Kerala's unfolding migrant story

Rising attacks on Bengali workers in the state expose how suspicion and slurs bleed into violence.

Ramanarayan Baghel, a migrant worker from Chhattisgarh, was lynched on December 17 last year in the Attappallam area of Walayar, Palakkad district, Kerala. In his post-mortem report, on a body only 31 years old, at least 80 separate wounds were identified.

To inflict such violence requires a chilling degree of intent; it is no ordinary crime, and neither is such a crime limited to the assailants alone. One must contextualise the event to shed light on the larger social picture.

Apart from suspecting him of theft, the mob also asked if he was a ‘Bangladeshi’, a term not so commonplace in Kerala, where ‘Bengali’ is more familiar.

Who, then, has imported this abusive slur into the state? One must also ask: what perceptions of migrant workers, particularly the ‘Bengali’, are held in contemporary Kerala?

A Bengali migrant worker, as ‘Bangladeshi’, is an unfortunate political gift of Assam to Bharat. It travelled through Assam’s anti-migrant protests of the 20th century, culminating in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which sharpened the distinction between native and foreigner.

Anxieties about the presence of foreigners found expression in law, granting exceptional protection to the native and instituting elaborate legal processes to identify foreigners. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) follows in its footsteps in many ways.

This fixation with identity comes with a desire to control migrant bodies, which more often than not end up in surveillance and, at times, violence against them. The turn to nativity cards in Kerala must be contextualised within the changing landscapes of social perceptions of migrant workers.

One such shifting social ground is the treatment of migrant children. Interactions with some parents of Bengali ethnicity reveal that children increasingly report being “taunted” even by teachers in schools for being Bengali. They appear as jokes or in the name of friendly banter.

Such taunts also ought to be contextualised. At times, boundaries are crossed, such as suggesting that migrant workers are taking away jobs of local people in Kerala.

These anti-immigrant tropes have been recorded globally. Bengali migrant workers are also profiled as dirty, unhygienic and poor. This is precisely what xenophobia looks like. Xenophobia is xenophobia; it would be a mistake to categorise them as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms. Social prejudice against migrant workers is also evident in their identification along ethnic lines — as ‘Bengali’ rather than through religion or other registers.

This was precisely the template of ‘Bangladeshi’ in Assam, where ethnicity/language mattered, not religion. A Hindu Bengali is also seen as a Bangladeshi. 

It must be acknowledged that the assailants of Ramanarayan Baghel were charged, and his lynching was condemned by the state government and civil society in Kerala.

Yet something is shifting socially. Anti-immigrant sentiment is no longer rare. It has become palpable, emergent. The recent attacks on migrant workers in Perumbavoor in Kochi are a case in point — showing how dark forces gather quickly. Even for petty crimes, migrants often become soft targets. It begins there and escalates into slogans of “go back”. 

To borrow from Georg Simmel, migrant workers are, like the stranger, those who have not overcome the freedom of coming and going. This unfreedom is exacerbated by random acts of violence against them. 

Hearing the stories of migrant workers like Ramanarayan Baghel reminds one of the story of Kader Mia that Amartya Sen recounts in Development as Freedom. Kader Mia had come out of his home, in desperation and despite his wife’s pleas not to, in riot-gripped pre-partition Dhaka, to find work so he could feed his family.

On his way to work, he was knifed in the back and later succumbed to his injuries. Sen writes, reflecting on this story, that “the penalty of his economic unfreedom turned out to be his death... Economic unfreedom can breed social unfreedom, just as social and political unfreedom can also foster economic unfreedom.”

Ramanarayan’s fate was no different. Last year, similar attacks on Bengali migrant workers were reported from across the country, driven by misplaced suspicion of them being ‘Bangladeshis’.

Suspicion, as philosophers have argued, is often the search for an enemy. When you want to find one, the finger will be pointed at someone, who may be deleted, unmapped, ridiculed, or lynched, and with absolute impunity for the person pointing the finger. 

Suspicion, social surveillance by vigilante individuals and groups, the counting of citizens, and identification drives by modern states often end up in violence. It has torn apart societies at the very least. Will the story be any different for Kerala? 

The author teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)