Regional disparities have increased in post-reform India, leading to
higher migration. This has been accompanied by the rise of identity
politics that targets migrants. The Internet is, therefore, just a
convenient scapegoat.
September 5, 2012:
The recent exodus of tens of thousands of persons of the North-East,
from Bangalore and other southern cities, has been treated as a problem
created by malicious rumours sponsored by a foreign hand.
The response has thus been concentrated on the messenger, with a great
deal of debate on controlling the Internet and SMS. Very little
attention has been paid to the more fundamental question of just why did
these rumours find such fertile soil in which they could grow so
rapidly?
Without an answer to this question, we risk shooting the messenger at
great cost to democratic freedoms while the exodus-generating wounds
continue to fester.
When we step back from the immediate crisis and try to understand the
longer-term trends underlying the panic that drove persons from the
North-East back to their States, even though social tensions were at a
peak in Assam, it is difficult to miss the role of migration in the
post-liberalisation economic strategy.
Prior to the reforms of 1991, addressing regional disparities had a
prominent place in economic policy. Industries were regularly given
incentives to move to backward areas. After the reforms, these
incentives disappeared from the policy discourse. Instead, States
competed with each other to attract investment by offering incentives to
set up industries in their most advanced sites.
As a result the more developed parts of the country developed further,
even as the less developed regions remained largely where they were.
Labour from the less developed regions then had necessarily to move to
the more developed regions in search of work. This migration was not
confined merely to the people from the poorer regions of the State
moving to relatively nearby urban centres, but to migration across much
larger distances such as from the North-East of the country to southern
cities.
Identity politics
It is possible to provide a positive spin to this large-scale migration
across the country. The fact that Indians can gain employment in any
part of the country does strengthen the idea of India. It also improves
the prospects of our large cities becoming multi-cultural centres. And
as migrant workers send a part of their wages back home, it helps a
transfer of resources from the more prosperous parts of the country to
the slower growing regions.
This idyllic picture is, however, blurred by at least two other features
of the last two decades and more. First, the terms of employment in the
post-liberalisation era have been marked by greater uncertainties.
Rather than the long-term career options that were the ideal in the
years before 1991, the focus is now on short-term employment.
Moving up the career ladder is to be done by crossing over to more
lucrative jobs. The high attrition rates do not allow much space for
stable workplace institutions, including trade unions. The migrant
workers then live in an atmosphere of temporariness with few local
institutions they can turn to in times of acute distress.
Second, and arguably more important, the political ethos that has
emerged over the last three decades is quite inconsistent with
large-scale migration across the country.
Identity politics has become the lingua-franca of the political space.
Ideological battles are often based on implying one identity to be
greater than another. Political battles are then largely, if not
entirely, a matter pitting religious identities versus caste identities
versus class identities versus regional and language identities. And as
politics has become more competitive, the reliance on identity politics
has only increased.
easy targets
Migrant workers are the easy target of this identity crossfire. The
numbers are clearly stacked against them. Even when migrant workers are a
majority of a city’s workforce, each regional group can be targeted
separately. The riots in Assam were sought to be countered by
mobilisation of other minorities in Mumbai.
This was, in turn, countered by Raj Thackeray mobilising the majority in
a counter-rally and using that occasion to target other regional
minorities from Bihar in Mumbai. It is then no surprise that at the
first signs of social tensions migrant workers have no option but to
pack up and leave.
Ironically enough, the conflict between the political and the economic
over the last three decades has only served to further strengthen
identity politics. As workers move across the country into environments
where local institutions, at best, ignore them, they have few options
other than creating institutions based on their own regional identities.
This provides an ideal situation for politicians who thrive on identity
politics to practise their craft. If workers from State A are
threatened in State B, politicians in State A can threaten to retaliate
against workers from State B.
With identity politics feeding on the uncertainties of migrant workers
it would be futile to expect the mismatch between a unified national
economy and local political expediencies to be corrected by steps in the
political space. It may be much more useful to bring the goal of
reducing regional economic disparities back to the centre stage of
policy making.
Anyone who saw the fear in the eyes of young men from the North-East
pushing themselves into packed, moving special trains on a
three-and-a-half-day journey from Bangalore towards a trouble-torn
Assam, even though there wasn’t a single incident of violence in the
southern city, will surely recognise that we need a much more serious
response than controlling the Internet.
(The author is Professor, School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.)