The never-ending agonies of Indian workers in Gulf

Last Thursday newspapers across India and abroad carried a shocking story wherein a Saudi female employer allegedly chopped off the right hand of her Indian housemaid from Chennai, Kasturi Munirathinam. Her crime: protesting harassment by her employer.
Several newspapers have splashed the heart wrenching photograph of Munirathinam’s bandaged hand .“When she tried to escape harassment and torture, her right hand was chopped off by the woman employer. She fell down and sustained serious spinal injuries,” Munirathinam’s sister, S Vijayakumari, told the Press Trust of India. Munirathinam was reportedly earning less than Rs 20,000 a month for putting in at least 12 hours of work daily.
Of the 2.8 million Indians working in Saudi Arabia and sending billions of dollars in remittances, many are also facing hardships and untold miseries. The government of India does not have actual numbers of the wretched ones who have been mistreated by their employers or those who are languishing in jails on real or false charges.
In several instances, the women workers who serve as domestic help are the worst affected. While there are innumerable cases of Indians going to Saudi Arabia and prospering through their skills there are also tragedies of the other kind befalling the Indian diaspora that goes unnoticed, leave alone thinking of planning some precautionary remedial measures. The two deaths that took place in Hyderabad in the recent weeks do touch upon the tragedy affecting not just a person but entire families.
Wasif Ali, aged about 40, who worked in a northern city in Saudi Arabia was sent back home last year when it was he was suffering from kidney failure. On returning to Hyderabad he tried treatment at various hospitals but to no avail. He has left behind a young widow with four children to look after.
The other tragedy was that of Tausif Khan who had come home to celebrate Eid Al Adha with his family. He had gone to Jeddah after purchasing an “azad (independent) visa” for about Rs 2 lakh from a local agent. No sooner had he landed in Saudi Arabia, he learned that the labour laws have been tightened and there is hardly any way that he could find a suitable job in a short time. Seeing his pitiable condition, a Saudi decided to help him by risking his own business. He took him under his sponsorship and allowed Khan to find a job which he did after about six months. The ‘surrogate’ Saudi ‘employer’, as had promised ‘freed’ Khan from his sponsorship and gave him the necessary documents for the transfer of employment. Since the 50-year-old Khan was pining to meet his family, he sought an early leave from his new employer and arrived in Hyderabad buying his own air ticket about a week before the festival. Khan suffered a massive heart attack and breathed his last on the table where he was being examined by doctors for an unexpected ‘stomachache’. There are also cases of many rural and urban poor workers from Telangana committing suicide in Saudi Arabia or on returning home. The causes are almost the same—feeling that they would never be able to clear their debts.
Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj has reacted sharply and said that the Indian government would seek stringent punishment for Munirathinam’s employer. The agonising stories of the Indian workers in Gulf countries have hardly been narrated. They have been swept under the carpet by the workers who fear reprisal if they spoke and the Indian government’s soft pedaling of these issues. And it’s time for India and state governments like Telangana and AP to speak out about the injustices being faced by their folks in the Gulf States.