Migration

Politics of Migration: Indian Emigration in a Globalized World by A Didar Singh and S Irudaya Rajan, New Delhi, London, and New York: Routledge, 2016; pp xix+198, ₹895.

The Kerala government is under pressure to enforce action to deal with the rising migrant population in the state after the arrest of a migrant labourer as the suspect of rape and murder of Jisha, a Dalit law student. Keeping track of the migrant population in the absence of an identification database would violate the constitutional provisions of the right to work. By launching an insurance scheme to incentivise migrants to voluntarily register themselves, the government is planning to track migrant workers. Profiling by the state, even under the garb of welfare schemes, will further justify the existing middle-class ire against domestic and regional migrant labour.

Scholars following the transnational turn in migration studies have stressed the way in which connections that migrants maintain across nation state boundaries affect their daily lives and subjectivities in the place of settlement. By doing so, the influence of the local context on transnational ties is sometimes overlooked. Based on five months of fieldwork amongst the Gujarati Hindu community of Cape Town, the cases presented in this paper show that local particularities inherently affect global processes. It suggests a reconceptualisation of transnational connections that emphasises the influence of the local and historical context of migration and argues that the regionalised migration trajectories and the manifestation of the history of apartheid in the local context have significantly affected the way in which transnational ties with India are maintained by this community.

The paper explores the interfaces of urbanisation, settlement practices, and issues of labour migration and displacement in contemporary Kolkata. It starts with interrogating a historical narrative of urbanisation and zoning practices in the city in the 1960s and picks out few threads which still seem relevant in studies of contemporary modes of urbanisation. It studies in some detail the practice of "thika tenancy" in the Kolkata slums--the most prominent site of habitation of the migrant workers in the city. It challenges the hypothesis of the "bypass model" of urbanisation in Kolkata and introduces the concept of "urban recycling," which facilitates a continuous juxtaposition of displacement and accumulation of human and other resources as part of the urbanisation process.

The anti-migrant political environment in the city of Mumbai has created a confused sociopolitical and economic environment, where the migrant worker, essential to manufacturing and service provision, is able to find work, but is unwelcome in terms of occupying physical, social, political and cultural spaces in the city. The paper attempts to bring this contradiction to the fore through a study of elderly migrant labour employed in the private security provision industry. From the study it becomes apparent that the reality of the lives of workers is shaped by factors beyond work and wages. Their living conditions, inability to cope with any exigency, including illness or death, the atomised lives that they lead in the city in comparison to the villages, and absence of social security or access to quality welfare services force these workers and their families to live in precarious conditions.