Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Why rush to war zones? Jobs at home declining

Election-eve is the time for brave assertions. No Indian leader might boast like Nguyen Co Thach, Vietnam’s foreign minister for over a decade: “We are not without accomplishment. We have managed to distribute poverty equally.” But Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim to have lifted 25 crore Indians out of poverty in nine years may come a close second. What matters in the numbers game isn’t how many crores of people have escaped grinding poverty, but how many are still wallowing in it.

Even the official admission of unemployment increasing from 6.8 to eight per cent in February can’t disclose the full extent of distress lurking beneath what Thomas Piketty calls “The Billionaire Raj”. Indians would not otherwise have courted death trying to smuggle into the United States, fighting as Russia’s underequipped mercenaries in Ukraine or replacing 90,000 Palestinians whose work permits were revoked after the conflict with Hamas erupted.

In fact, news of the first batch of more than 60 construction workers going to Israel under the bilateral agreement that the Narendra Modi government signed with Israel on November 3, 2023 might inspire some wit with a cruel sense of humour to adapt Marx and Engels and foist the NDA establishment with the slogan “Coolies of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your lives!” I am not surprised that several labour unions, including the Centre of Indian Trade Unions and the All-India Trade Union Congress, as well as rights groups, question the wisdom of sending workers without adequate guarantees for their safety. Disregarding the external affairs ministry’s somewhat pathetic plea to the Israelis “to do their best to take care of their safety and well-being” which are “important” to India, the unions point out that an advisory issued by India’s embassy in Tel Aviv on March 5 asked Indian nationals in regions affected by the Israel-Hamas conflict to move to safer areas. The advisory was issued when an Indian was killed by a missile allegedly fired by Hezbollah’s Iranian terrorists at an Israeli agricultural community in Galilee.

No Indian worker would have risked their lives if they had jobs at home.

They do so only because our governments, whether colonial or Hindu nationalist, are equally callous. It wasn’t patriotism that prompted over a million Indians to enlist under the British in the First World War, and 2.5 million in the Second World War. There wasn’t a Rupert Brooke among the 60,000 Indians who died in the First Great War and 87,000 in the second to burble: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England…”

Like the 18,000 Indians, mainly care-givers, meaning nannies, maids and other help, slaving away in Israel today, they needed a soldier’s wages to survive.

Hunger also prompted the sad-looking unshaven and anonymous Indian whose picture hangs in Cambodia’s grim Choeung Ek memorial and whose skull is probably among the more than 5,000 relics of victims of the pitiless Khmer Rouge regime, to seek a livelihood in distant killing fields.

The bilateral agreement on “facilitation of temporary employment of Indian workers” in construction and home-based care-giving must be a feather in the cap of Israel’s ambassador in New Delhi. It’s a far cry from Israel’s consul-general in Bombay (long before it became Mumbai) being ordered to cancel his planned national day reception in the capital for which cards had gone out already. Or young radicals being mobilised in Calcutta (before it became Kolkata) to demonstrate against Israel’s then 77-year-old President, Zalman Shazar, on his way to pay a state visit to King Mahendra of Nepal in Kathmandu.

About 5,000 Mizos, recognised as Bnei Menashe Jews, are already working in Israel. So are some so-called “Black Jews” from Kerala who, when I saw them near Beersheva, spoke mainly Malayali. Israel is recruiting tens of thousands of other low-cost Asian workers to replace cheap Palestinian labour.

So great is the need that during a telephone conversation with Mr Modi in December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for “advancing the arrival” of workers from India.

The National Skill Development Corporation’s posters tempt hundreds of workers from Haryana and Uttar Pradesh with the slogan “to land your dream job overseas”. The NSDC is a public limited company that the finance ministry set up under the public-private partnership model and which provides skill development and vocational training to workers who have been tested for jobs in masonry, carpentry, tiling and bar-bending in Israel’s construction sector. Its website mentions vacancies for 3,000 framework workers and bar-benders, and 2,000 for tiling and plastering at monthly salaries of Rs 137,000, although another pamphlet warns that successful applicants will have to pay for travel and relocation costs, taxes, social security and health insurance.

“So what?” a desperate applicant might retort. Hasn’t Israel’s ambassador, Naor Gilon, assured them that even humble construction workers will bask in the glory of being “ambassadors” of the great people-to-people relations between the two countries? Even without that allurement, Indian labourers in Singapore are often glad to pay a commission to recruiting agents.

The ambassador is only doing his job. The NSDC can’t be blamed either. But not even the customary rhetoric of canvassing for votes can justify gross misrepresentation of India’s bleak reality where favoured billionaires appear to prosper most. Despite all the hype about engineers walking into prized jobs abroad, 36 per cent of the prestigious Bombay IIT’s graduates are unemployed.

With the India Employment Report claiming that 29 per cent of Indian graduates need jobs, graduates of Lucknow’s IIM and Pilani’s Birla Institute of Technology and Science reportedly also face difficulties.

India has indeed made significant economic progress in many sectors.

The stock market is booming. Property prices are soaring. But investment in human resources is relatively feeble, although one quarter of the population languishes below the official poverty threshold of Rs 32 per day. The World Food Programme reckons that 21.25 per cent of Indians live on less than $1.90 daily. It also says that India is home to a quarter of the world’s undernourished people.

Yet, the number of billionaires rose from 169 to 200 while their collective wealth jumped 41 per cent to $954 billion between 2022 and 2023. No wonder the Credit Suisse Research Institute’s Global Wealth Report calls India the world’s second most unequal country, with the top one per cent of the population owning 58 per cent of its total wealth. Money being the modern manifestation of caste, “India Shining” remains as much a slogan in 2024 as it was in 2004.