NAMRATA RAJU
The ghosts of migrant workers haunting the facades of the buildings they once constructed makes for striking imagery. It is also true that the invisibilisation of migrant workers is just that extreme. Whether in literary fiction such as Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, or scholarship like anthropologist Andrea Wright’s Between Dreams and Ghosts, it is no coincidence that literature and academia are replete with parallels between migrants and ghosts. Being of and from different places, migrants are archetypally included neither here nor there: a fractured citizenship exacerbated by electoral exclusion in their home states.
This is even more true of low-wage migrants. Suspended between two parallel worlds whilst battling economic want, they continually navigate their selfhood in their current places of residence, whilst still yearning for their old selves left behind at home. Undergirding the socio-cultural otherness that migrant workers face is the issue of systemic otherness. This comprises the practical exclusion of these workers both, in their places of origin and destination, including basic rights and services ranging from healthcare and social security to the access to vote. If migrants in India and overseas were to be described across a spectrum of socio-economic inequality, those at the lower end are the most invisibilised in terms of the translation of their rights into practice. Voting is no different.
Typically, policy discourse on migration brackets international and internal migrants into disparate groups for study. While the wide-ranging demographic makeup of India’s migrants necessitates this approach, it is simultaneously essential to consider all migrants as a polity. This is due to the plethora of ways in which different migrant groups can be subjected to wide-ranging exclusions, being rendered invisible both at home and in their current places of destination. The nature of a migrant worker’s vulnerability often plays out in the specific type of exclusion they face.
The Covid-19 pandemic exemplified this point, placing the invisibility of migrants on graphic display. Based on their specific vulnerabilities and where they fell within the socioeconomic ladder, migrants faced different types of invisibilisation and exclusion. For instance, gender- based violence and harassment spiked during the pandemic. In the workplace, this meant that groups such as residential domestic workers, several of whom are women migrants within India and overseas, faced even more confinement to the homes of employers perpetrating violence, owing to the pandemic’s mobility restrictions….
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