Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  To kickstart the modernisation of the country, he came up with a five-point programme of his own. A mixture of the worthy and the quixotic, it prioritised family planning, slum clearance, mass literacy, afforestation and the abolition of bride dowries. The last three being the least susceptible to speedy implementation, they had to wait. That left the slums and the birthrate; it was for bulldozers and vasectomies that Sanjay would be remembered.

  The slums he targeted were principally the shanty townships in Delhi. Sanjay had already adopted the city as a trial ground for his rough-and-ready brand of enforcement, and had there found an able collaborator in the person of Jagmohan Malhotra, Vice-Chairman of the Delhi Development Authority and later a controversial Governor of Kashmir. While Sanjay provided political cover plus police backup, and with the Emergency regulations ensuring a publicity blackout, Jagmohan ordered in the bulldozers. Sometimes the residents received ample warning; sometimes they were directed to remote alternative sites; sometimes neither. In the space of eighteen months around 150,000 families had their homes demolished, and since most of these were rented and had been illegally constructed in the first place, there was little prospect of compensation. Resistance was met by baton charges, teargas and occasionally live rounds. The numbers wounded or killed went largely unreported, like the action itself. No doubt the slum settlements were an eyesore and a health risk. But this most undemocratic method of dealing with them belied Mrs Gandhi’s claim that her Emergency was in defence of democracy.

  Much the same could be said of Sanjay’s efforts at population control. These had a far wider effect, and just as much to recommend them. The population had doubled in the last half century. Reducing the birthrate had long been government policy; the planners regarded it as essential, and with life expectancy increasing and infant mortality falling, it was the obvious way to reduce the poverty statistics. But this was less obvious to labouring families who regarded every infant as a potential source of earnings. Moreover, condoms were unpopular and contraceptive pills in short supply. Easier to quantify and much more effective was the ‘snip’. Mass vasectomising could be conducted in roadside tents and mobile clinics. Like immunisation, it could also be incentivised.

  This was Sanjay’s brainwave. From attracting individual volunteers with promises of cash or a radio, he began setting targets for the number of vasectomies to be performed by each state. Passed on down to the districts and sub-districts, the targets introduced a competitive element. To meet or exceed them, and so impress ‘the Rising Son’, officials vied with one another and resorted to methods that might be both discriminatory and coercive. In some areas the clinics directed their attentions disproportionately to the homeless, Muslims, tribal peoples and Harijans. Elsewhere, the entitlement to benefits, jobs and licences might be made contingent on the production of certificates of vasectomisation. The results were impressive. ‘In the six months between April and September 1976, two million Indians were sterilized,’ with as many as 6,000 per day in Delhi alone.32 But resistance was widespread and visceral. Nothing in the entire Emergency was as much resented as Sanjay’s clumsy assault on the masculinity of the nation.

  Isolated among the obsequious members of her kitchen cabinet and lulled by her compliant press, Mrs Gandhi was apparently unaware of the worst excesses. When they were finally brought to her attention, she called a halt to them, though without censuring Sanjay or appreciating the scale of the damage. Just how out of touch she had grown became clearer in January 1977. Taking both friend and foe by surprise, she blithely announced that elections were to be held. They were to take place in March, allowing just eight weeks for the campaign. Most of the political detainees were released; censorship was lifted and campaigning began immediately. Like Bhutto in Pakistan, indeed possibly prompted by his announcement of elections there a few days earlier, she supposed her opponents were in disarray, and was confident of victory.

  Bhutto’s reading of his own electoral prospects would prove right; his mistake lay in over-egging his victory. Mrs Gandhi’s reading was hopelessly wrong; her mistake lay in trusting her own propaganda machine. Both had become dangerously isolated from the realities of life – and not just in South Asia. For as of 1973 an economic tsunami had been racing out of the Arabian Gulf and across the world’s oceans. Nowhere was spared. Currency markets shook and stock markets crumbled. In what might well qualify as the late twentieth century’s first wave of globalisation, the price of oil had gone through the roof. Buffeted by the shock, Mujib in Bangladesh, Bhutto in Pakistan and Indira in India might console themselves with the thought that their woes were not entirely of their own making. Yet the long-term effects for South Asia would prove far more complex, indeed a blessing, albeit mixed and in disguise.

  8

  Two-Way Tickets, Double Standards

  The hike in oil prices hit hardest in 1973–74, when in a matter of weeks the price of crude shot up from $3 a barrel to $12. Though in part a response to the devaluation of oil assets occasioned by Nixon’s detaching the dollar from the gold standard, Arab producers insisted they were raising prices and cutting back on production in retaliation for Washington’s rearmament of Israel after the 1973 October/Yom Kippur war. In other words, the dreaded ‘oil weapon’ had finally been unsheathed. Motorists panicked and manufacturers hastily rewrote their price lists. Since practically everything depended on oil, practically everything was affected, from steel output to textile and fertiliser production. In Japan the panic extended even to toilet paper.

  Then in 1979–80 the same thing happened all over again. The crude price soared to $40 a barrel. This time it was supposedly because of uncertainties over supply following the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War. But an element of panic was noted, and some corporate manipulation was suspected. Throughout a rapidly industrialising world, the dangers of depending on any globally traded commodity that was in limited supply were becoming painfully manifest.

  Higher oil prices were not always bad news, though. As well as bringing untold spending power and an almighty construction boom to the otherwise impoverished Gulf region, price hikes quite suited the industrialised countries. Those with their own reserves could charge more for them, while to those without reserves, higher prices provided an incentive for developing alternative sources of energy. South Asia was badly placed in both respects: its known oil reserves were limited to a few wells in Assam, and in respect of alternatives like gas and nuclear energy, its technical expertise was limited.

  Here too, though, ill winds and silver linings worked their proverbial magic. For on balance the bonanza in the Gulf opened up other reserves – of employment, foreign exchange and cross-border investment – which would offset the region’s exposure to the rising cost of imports and substantially boost GNPs. Though unforeseen at the time, indeed a mild source of embarrassment, such spin-off opportunities would buoy all the economies of South Asia well into the twenty-first century.

  V.S. Naipaul had noted the relevance of the Gulf as early as 1976. Rattling round Delhi during Mrs Gandhi’s Emergency, he had been surprised to learn that his Sikh taxi driver was planning to emigrate.

  He wanted to go to one of the Arab Gulf states. He had paid a large sum of money to a middleman, a ‘contractor’. His papers were almost in order now, he said; all he was waiting for, from the contractor, was his ‘no objection’ certificate.1

  ‘No objection’ pretty much characterised the official attitude towards emigration at the time. It was neither promoted nor prevented; as yet irrelevant to the generality of South Asians, its appeal was limited. Naipaul reckoned his Sikh driver to be someone who was ‘better off than most people in India’. He spoke excellent English, his taxi was his own, and it occupied a sought-after station in the rank outside Naipaul’s no-doubt comfortable hotel. Post-colonial emigration, whether to the West or the Gulf, seldom benefited the poorest classes or the lowest castes. Far from being an option of last r
esort it was seen as a promising investment, the capital outlay required having the potential to transform not just the life of the migrant but the prospects of those he left behind.

  Sikhs had been wise to the advantages of foreign earnings since long before Partition uprooted many from their homelands in what was now Pakistan. Untroubled by the caste-conscious Hindu’s need to undergo expensive post-travel purification ceremonies, they had acted as diasporic pioneers, establishing communities in parts of California, British Columbia, East Africa and the UK even before World War I. The beturbanned journeymen who in the 1970s were still selling dusters and detergents out of battered suitcases in places as remote as Orkney and New Zealand were often second- or third-generation migrants.

  The new wave of migration differed in that the Gulf offered fewer incentives for permanent settlement. On the other hand, it was nearer and cheaper in respect of home visits. Most migrant workers were destined for the construction or service industries and went on fixed contracts, typically of two years. Although these might be extended or repeated, the conditions, both contractual and physical, were seldom such as to encourage workers to summon their families and so make the transition from ‘sojourners’ to settlers. Instead, like the earlier wave of South Asian migrants to the UK and North America, they saved up to 50 per cent of their earnings and remitted these sums by various means to kin and sponsors back home.

  The economic impact of such transactions would be enormous, but so too would the social consequences. According to one study, albeit based on the expectations not of sojourners in the Gulf but of settlers in California, remittances were employed ‘to enhance status; gain philanthropic prestige; maintain izzat or honor; improve marriage potentials family-wide; acquire political power or influence: demonstrate religious devotion; increase the potential for the education of siblings or more distant kinsmen; and, of course, finance additional migration’.2 Very few first-generation migrants, and not many of the second or third generation, severed their links with their kinsmen back home. If anything, South Asians abroad clung to family and community even more tenaciously than they did at home. Empowering his brethren back in South Asia validated the migrant’s experience and enhanced his standing among them. They in turn might defer to his suggestions on the use of his remittances and heed his advice in other matters of community interest, including those of doctrinal and political allegiance.

  Initially it was not India but Pakistan that benefited most from the Gulf’s appetite for labour. Being for the most part Muslims, Pakistanis were already welcome in the Arabian peninsula. There were ancient commercial and trading links between Sind and the Gulf ports, and many thousands of Pakistanis headed to Mecca on the annual pilgrimage. Haj organisers were trusted figures and were acceptable to all parties as labour contractors. Though in India migration to the Gulf was principally from Kerala – and though in Pakistan migration streams to countries other than those of the Gulf were also origin-specific (e.g. Azad Kashmiris to the UK) – the Gulf appealed across the board, attracting unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers from all over Pakistan. Pathans and Punjabis flocked through emigration control at Islamabad airport as readily as did Sindis and muhajirs at Karachi airport. Unusually for Pakistan, here was an enterprise in which all the nation’s fretful ethnic groups might jointly participate and profit.

  It was therefore somewhat ironic that the PPP, the main political party with an all-Pakistan appeal, was unable to reap the rewards of Gulf migration. Bhutto had been in dire need of good economic news, but when his government had been ousted by the military, the exodus to the Gulf was still a trickle. Only thereafter did it become a flood. From perhaps 300,000 Pakistanis working in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states when Bhutto was arrested in ’77, the figure quickly increased sixfold, so that by the time he was executed in ’79 it stood at around 1.8 million. It would remain at this level until 1983, then fall away, only to surge again as oil prices soared further in the late ’80s. The principal beneficiary was thus the eleven-year regime of General Ziaul Haq.

  The same poor timing did Bangladesh’s Mujibur Rahman and his Awami League no favours either. Augmented by remittances from the Sylheti community in the UK, the earnings of Bangladeshis in the Gulf would come to constitute the country’s main source of foreign exchange. But the outflow of migrant labour to the Gulf only reached appreciable dimensions three-to-four years after Mujib’s death. Once again it was the military regimes, first that of General Ziaur Rahman and then of General Mohamed Ershad, that benefited.

  Although available statistics on the scale of remittances are reckoned inadequate (because they generally fail to distinguish between different streams of migration) and unreliable (because they mostly ignore informal money transfers), it seems that the value of foreign exchange reaching Pakistan in the form of recorded remittances from the Middle East rose ‘from $434 million in 1976–77 to a peak of $2,403 million in 1982–83’.3 By then Gulf earnings covered nearly 75 per cent of Pakistan’s trade deficit and were bringing in more foreign exchange than either exports or American aid packages. Averaged out, the World Bank calculated this to mean that in the decade 1977–86 Pakistan profited from Gulf migration to the tune of nearly $16 billion.

  In reality it was probably more. Cash transferred not through banks but through the informal hundi system of brokers – or indeed stashed about the returning migrant’s luggage and person – is thought to have added another 50 per cent. Moreover, the Pakistani economy profited indirectly too. Lower deficits meant less borrowing costs; siphoning off excess labour to the Gulf may have reduced domestic tensions; and the demand for Pakistani produce from the roughly 10 per cent of the country’s male labour force who were now working in the Gulf saw exports to that region double.

  Nor was this a flash in the pan. As of 1983 Pakistan’s participation in the Gulf bonanza showed a slight decline. Oil prices were slipping and the resultant belt-tightening in the Gulf reduced the demand for labour. Meanwhile migrants from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka who were either more amenable to lower pay rates or better equipped in terms of skills provided stiff competition. Yet the reduction in remittances to Pakistan was nicely offset by the lower cost of oil imports, and when oil prices again surged, so did the flow of migrants and the value of their remittances. After several more such seesaws, by 2012 the value of all foreign remittances reaching Pakistan (so from Europe and North America as well as the Gulf) was estimated at a mighty $13.5 billion a year.

  How much of this was being put to productive use – indeed what constitutes productive use – has been much debated. A survey published in 1987 by the Asian Employment Programme of the International Labour Organisation indicated that in Pakistan around 50 per cent of remittance funds were spent on ‘recurring consumption plus [consumer] durables’, with another 10 per cent going to marriage and haj costs and 17 per cent to acquiring land and property. That left around 20 per cent for ‘other investment’. Some of this 20 per cent ‘was directed towards commercial avenues such as trade and [the] restaurants business’, but only 7 per cent of it went to ‘agricultural and industrial machinery and commercial vehicles’.4 Greater spending power obviously benefited the wider economy and boosted GDP; but the government-sponsored savings schemes and investment incentives that might have generated long-term productivity were scorned. ‘Indus man’s abiding preference for ostentatious consumption over thrift and capital accumulation’ was still in evidence.

  Something similar was true of Kerala. Though one of India’s smaller states, Kerala – densely populated, well educated and with a substantial Muslim minority – accounted for half of the nation’s annual migrant outflow to the Gulf of around 200,000. The stream of remittances into the state was thus considerable; yet ‘it does not seem to have made any impact on the economic growth rate of the state economy’, nor to have had any substantial effect on the employment rate, agricultural development or industrialisation.5 Instead Keralans ploughed their earnings into day-to-day necessit
ies, consumer goods and construction materials for new-build housing.

  But just across the border from Pakistan in the Indian state of Punjab the situation was rather different. In Jandiali, a Sikh village with a long tradition of migration, Arthur Helweg’s research in the 1980s found that investment from remittances had overtaken the needs of production.

  Emigrants sent back much money which enabled farmers to mechanize and invest heavily in machinery and technology … To illustrate, Jandiali had 22 tractors to till her 646 acres. Tractors in Jandiali did hire out, but the figure is indicative of an investment above that warranted by the output, possibly 20 times the amount. Part of the reason for excessive tractors is that they are a prestige item.6

  Jandiali was an extreme example. Located in Jalandar district, long an area of high emigration, by the 1980s more than half of the village’s natural population was living abroad; and since earlier patterns of migration had established Jalandar’s Sikhs in the UK, Canada and the US, it was from these places rather than the Gulf that the bulk of the remittances were coming.

  Punjab itself was not exactly typical either. The tractor-cluttered roads and the thump of newly sunk tube-wells advertised its pre-eminence as the most agriculturally productive state in India. In fact, by 1985 India’s Punjab seemed no longer to belong to the Third World, and to have left the rest of India behind. Bullock carts were being forced off the roads by combine harvesters. The shops had plate glass and the Yamaha had ousted the bicycle. ‘There were no mud huts in the villages; it was all brick and stone … If any one part of the country could be called a success story, this was it.’7