Abstract
At a time when the conditions of labourers and their human rights have completely disappeared not only from the agenda of public policy but the discourse of civil society as well, that there is someone who has the restless urge to stir our conscience about the continuing slavery practices in the twenty-first century and the passion to advocate enforcement of laws and programmes to eliminate them despite indifference, non-cooperation and even hostility of the very agencies entrusted with this task should instantaneously earn our gratitude. No less deserving of our appreciation is the publisher who has decided to bring out this bulky volume on a subject not much in demand in the current matrix of reading choices.
The book Human Bondage: Tracing its Roots in India by Lakshmidhar Mishra is a landmark study on the subject because of comprehensiveness and multi-dimensionality of treatment of the subject. It has not left any aspect—conceptual, historical, legal, operational or prescriptive—unexplored. The study bears the imprint of scholarship, wide administrative experience and social activism and is an enlarged version of Burden of Bondage, published in 1997. It is difficult to think of a person more qualified than the author to produce this insightful treatise. As the biodata at the end of the book indicates, besides being a prolific writer, Dr Mishra has occupied positions at policy-making level in the agency dealing with labour in the government as well as in the International Labour Organization and has carried out numerous investigations for the Supreme Court and National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). He continued to pursue his commitment to eliminate bondage system with a crusading zeal in his assignment as a rapporteur of the NHRC which has been mandated by the Supreme Court to monitor this work, till recently and current assignment as Special Advisor, National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights.
The book is divided into three sections. Section I dealing with overview traces the roots of bondage through the history specifying distinguishing characteristics in relation to origin, evolution, growth and practice of slavery in Greece, Roman empire, China, Russia, Islamic countries ranging from Arabia to Indonesia and Turkish empire and pre-Islamic Africa. In Americas, the practice of slavery was found in Caribbean, South America and southern states of America. Despite the enormous economic contribution made by slaves to the prosperity of slave-owning countries, the treatment meted out to them was worse than that accorded to animals. Slavery was legalised by enactment of laws which made slaves a commodity and a property which could be inherited, purchased and moved from one place and owner to another. Though ill treatment of slaves was disallowed, there was little enforcement even of this restriction as the slaves were in no position to challenge their masters or protest against them. The slavery in India has been traced from the Vedic period and has been extensively dealt with in Kautilya’s Arthsastra. But its most institutionalised form emerged in the post-Mauriyan period through the Varna system reinforced by Manusmriti. It weakened in the post-Gupta period but mutated as debt-bondage which continues to this day in some form or another. The author bemoans that even the egalitarianism of Buddha and compassion of Ashoka could not make any dent on the system. The social evil therefore passed on to Medieval India, largely in the form of domestic slaves. The liberalism of Islam did not percolate to the practice of enslavement of conquered people which later extended to those who could not pay their debt and lost their free status. The latter phenomenon increased with frequent occurrences of famine. Strangely, the advent of colonial rule despite emergence of liberal thought in the home country did not produce any change in the practice. Rather, the introduction of Zamindari system rendered peasantry indebted and landless and led to what the author calls the monetised form of debt-bondage. The large-scale deindustrialisation and dispossession of people from land and forest paved the way for recruitment of these disinherited people as industrial labour in mines and plantations both within the country and overseas. The export of labour to plantations overseas was similar to enslavement of Africans for working in diverse vocations in Americas. The colonial government, far from legislating for emancipation of slaves or even their humane treatment, legalised oppressive control over them by their masters. Only the post-independence period witnessed some measures, direct and indirect, which created enabling conditions for bonded labourers to free themselves from the clutches of their masters. The direct measure came much later with the enactment of the Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act, 1976. But the indirect measures were initiated soon after independence. These included enactment of land reform laws and laws related to protection of interests of labour—minimum wages, equal remuneration, child labour, inter-state migrant labour, contract labour, etc.—and programmes of agricultural development, poverty alleviation and social welfare. But neither of the two measures has helped eliminate this scourge. The beneficial laws have been poorly implemented due to lack of political will, insensitivity of enforcement machinery while the development and welfare programmes have failed to change skewed distribution of land and other assets, institutionalised inequalities based on caste, perpetual indebtedness of the poor (particularly those belonging to lower castes) due to lack of employment and access to credit and cornering of benefits of development and affirmative action programme by the undeserving—in short the embeddedness of poverty and multi-faceted exploitation in the stratified social and economic structures based on caste and distribution of land. This social and agrarian structure concentrates the phenomenon of debtbondage in the most vulnerable and marginalised social groups, the SCs and STs.
Section II of the book deals with issues which the author feels need to be seriously addressed if the bonded labour system has to be eliminated. Seven such issues, which contribute to this practice have been highlighted. These include land tenure system, tribal land alienation, illiteracy, child labour and trafficking, Devdasis and Joginis, credit and indebtedness, globalisation, state and market. As for the land tenure system, the distortions in agrarian structure have created a class of absentee landowners who engage in extracting maximum rent from the sharecroppers and tenants and labour farm workers, in the case of the latter due to under payment of wages, delayed payment, absence of any employment during lean season forcing them into condition of debt-bondage. The latter have no bargaining power due to total dependence on the landowners for survival. In the case of tribes, alienation of their land drives them to indebtedness and bondage. This alienation is facilitated by a number factors—uneconomic holdings, vagaries of monsoon, lack of resources for productive investment, unremunerative returns from their agricultural and forest produce, absence of credit facilities, usurious rates of interest charged by moneylenders, pervasive ignorance and illiteracy. The worst aspect is that laws preventing land alienation are poorly implemented rendering the tribals totally vulnerable. Despite programmes of literacy implemented across the country, the social and economic situation of these marginalised groups prevents them from availing of these facilities. These sections of society have not been mobilised for collective action to rid themselves of debt-bondage in the absence of dedicated agencies working for them and the suspicion with which mobilisation of poor is looked upon by the state agencies. Various legislative and administrative interventions notwithstanding, child labour and trafficking in women and children both in the country and across the border continue unabated. The grinding poverty, laxity of law enforcement and indifference of the larger society are some of the factors responsible for it. The Devdasi and Jogini systems are ugly manifestation of sexual exploitation of lower caste women which the law and the rehabilitation programme have been unable to eliminate. A social movement led by progressive persons in society alone can put an end to this practice through a twin strategy of social mobilisation and effective law and programme enforcement. Easy access to credit, when in need without hassles and collateral and at affordable and reasonable terms, alone can prevent indebtedness. This access does not exist despite affirmative interventions such as necessary directions to banks/cooperatives, encouragement of and assistance to self-help groups etc. The economic reforms and globalisation have also pushed the poor (particularly SCs and STs) to debt-bondage increasingly as a result of shrinking of employment opportunities, lowering of wages, uncertainty of income, increase in the incidence of poverty, informalisation of labour, deteriorating working and living conditions against which the poor and the vulnerable have no protection. The trade unions have virtually ceased to function because of the tilt in the establishment in favour of employers and the pervasive insecurity and fear in labour that it may even lose its job if any attempt at organisation is resorted to. Economic reforms has also led to adverse health impact and declining access to health care. Tribals have been worst victims of globalisation because of the large-scale displacement from their land, habitat and environment, and loss of livelihood suffered by them with no rehabilitation to even partially mitigate its adverse effects. Women too turn out to be its victims as they are driven to engage in the most exploitative forms of work with pervasive threat of sexual harassment and low wages. The environmental degradation and poor quality of life are additional negatives of the neoliberal economic transformation pushing more and more people into debt-bondage.
The third section deals with policy initiatives at national and international levels. At the national level, policy instruments are impressive even though late in coming—a very good law, extensive guidelines for rehabilitation of released bonded labourers and favourable court judgments. Despite this, the enforcement of law is poor due to the indifference and even hostility of state governments to the programme. Even with extensive monitoring and exertion of pressure by the NHRC, there has been little by way of change in the attitude of state governments, most of whom are in denial of the existence of bonded labour in their territory. They have even failed to constitute state level and district level vigilance committees with persons of proper aptitude and empathy, empower them to function and appoint executive magistrates to try cases under the Act. The state level officials display ignorance of legal provisions, interpret provisions negatively and even frustrate efforts of NGOs and social activists to free bonded labourers. At the level of rehabilitation, the performance is dismal, by and large, although the author has cited a few positive developments in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and Uttarakhand. A large number of cases have piled up in the courts of Executive Magistrates of which a substantial number have, after years of delay, ended in negative findings without adequate justification, displaying poor understanding of the law and its ethos. At the international level, significant initiatives have been taken in Europe, Latin America and Africa. A sub-regional project on prevention and elimination of bonded labour in South Asia has been launched though it faces formidable challenges in the concerned member states. NGOs take the larger share of credit, wherever some success has been achieved in identification, release and rehabilitation of bonded labour.
Given this pessimistic scenario, the author comes to the candid conclusion that the pernicious practice of bonded labour system cannot be eliminated by international instruments/treaties or an effective national law or even by welfare programmes and favourable court judgments. These instruments, important as they are, need to be complemented by a strategy which should consist of a national policy, a perspective plan and a national commission to translate the plan into action. He then sets out the details of these three components of the strategy. This begs the question whether the government which has failed to act with an already available and effective law and welfare programmes would display greater interest in implementing the strategy laid down? Considering that the evil of bonded labour system has not only persisted but mutated into more horrendous forms as seen in the migrant labour, child labour and trafficking in women and children, without any change in the attitude of law-enforcement agencies, it is unlikely that more policy making and institution building would fare any better. With regard to newer forms of bondage, the author considers three factors crucial for making a change in the situation—(a) how positive and supportive is the contemporary milieu, (b) political will, commitment and determination and (c) right attitude, approach, insight and perception on the part of multiple stakeholders—and concludes his study without answering whether there is any likelihood of these conditions being satisfied. Evidently, there is little possibility of these conditions emerging given the past experience and the current developments. The contemporary milieu is totally anti-labour. Since the onset of economic reforms, not only the enforcement of existing labour laws have been put on a back burner, there is persistent clamour for labour reforms which imply delegislating/reversing some of them with a view to giving greater freedom to employers to hire and fire and determine at will their working conditions. Never sincerely implemented in the best of times due to lack of organisation in the labour (in the informal sector particularly), the labour has no interlocutor in the present milieu of political economy where the government is ever ready to placate capital in the interest of attracting investment. Labour enforcement officials are governed by an unwritten diktat that they should not inspect establishments to check enforcement of labour laws and merely take a declaration from the employers that legal provisions have been observed. Bonded labour system would require greater persistence to examine in depth the working conditions of labour in an ambience where the victims muster courage to speak the truth without fear of reprisals. This condition simply does not exist. Even in the pre-reform period, except for a brief interregnum of emergency, when the implementation of Bonded Labour Act was placed as an item of priority in governance, there has never been any proactive pressure from the government on the officials to implement it because landowners enjoyed unmatched political clout. The conditions today are totally unfavourable. While the power of landowners has not diminished, much greater power is now enjoyed by employers due to obsession with growth at whatever cost. No degree of policy making for protection of women and children has made a dent on child labour and trafficking in them. Even the enactment of right to education, not to speak of the pressure of child rights activists, has not moved the government to remove the indefensible distinction between hazardous and non-hazardous activities in the existing child labour legislation. Similarly, the rescue of hapless children by NGOs now and then from brutal treatment of employers in various establishments has failed to stir the conscience of policy makers and enforcement officials. The civil society and media are indifferent (barring some exceptions) and the trade unions have shown little interest in organising the unorganised labour. The debt-bondage system would, therefore, persist and would, in fact, increase as a larger number of people face displacement and destitution on account of various economic policies. As for the political commitment and will, it has never been there even in the best of times as evident from the enormous delay in ratifying international conventions and enactment of a national law on the subject although during emergency a contrived commitment was on display for political reasons.
But today it is a lost cause because that compulsion does not exist and the political economy to which the ruling class is so passionately committed is conducive to creation of bondage system rather than its elimination. The attitude of stakeholders would never change in such a political economy. The employers as a class are the beneficiary of bondage system. The media and upper crust of civil society swears by the current model of economy. The bureaucracy looks up to the political class for signals. On its own, it never had nor has empathy and concern for the poor, even less for the unfortunate bonded labourers. The bonded labour has no voice in the current system. Therefore, beyond the officials of the NHRC and a few NGOs and activist organisations, the desired positive attitude towards the plight of bonded labour does not appear to be in evidence and is unlikely to emerge.
The prospects for elimination of bonded labour system therefore are bleak. The system in the past was an outcome of skewed agrarian structure superimposed on an even more unequal caste-based oppressive social structure. The law to eliminate bonded labour system could not realise its objectives because the two structures have continued to persist and have in fact reinforced each other. The bondage system has now mutated into varied forms in the changed political economy with the unquestioned supremacy of the capital. It cannot be eliminated without reversing the neoliberal globalised economy and making a determined assault on the skewed agrarian and oppressive social structure to produce desired social change. Only a massive political mobilisation against landed and caste relations of power and national and global capital can create conditions for loosening of debt-bondage. No such mobilisation is in sight although the poor and the oppressed are struggling in this direction in their own way in several places. At the international level, global capitalism is showing signs of collapse and is unlikely to recover. Our only hope lies in these challenges growing to create conditions for a larger political mobilisation for social transformation to emerge.
This pessimistic note withstanding, Dr Mishra’s book, I hope, would stir the conscience of all those who subscribe to the liberal and humanist values and induce them to act, in whatever manner they can within the realm of their activities, to work towards eliminating this scourge in society.
The book is a must read for all those who claim to have a social conscience. For officers of civil services, state and central, who have the primary responsibility to enforce the law and development programmes, the book must be prescribed as a compulsory text in the syllabi of their training programmes if not already included. If at least some of them are inspired to take up this work with sincerity and commitment before they are disoriented by more glamorous work of their jobs, Dr Mishra’s labour would have been rewarded.