Migrants Keep India Moving

Kashmir killings are a warning. We urgently need an inter-state migration council

- Chinmay Tumbe

The recent exodus of migrant workers from the Kashmir Valley has yet again put the spotlight on their precarious lives. This time the reason is terrorism, in 2020 it was a badly planned national lockdown and in many Indian states, they are subject to recently introduced nativist laws that blatantly violate the spirit of the Indian Constitution that permits free mobility via clauses under Article 19.

Over a hundred million circular migrant workers play an important role in running India’s economy. The number of inter-state migrant workers runs into tens of millions, and they are the ones that repeatedly suffer due to deep-seated prejudices in some places of seeing the ‘outsider’ as a problem. At various times, they have been blamed for stealing jobs of locals or even for murders and rapes in cities.

Blaming the internal migrant ‘outsider’ has a long history in India. The Mulki rules of the late 19th century in Nizam-ruled Hyderabad privileged locals for employment for several decades. The 1960s anti-South Indian movement in Mumbai depicted ‘SI Vultures’ or ‘South Indian Vultures’ in cartoons and decades later morphed into an anti-North Indian movement.