Precarious Transitions: Mobility and Citizenship in a Rising Power

What meanings do citizenship hold for mobile populations? As a theoretical concept and a juridical category, citizenship is firmly anchored in assumptions of fixed territories and bounded populations. Several of these assumptions are challenged by political and economic transitions that mark the contemporary world. While some aspects of these transitions, such as political democracy and economic growth have contributed to unprecedented movement of people across local, regional and international borders, others, such as burgeoning inequalities and sedentary conceptions of the political community have rendered these transitions precarious.  

India’s 100 million circular labour migrants exemplify this “precarious transition.” The country produces dollar billionaires rising at the rate of 17 per year. Yet, more than 800 million Indians eke out a living on less than $2 a day. India’s democracy, imperfect as it is, has contributed to shaking the hierarchies that underpinned its social landscape for at least a millennium. But political and institutional constraints on people’s mobility remain, made possible by a sedentary conception of citizenship that does not take into account the mobile character of the population. Such constraints exacerbate socio-economic inequalities and poor people’s vulnerabilities.

The Precarious Transitions research project explored internal migration in India against the backdrop of rapid but uneven economic growth, political change and social transformation. The project design was multi-sited, reflecting the multilocational reality experienced by itinerant labour migrants. The ethnographic component of the research entailed that my research team worked closely with select families in a single village in the State of Bihar. While two researchers circulated along with migrant labourers between different localities for work, a third focused on the family members of the migrants who stayed back in the village. In addition, the study combined two surveys, covering 10,000 households, which gathered primary data from multiple “source” and “destination” locations, with group discussions conducted in almost 20 locations across India.

A major component of the research was implemented in Bihar, whose 100 million people contribute significantly to the growing ranks of India’s labour migrants. The issue was raised in the election campaign of the state’s opposition parties in the just-concluded Vidhan Sabha elections. The post-poll survey conducted by the Centre for Study of Developing Societies–Lokniti suggests that migrant households, who made up 42% of their sample, preferred the opposition Mahagathbandhan (MGB) alliance over the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) by 5% points.

Escaping Caste: An Emerging “Rurban Cosmopolitanism”

The study departs from structuralist and culturalist explanations of labour mobility that either emphasise the salience of economic "pull" and "push" factors or highlight the importance of shared norms and values that supposedly motivate people to migrate. Rather the research situates migration from Bihar in the context of political change witnessed in the state during the 1990s which shook a calcified social structure and incubated ideas of social justice which in turn spurred people’s hopes for dignified lives. The study finds that migration is important for rural Biharis because it offers them the chance to move beyond the occupations and relationships that in their home villages are determined by caste. 

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the people who iterate between different locations in India affiliate with historically oppressed communities, collectively known as Dalit Bahujans. These communities are driven by internal distinctions and have been labelled as ‘primitive’, ‘low caste’ and as ‘untouchable’. Caste is writ large across each panel presented in this journey.

The research points to the ways in which Dalit Bahujan migrants combine different occupational identities—such as that of labourer and employer, and of industrial worker and agricultural farmer. Their political engagements straddle their rural and urban locations. 

Their repeated circulations between town and country make both these locales familiar to them, signalling an emerging “rurban cosmopolitanism.”

Sedentary Citizenship: The Antinomies of Freedom

The study highlights the vulnerability and marginalisation of migrant workers. Social and political rights in India are not portable. The country’s elaborate social protection regime hinges on the provision of entitlements to sedentary populations and excludes mobile people. Likewise, voting rights in the country remain tied to people’s villages of origin, effectively disenfranchising labour who are not always able to be present in their villages during elections. Key dimensions of citizenship—the rights to social entitlements, such as food subsidies and their right to vote—are invalidated the moment they leave their rural homes, where these entitlements are registered. Such a sedentary conception of social and political citizenship effectively restricts the population’s mobility. Coupled with the precariousness of informal employment in which labour migrants find themselves, the research points to the "immobile foundations of labour mobility" in India.

Labour migrants do not only construct buildings, fire brick kilns, manufacture footwear, drive buses, but also sweep floors, clean trucks, sew clothes and deliver goods. They are indispensable to its economic growth. Their iteration across the country makes the idea of India a concrete reality. They build India from below.  

Although migrant workers continue to be reviled and viewed with suspicion across the country, some states are beginning to recognise their contributions. In July 2017, Kerala’s Kochi Metro Rail Limited organised an official feast to thank the 800 migrant workers who were employed in the back-breaking job of constructing the metro. 

More recently, the state government has initiated the Apna Ghar scheme to provide dormitory-style housing for migrant workers. The government already offers free health care to its migrant workers. In 2010, Kerala became the first state in the country to provide benefits to job-seekers under the aegis of the Kerala Migrant Workers Welfare Scheme.

Also, in 2010, Punjab became the first state in the country to institute a migrant welfare board aimed at safeguarding the rights of migrant workers in that State. The Government of Maharashtra’s Department of Labour has partnered with the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Disha Foundation to initiate a grievance redressal cell dedicated to managing wage-related disputes between migrant workers and their employers. Other state governments such as that of Rajasthan and Gujarat are aided by NGOs such as Aajeevika Bureau who provide legal counselling to migrant workers, thereby enabling them to understand their entitlements under the law. 

Nevertheless, the Indian state, which presided over one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world prior to the onslaught of the pandemic, could have done more.

Precarious Transitions and Disjunctions of Mobility and Citizenship in Postcolonial India

The continued social and political exclusion of circular labour migrants in India point to the antinomies of freedom. On the one hand, they are freer than ever before to journey to the destinations of their choice. But those very same freedoms disqualify them from exercising their social and political rights. 

The social and political exclusion of circular labour migrants inhibit the citizenship claims of some of India’s most vulnerable people, denying them the very right to have rights. Furthermore, they limit the potential of India’s economic growth and stunt her urbanisation. Perhaps most tragically, they prevent workers’ migratory journeys from translating into meaningful social mobility, thereby fragmenting possibilities of India’s transition into a country whose people enjoy the benefits of economic development and political democracy. 

The pandemic exposed the fault lines searing through state and society in India. The lockdown exposed the disjunctions between mobility and citizenship in India, exposing the immobile foundations of the former and the precarious trajectory of the latter. Modi’s announcement gave Indians exactly four hours to prepare for the lockdown. With little reliable information available, migrant workers (like everyone else) wanted to be with their families back in their rural homes during such a time of crisis. For many, there was little choice as employment opportunities in the towns shrivelled up, landlords threatened to evict them from their homes due to impending non-payment of rents, and markets shut down without them getting a chance to purchase essential food items necessary for their survival. As transport services shut down, they were compelled to undertake their journeys on foot, traversing many hundreds if not thousands of kilometres to get home. 
Over the next few months, national and international newspapers reported horrifying stories of migrant workers being harassed, humiliated and brutalised by the Indian state. One video emerged of the police accosting migrant workers walking from Jammu to Bilaspur through Badaun in Uttar Pradesh¹ beating them up and forcing them to continue their journey leaping life frogs. Another emerged of police spraying migrant workers returning to their homes in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly district ordered to strip and then being sprayed with chemical disinfectants purportedly to sanitise them.² 

Hundreds of people have died trying to reach their homes (The Wire Staff 2020).  Some (like 39-year-old Ranveer Singh) collapsed due to exhaustion, having walked 200 kilometres on foot under 35 degrees Celsius. Others (such as 18-year-old Lauram Bhagora) were run over by speeding vehicles on Indian highways. A one-year-old baby was among four people killed in a fire as they walked through a forest since no motorised transport was available. In May, 16 migrants were mowed down by a speeding train when they fell asleep on train tracks due to exhaustion. More recently, migrant workers aboard the special Shramik Trains initiated by the government died of hunger and dehydration since neither food nor water was available. A woman on one of those trains died soon after alighting her destination station also due to hunger and dehydration; a gut-wrenching video has been circulating of her little toddler trying desperately to wake her.  

Although the Indian economy is critically dependent on the country’s millions of migrant labourers, the state in India remains suspicious of its internal migrant workforce. In “normal times,” it seeks to politically and socially exclude them despite their Indian citizenship. Mobility promises members of historically oppressed communities an escape from caste but their precarious livelihoods disclose the immobile foundations of mobility. The pandemic has exacerbated this tendency and revealed the precarious trajectory of citizenship among migrant workers in India.