Why Kashmir calls out to Biharis

A labourer carries a box of apples at a wholesale fruit market in Sopore. File/AFP

I am a Harry, a term coined decades ago by the snooty set to condescendingly identify the middle class, English-speaking Biharis in Delhi. We Harrys know from our experience that economic mobility is the principal driver of migration, more so as Bihar is India's poorest State by Gross State Domestic Product per capita. Yet we were struck by the suicidal streak among Biharis who want to earn a livelihood in Kashmir, India's most dangerous place, where five migrant labourers were gunned down this month.

There is a subtext to the names of those who died - Raja Reshi, Joginder Reshi, Arvind Kumar Sah, Sagheer and Virender Paswan. Sagheer is a Muslim from Uttar Pradesh, which is a rung above Bihar on the poverty scale. Of the four Biharis, three were Dalit and one an OBC.

Invisibilised in their lifetime because of their lowly socio-economic status, in death they were, finally, owned up by India as its very own, albeit as migrant labour, a category of citizens for whose protection the state suddenly became solicitous. Anecdotal accounts suggest they were encouraged to leave Kashmir - and so they did in droves.

Escape from a hellhole? For an answer, you must listen to the interview that The Lallantop, a YouTube news channel, conducted with Pankaj Paswan, a relative of Virender Paswan, the golgappa seller who was killed in Srinagar on October 5. Pankaj has been in the Valley for 27 years, 12 of which were with his family living there.

Pankaj said he and other Biharis come to Srinagar because Kashmiris show them respect, an allusion to the caste indignities his Dalit subcaste encounters in Bihar; that they earn Rs 600-650 daily, three times what he can back home - and higher than the wage rates in any other Indian State; and that Kashmir never gets too hot. Pankaj said, "Any praise for the people will be less."

But the reading down of Article 370 must have had Kashmiris look upon Pankaj as the ugly Indian, so to speak? No, he shot back, even though the government encouraged them to leave, he and many others did not. That was because of the assurances of Kashmiris: "Don't go, you will die only after we do." He said that during the 2020 lockdown, Kashmiris regularly sent them ration. "In Bihar, a person wouldn't give a kilo of rice to his neighbour," Pankaj said.

It would seem Kashmir is the safest place for lower caste Biharis. Gross exaggeration, the Harry in me thought, until I trawled the internet to discover nuggets of facts soaked in the blood of Biharis: On January 5, 2007, the United Liberation Front of Assam killed 48 of them in the State. Two days later, they slaughtered 14 more, triggering the exodus of Biharis from Assam. These attacks there had been preceded by the killing of 29 Biharis in 2003. In Manipur, 14 Hindi-speaking migrants were killed in 2008.

Mumbaikars' contempt for Bhaiyas, a pejorative term for those from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, spilled out in a prolonged spell of violence in 2008. Fomented by Raj Thackeray, who had left the Shiv Sena to float the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, his supporters attacked the hated Bhaiyas attending a Samajwadi Party rally in Mumbai on February 3. They were beaten, their stalls and carts looted, their taxis smashed.

Raj's arrest for a few hours on February 13 saw the violence spread to other districts in Maharashtra. Migrants were terrorised through the year, most viciously in October, when a large number of them appeared for a Railway recruitment entrance examination in Mumbai.

Five died; 15,000 north Indian migrants in Nashik and 25,000 in Pune returned home. In October 2018, after a 14-month-old girl was allegedly raped by a migrant worker in Gujarat, mobs descended on industrial estates in as many as six districts. Led by wannabe politicians, their violence frightened an estimated 25,000 north Indian migrants to exit Gujarat.

One Covid-19 image that will forever haunt us is of migrant workers, hungry and forsaken, enduring police battering, walking hundreds of kilometres to reach their homes in north India. Given that over two lakh migrant labourers descend on Kashmir every year, it might have seemed surprising that we rarely heard of Biharis trekking out of there. Pankaj's interview provides the answer.

By contrast, a National Human Rights Commission study on the impact of the 2020 lockdown on migrant workers found that 39 per cent of workers in Delhi, 38 per cent in Gujarat, 31 per cent in Haryana and 42 per cent in Maharashtra lost their livelihood. Only community support, as in Kashmir, could have dissuaded them from fleeing worksites.

This is not to deny the factor of fear in the exodus of Biharis from Kashmir in recent weeks. Yet former Bihar Chief Minister Jitan Manjhi was being frivolous when he said Biharis could fix Kashmir in 15 days if it were handed over to them. It is Bihar that needs a fix. As for Kashmir, Manjhi should ask the Prime Minister to fill the political vacuum there, for the five killings in October were, to use the phrase of philosopher Régis Debray, "manifestos written in the blood of others".

The writer is a senior journalist
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