Xenophobia, Kashmiri style!
By Arjimand Hussain Talib
09 August, 2007
Kashmir Times
It is a Catch 22 kind of situation hardly ever seen in Kashmir's chequered history. Even as both militant groups as well as Syed Ali Shah Geelani have toned down their call to migrant laborers to leave Kashmir, hundreds of laborers and small business holders, most of whom are from north and north-eastern India, are packing up their bags for home. To the outside world, Kashmir today represents an addition to the long list of nations and ethnic groups that have engulfed themselves in the fires of xenophobia.
For a place like Kashmir, anything close to xenophobia, if not xenophobia per se, is a tragic irony in itself. For a tiny and powerless nation witnessing the worst kind of oppression and repression since ages now, the transformation of its image from the subjugated to the tyrant is cruelly unjust.
Kashmiris have always been thought as the last ones to be chauvinists. But why are today flocks of migrant laborers being driven out from the Valley? How did a people who are celebrated and cherished throughout the world for their warmth and hospitality are today feeling insecure and reacting?
If one were to remove one's jingoistic spectacles for a while we would see two simple but profound reasons. From a majority of 72.41 per cent in 1941 to 64.19 per cent of the total population as reported in 2001 census Muslims in Jammu & Kashmir are gripped by the constant fear of "demographic engineering" which might well reduce Muslims in Kashmir to a minority. The rate at which non-State subjects - Article 370 of the Indian Constitution notwithstanding - are able to get J&K's citizenship and have been able to dilute the original demographic medley here to the people of the State is alarming too. Although in theory Article 370 was supposed to be a guarantor of J&K's identity after its assimilation into the Indian Union, the ease with which non State-subjects can get land or other properties on a 90-year lease has also been a source of disquiet too.
But why is the anger directed towards poor laborers who will neither get a Permanent Resident Certificate (PRC), nor buy land on lease or become part of demographic engineering?
People today in Kashmir ask the question why did they come in such huge numbers in the first place?
The answers lie much beyond where most of the people are looking for today. The answers lie between the lines of the larger context of Kashmir 's political economy. Let us call spade a spade.
Since my childhood my father has told me interesting stories of Kashmir's former Prime Minister, G M Bakshi, who coincidentally was our close neighbor in our old family house in Srinagar's Chattabal area. What one understood from his stories and the history books is that after the imprisonment of Kashmir's popular leader - Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah - and the installation of Bakshi's puppet regime, the latter was given one single mandate: ingrain corruption into the blood veins of the Kashmiri people by first bribing them with government jobs and contracts, then dividing them and subsequently "winning over them."
So once during an on-the-spot compensation drive to houses being dismantled during a road widening operation in Srinagar city, when a Kashmiri Pandit got lesser compensation and asked Bakshi Sahab why it was so when his Muslim neighbor got better compensation, Bakshi's reply is said to have been more than an expression of his humorous wit, "Listen my dear! You are already an Indian. Your this neighbor demands Pakistan and my task is to make him an Indian. That is the reason he gets more."
More than four decades down the line, the same blood having been injected into Kashmiri veins is running in the veins of another generation of Kashmiris even today. What one could understand from history books, those were the times when the policy makers on Kashmir would find Kautilya's Arthshastras very handy in creating situation of "stability" here.
Apart from subsidies, the ruling political class was mandated to assimilate dissenting and the discontented voices into government services. That is what has actually happened. Living with a government job became the sole objective of an ordinary Kashmiri's life in both urban as well as rural areas. In the process all creative thinking and private enterprise was destroyed. A culture of mediocrity and workless ness took deep roots. Whenever some critical and creative thinking tried to take shape, the conditions so created in the whole political economy made them end up in the government system with a premature death note. In nutshell, it was a political economy which was designed to kill creative private enterprise and breed dependency. That is what explains why lakhs of skilled and unskilled laborers have flooded Kashmir as our own people wait for a government job until death and do not work. That is the reason that despite injecting this kind of government spending, Kashmir ends up back injecting more than double of the financial resources into the Indian economic system in the form of imports than what it gets in the form of so-called subsidies and liberal financial assistance.
In economics, it is said that when a society's living standards reach a certain degree of prosperity it sheds low income yielding jobs, explained by a backward slope curve. Is Kashmir on that curve now?
The vacuum created by the Kashmiris in the low-end odd-job segments was just all natural to be filled in by migrant laborers, because a vast majority of our educated and low educated segment was waiting for government jobs. Kashmir has a vibrant construction business. Did we have enough people to do the jobs there? Is the migrant inflow driven by demand or it is the supply which is driving the demand?
When Europe was in the midst of an economic boom after its industrial revolution, it opened the flood gates for immigrants - a huge chunk of whom were Muslims - to fill in the low-end jobs. Then it was mostly about having cheap labor, sparing the Europeans from doing the kind of low-end jobs which they abhorred. Several historians have written that then the Europeans - who were historically and culturally very conscious of their racial distinctiveness - would hardly bother about who and where the immigrants belonged to. Then it was hardly a concern that the immigrants were coming into Europe with a big cultural baggage and belief systems, which finally went to alter Europe's cultural and religious mosaic to a good extent. Many radical European parties and ideologues - like the British Nationalist Party (BNP) in Britain - today deplore the open-gate policy to the non-European immigrants. These immigrants - mostly Muslims and South Asians - are today a significant racial and religious grouping in Europe.
But no matter what, the cultural costs, the economic imperatives in all countries and the inevitable realities of globalisation make almost all societies accept immigrants today. Although countries like Australia have taken very radical positions on immigration now, on occasions even letting ship loads of immigrants and refugees vanish in the seas, the fact is that legal immigration to Australia is a reality today.
The gruesome rape and murder of a 14-year old girl in north Kashmir in July precipitated the call for all migrant laborers to leave Kashmir. This has come after years of simmering discontent with the migrant laborers bringing in crime, diseases and moral practices which are seen not in conformity with Kashmiri culture and values. Yet, the compelling need of migrant laborers has been making the Kashmiris bear them out in spite of the simmering anger.
There is no doubt that migrant laborers have brought in many social ills to Kashmir which were not part of Kashmiri traditional social set up. There is also no doubt that both society and local administration needs to check the criminal activities of migrant laborers. But in economic and moral terms, can we afford to lose them going back for good? What would happen to thousands of Kashmiris living in India and other parts of the world if they were to be sent back home on similar grounds?
From barbers to brick kiln workers, from laborers on paddy fields of Kashmir's countryside to the workers building border roads in Kashmir, migrant laborers are there everywhere. Jingoistic bravado apart, what would happen if overnight we would have no workers to work in low-end jobs? Do we have enough work-force to fill in the demand? What would happen to the construction activity?
The fact is that there is a profound economic dimension to the presence of the huge number of the migrant laborers in Kashmir. The major reason being that they are coming here because there is a huge demand for them. Despite a raging conflict, what attracts them are higher wages, good working conditions, friendly employers and pleasant weather here. There is another simple economic explanation to this: it is the demand which has been driving the supply of laborers to Kashmir and not the vice versa.
What an outright outflow of migrant laborers would do is make Kashmiris as oppressors in the eyes of the world, no matter the subjugation they are going through themselves. Political and social awakening is required to address greater ills: ethnic and demographic engineering, lease out of land for 90 years and other macro issues. These poor laborers are not going to get Permanent Resident Certificates of our State.
Let us do not lose sight of the manner we Kashmiris are projected today. Beyond the misleading news coverage of India's national media on Kashmir there are a million stories of our hospitality and peaceful co-existence which have remained shrouded somewhere. For instance, there are nearly 3000 non-Kashmiri students - mostly females - getting their education training in dozens of education training colleges in Kashmir. They are here since years, even in the midst of the conflict. Srinagar's National Institute of Technology (NIT) has a students union whose head is a non-local and two-thirds of its body is comprised of non-locals. Dozens of roads of border areas, being maintained by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO), are constructed and maintained by non-Kashmiris. The multi-billion rupees fruit trade of Kashmir is done through non-locals who visit the nook and corner of Kashmir in search of contracts. All of India's major private companies, mainly telecom giants like Airtel and Aircel have non-Kashmiris at their helm. Almost all central government undertakings, including public telecom company, BSNL and railway construction company - IRCON - in Kashmir are run by non-locals, who are living side by side with their local hosts peacefully. Almost all our sweet shops are run by non-locals. The goal gappas are a reality in Kashmir because of these migrants. The kiosks selling variety of roadside snacks from baked pulses to samosas are all run by non locals.
To send all of these back would be a blot on our rich traditions of hospitality, tolerance and peaceful existence. Kashmiris would do better by not letting their enemies paint a greater demon out of them. We live in an intense world of inter-dependence and let us continue to create examples of peaceful co-existence and tolerance. But the response to Census reports surely need people put their heads together.
(The columnist can be e-mailed at
arjimand@gmail.com).
