The laborers are below. The capitalists are above. The farmer is in the middle.
—Farmers Focus Group (Focus Group Discussion 45)
LEAVING FOR TOWN
I met Paratapa on his sprawling estate late in the evening.
1 It was everything I could do to arrange a meeting with him, as he balanced the management of his land holdings with a career in the city. When the topic of his laborers came up, he spoke in the past tense, as if a burden had been lifted: “In those days, we used to keep bonded laborers, and even if they required many things from my house, I would lend to them…. My costs have gone down because they have left our household.” It was clear that he considered his own social position to be the reason these laborers turned to him. And who was he to reject community members who came with their problems? The burden of bonded laborers rested on his shoulders, in his mind at least, and these relationships were costly, both financially and legally:
In those days, people used to stay here as family members. Even in our absence, they used to work, and they never used to feel apart from the house. But nowadays, there is no sort of relationship. They come as a daily wage, they go in the evening, and there is no sort of relationship. In my father and grandfather’s time, there used to be ten bonded laborers here, but for the moment, no. They used to stay here itself, even their children and their wives and all. Even food, clothes, and everything, their expenditures and health and everything. Even marriages, we used to spend everything for the laborers. Nowadays, the relationship has changed. Now the cases are being filed, even against me. Two people filed a case against me…. People have filed old cases, from twenty years ago, but recent cases have also been filed…. In my situation in particular, they filed a case, but nothing drastic has resulted because I explained that it was because of their vulnerability they came to me, approaching me for something, and I accepted. I have not forced them to be my bonded laborers. So, everything went smoothly, and nothing more has happened to me.
Like other interviewees, Paratapa shifts back and forth easily between an earlier generation and the present. This slippage reflects a broader tendency to ascribe the worst violations of laborers’ dignity to earlier generations while framing contemporary bonded labor as the costly but ethical response to the pleading of indigent community members.
He is also powerful enough to talk about his own case without fear of jeopardizing himself further. When insurgent bonded laborers—and doubtless a number of other factors—made agriculture too difficult, he responded by taking a position as the president of a cooperative agricultural bank. His confidence rests on the political and social influence that comes from such a presidency.
2 But it also rests on a conviction that the courts will recognize his benevolence, since “some of them refused to lodge a case against their master because they were treated well.” The fact that his violation of the Bonded Labor Act landed him in court is a minor detail; caring for the workers matters most. What bothers him more than the case, he says, is the lost family-feeling:
We have a [sad] feeling about losing these workers. When they were here with us they had status as a family member, and we ourselves got a good profit and would share some of that with the laborers…. In those days, social bonds were strong, but now relationships are unstable. We cannot even lend money to these people anymore because there are these groups coming up, especially for the scheduled tribes and scheduled castes. Landlords are afraid of these groups because these people might go and complain.
His musings echo the sentiments found in the preceding chapters—paternalistic concern for laborers and a sense that emancipation erodes social bonds—but he continues with an explanation of what this means for employers, farmers especially, in this situation:
Landlords themselves feel like quitting farming because of all these problems—power, labor, water—for all of these reasons, the landlords feel farming is a burden…. Sometimes I think I’ll just leave agriculture for town. Even if we offer sharecropping, the workers are not ready to take up the work because there is no guarantee they will earn any money…. We’re predicting conditions that will exist in the future, like a shortage of labor and all, and we’re thinking it’s better to go for plantation crops in the future, as they require less labor.
A puzzle lies at the heart of this chapter: if almost all perpetrators had similar expectations for ideal social relations, and if almost all felt similar pressures from their laborers, then differing responses may be rooted in something other than the social movement intervention, per se. Thus far, I have developed the argument that the range and mode of target responses are rooted in a particular political, economic, and cultural context, specifically in their expectations for ideal social relations, interpretation of events as unjust, and radical fluctuations in resources, threats, and opportunities. Here, we arrive at the book’s second and third key contributions. These factors shape target responses in ways that trace political-process theory, as seen in the second chapter. In sum, these factors shape the way they desire to respond, the way targets think they can respond, and the way they are able to respond. Sometimes desire, intention, and ability align. Sometimes they do not.
The reality of interpretive processes is that repression and countermobilization may initially be adopted by a wider range of actors than can actually afford to keep them. Incumbency produces rather rigid expectations for reality, and when reality changes, something has to give. A longstanding and inflated assessment of one’s cultural opportunities (such as confidence in paternalism) or sudden shocks (like a collective rebellion or an interpersonal confrontation) may trigger passionate, emotional, and even violent responses. Landlords may think repression is preferable to compromise. But if a landlord’s power has diminished, this tactic may fail, and he may be forced to mount a subsequent response drawn from a shorter list of more realistic possibilities, such as adaptation or quitting. Presumably, the perpetrator eventually lands on the response he is able to afford, based on the resources and options available to him—as well as his willingness, I hasten to add. Poor farmers armed only with caste status quickly find they have fewer choices than they had previously imagined, as the gap between reality and perception closes.
Clearly, Paratapa feels in control of his life: confident that the courts will understand his benevolence, secure in his high status and his well-compensated position as a bank president, and able to decamp to the city at his leisure. In our conversation, he sketches the range of options facing farmers. Those without resources may sharecrop, though they will find it tough going. Those with resources may turn to politics or plantations, though these require social and economic capital. Choosing among these options is no small matter. Where caste was once an overriding determinant of one’s prestige and possible success, the institution is now facing an onslaught from more urban and economically oriented sources of power and prestige. How well-positioned employers are to navigate this transition has a good deal to do with how well they manage social movement challenges and the perceived erosion of the moral order described thus far.
TARGET RESPONSES
Qualitative data suggest preemptive tactics are used to prevent insurrection (as seen in
chapter 3). Maintaining power usually involves targeting the weak, dividing laborers into different groups, cycling pay, limiting repayment rates, requiring family labor as collateral, using emotional force and false sympathy, and sharing these strategies among themselves. A broader range of responses is needed if a full-scale insurrection emerges. These responses, I argue, are best thought of as occurring in two phases. In an initial round of contestation, incumbents will choose tactics that they believe will help them win. For powerful incumbents, this is likely to include attempts to countermobilize against or co-opt and repress the movement. In a second phase, targets will have collected valuable data about their own strength as well as that of the movement.
While perceptions of ideal social relations and the attendant collapse of the moral order are broadly distributed among upper-caste landholders, their reactions to these challenges are not. As Paratapa’s case indicates, a range of short- and long-term responses exist, though these options are not uniformly available to employers. In deciding how to respond, targets draw from a familiar repertoire of strategic action as well as their own capacity and desire (Swidler 1986, McAdam 1996). For contemporary perpetrators, this repertoire of strategic action varies based on one’s resources and opportunities. Targets may choose to continue, or they may decide to quit, depending on how existential of a threat they feel the movement represents. Target responses are constrained by their abilities,
3 and these abilities are both real and imagined. The strong do what they will, in a manner of speaking, along these major routes.
4Yet the strong do not always get what they want. Or, rather, those who think they are strong may not actually be so. Perception matters—many individuals interviewed for this study thought they were strong. But cultural, political, and economic resources are needed to persist, repress, or countermobilize successfully. Those with other opportunities (or a change of heart) may opt out early, but persistence requires the right resources. Having the right resources is a function of how profitable a given sector is and how much money and power the individual has to persist—themselves functions of their broader power and position. Attempts do not appear to correlate with these broader factors, since perception of opportunities or threats matters more than their reality when it comes to a movement adversary’s initial response (Goldstone and Tilly 2001, Kurzman 1996). I came across many instances in which incumbents mistook threats for opportunities. While landlords’ caste authority had previously combined with a lack of laborer options in such a way that ensured a steady and dependable labor supply, the previous chapter suggests this authority is under considerable strain. A mentality of caste entitlement may persist, nevertheless.
Kshantu, an employer who earlier explained that bonded labor is a legal rather than a cultural offense, learned of this distinction the hard way.
5 After spending nearly a decade working in Kuwait, he returned to Karnataka to try his hand at farming. Along the way, he took a bonded laborer. When the worker rebelled, ran away without repaying his debt, and collaborated with an advocacy group to secure a release certificate from the government, Kshantu responded in kind by countersuing to reclaim the debt. He told me that he had looked everywhere but had been unable to locate the laborer.
While the case will probably remain in court for the foreseeable future, Kshantu’s response is unique in its explicit deliberation. It is also notable for its hubris—he lodged a lawsuit to reclaim something established law clearly states was never his in the first place. The Bonded Labor Act of 1976 explicitly forbids the kind of relationship Kshantu had with his charge. A small Brahmin landholder, Kshantu’s efforts have come to naught. It may be that he could find the laborer if he had additional time or money to pursue the case further, but in our conversation, he expressed concern over paying the lease on his new tractor, shifting his children to a new school, getting the right price for his turmeric crop, and transitioning to organic farming. He was indignant that laborers no longer expressed thankfulness and embodied obligation. Kuwait, it seems, was free of such problems. “I want to sell and go back,” he confided in me, “because I’ve lost confidence in this place.”
In the short term, however, his efforts to threaten his former bonded laborer, Tanmay,
6 have continued apace. “Whenever I see him,” Tanmay says, “he tells everyone within earshot,
I will go to court and I will teach him a lesson, and someday I will call people and break his legs.” Kshantu does not know that I have spoken with Tanmay, and so he tells me that he cannot find the boy—perhaps he is unwilling to admit the extent to which he has lost control of the situation. He is fundamentally unable to recognize and admit the failure of the traditional ideas and relationships.
In Tanmay’s assessment, his former master’s belligerence is rooted in the fact that, after so many years abroad, he returned and “didn’t know anything…he cheated everyone and he could not afford to find people [because] nobody is going to work with him now…. I don’t know what his mentality was like twenty years ago, but I feel like it was from the old tradition.” The old tradition included maintaining caste boundaries that ensured caste cleanliness through untouchability, authority through the dispensation of commands, and status boundaries through an aloof approach to workers. Kshantu may not have the resources to succeed, but he certainly had enough of a moral shock, and sufficient righteous indignation, to fuel threats and a lawsuit for the foreseeable future.
In the next section, we will hear from farmers who have resigned themselves to these new realities, and in the longer term, Kshantu’s frustration may lead him to give in, “sell this land, and go back to my work.” In the meantime, however futile it may be, he is doing what he can to resist the bonded laborer’s challenge. He is an excellent example of a perpetrator who would like to hold on to the older cultural practices but is unable to do so under new conditions. His appeals to paternalism sound hollow: they echo in a new social, political, and economic reality that he is ill-prepared to confront. In many instances, I heard accounts—most often from laborers or movement workers—of attempts to countermobilize, repress, and persist. All but a few of these attempts failed when a social movement group was able to leverage broader structural changes against employers.
Repression is used in an attempt to halt the exodus of workers. Here we must rely on the testimony of survivors, as I did not find a single employer willing to speak freely about the force, threats, and violence that are used to coerce laborers.
7 Repression comes in many forms, the most direct of which are death threats from employers or their emissaries. Workers may be threatened with being pushed off the landlord’s land, or worse. When a group of kiln workers insisted that they had long since repaid their debt, the workers recall a representative of the kiln owner saying, “I will throw you into the kiln and kill you if you will not work for us.”
8 Such threats are not uncommon in extractive industries, where higher levels of profitability increase the likelihood that local operations have strong support from powerful political and economic actors.
Perpetrators’ other economic activities were a consistent theme in the focus-group discussions I had with rescued laborers. In addition to owning sites that practiced bonded labor, they were also involved in agriculture, owned transportation companies, managed retail shops, and worked as attorneys. These resources underpinned their ability to secure the compliance of police, though the police have turned out to be a fickle ally, as their allegiances are co-opted by the demands of the local administrative officials in case of a raid, frequently initiated at the behest of a movement group.
9 Connections with the police, real or perceived, allow perpetrators to increase the salience of their threats. Eighteen survivors of twenty years of intergenerational bonded labor found the police to be little more than an extension of the kiln owner’s security force:
Whenever we made a plan to go to the police station, someone definitely knew where we were going…. Sometimes someone waits at the police station, and they call the policemen, [asking] “why are workers going to the police station?” [and] “Your father already took an advance, so go and work for them, what can we say?” They [the kiln owners] definitely have very good relations with the police. Some of the women in our group went together to the police station to talk to someone. Then they beat us because they think we are trying to oppose the kiln owner.
10Threats serve as an ideal form of repression, especially when they seem credible based on past behavior. The survivors speaking above were the children of three brothers who had been bonded by the current kiln owner’s father. The fact that the kiln owner’s managers had beaten one of these brothers to death lent credibility to verbal threats. In another case, an interviewee was threatened prior to the raid—“If you do not work for us, then I will kill you. Otherwise, I will throw you in a kiln” and “As a Musahar [untouchable caste] you want to become a
goonda [thug]? If you want to become a
goonda, then I will break your hand and leg and throw you in the kilns”—and also after the raid had been completed, when the kiln owner would widely proclaim, “Whenever I see him I will beat him!”
11 The force of such threats is raised if laborers have found evidence of past abuse.
Threats are frequently followed by action. In another case where I also interviewed members of the former slaveholding class, the founder of another group of escapees recalls that after laborers refused to let their children weave carpets to repay the family’s debt, the moneylender came and “found the children who were not working, and there someone was boiling the water, just beside their huts, so he took the water and threw it onto the children. [They were burned] on the hands and legs.”
12In another less violent incident referred to in the previous chapter, local elites responded to efforts to secure higher wages by destroying a local access road. The movement group worked to connect at-risk children with local schooling, only to discover that landlords had destroyed the road to the school as punishment for these mobilization efforts. “At the time,” the same director explained,
[workers] didn’t realize that this is a human rights violation, that this is our right to get a road and nobody can harm us, even though they are upper caste or moneylenders and landlords. They took the initiative, went to the district magistrate, went to the assistant district magistrate, they started a case in the court, and, after twelve years, they got the road again.
13This approach started with an education campaign but ended in a victorious court case against elites’ efforts to block their access to a public school. From the movement target’s perspective, laborers’ efforts to access the school were successfully blocked a decade prior, but the social movement group turned this old defeat for the community into a new focal point for a fresh round of mobilization.
COUNTERMOBILIZATION AND CO-OPTATION
Efforts at countermobilization may be seen in the case of the Sonbarsa rebellion discussed in the previous chapter. Interviews with laborers over the past four years have taken place at the edge of the community, in an unincorporated no-man’s-land. The laborers’ homes were destroyed at the time of the uprising and had not been reclaimed or rebuilt at the time of this writing. Countermobilization tactics have also been used in attempts to disintegrate self-help and savings groups supported by social movement efforts. In one instance, a self-help group was significantly weakened and nearly destroyed after quarry contractors sponsored two different group members to compete for the position of village leader (
pradhan). This had the effect of splitting the group. Elsewhere, a group of survivors obtained a lease for their own quarry work but were thwarted when an upper-caste employer from another village used the name of a Dalit worker of his own to obtain an overlapping claim to the land. This succeeded in creating a division within the Dalit community and blocking them from their own land. By all accounts, similar low-level repressive tactics are widely used.
While more comprehensive and representative data would be needed to make the case, qualitative data suggest that perpetrators in extractive industries are more likely to resort to heavy-handed threats and to back these threats with action. Why might this be the case? Potential answers lie in a combination of resources and opportunities—stronger connections with police, politicians, and other income sources—as well as particular individual motivations and attitudes that I cannot discern. The opportunity cost to replace workers with a machine is prohibitive. One kiln owner told me that he could replace his hundreds of workers with a single machine. But the machine costs nearly 9,000,000 rupees (200,000 USD), an amount neither he nor any but the most powerful can afford. Likewise, quarry work can be mechanized, but none of the contractors I spoke with had resources that could match the large crushing operation that operated nearby. So, along the path between exclusive reliance on bonded labor and full mechanization lies a maze of compromises arrived at based on the landlord’s cultural and economic resources and commitments to the ideas underpinning bonded labor.
The stories of survivors of slavery are replete with instances of both repression and countermobilization at the moment when it became clear a community was on the verge of securing additional benefits that would undermine existing power dynamics. Rights-violating interviewees are understandably reluctant to discuss these issues. As a result, we are often left to fend with data from survivors and movement groups. What their experience demonstrates unequivocally is that when targeted, perpetrators long accustomed to power and control are likely to take action in order to protect their investment, their dignity, or both. Yet, are perpetrators armed only with culturally rooted forms of power, like caste, able to succeed in this effort, despite threats to their way of life and declines in resources? This section suggests an answer in the negative—initial outrage may trigger older, habituated responses, but these are not sustainable without control over key resources, especially from politicians, police, or profit.
RESIGNATION AND QUITTING
When faced with a social movement intervention, many respondents in this study resigned themselves to the situation and quit altogether. There is a near-consensus among laborers and landlords that after an intervention, less than 10 percent of employers in the region persist with the practice, though it is not clear if this estimate is correct. Those who quit the practice in the face of social-movement organizing do so for a number of reasons: as a tactic, because of a change of heart, or because they were simply unable to persist. The term “resignation” is meant to suggest both action and emotion—a cessation of activity, a decrease in willpower, or both.
Quitting in the face of movement mobilization and other obstacles appears to be a strategy for some perpetrators. This is my assessment of Paratapa’s situation. He may have exaggerated his relief at no longer having to care for bonded laborers, but his assessment of being taken to court and losing his workers was situated within a larger set of considerations that included his career as a bank president and his ability to shift easily to nearby Bangalore. He had other opportunities. The same may be said for Tanish, a budding industrialist who voluntarily released two bonded laborers from his brick kiln, blamed their condition on a subordinate, and used this experience to demonstrate his commitment to the goals of a kiln owner–NGO collaboration formed to draft employment policies for the brick-kiln industry.
14 There is no way to divine his motives, but Tanish’s strategy had the effect of putting him on the right side of history, so to speak.
For some, it may also be a sense that an era has passed, and as movement efforts draw attention to standing laws, some find they are not willing to continue behavior that now has a certain social and legal stigma, if only in their community. Perhaps a few have had an honest change of heart, as with Gurumanji, a former farmer and contractor who quit his businesses in order to follow his god and a preferred guru. Over shared betel nut, he explained his pursuit of truth: “There is nothing left for me to do as a businessman. I have done theft and looting; I have done everything. But I realized that when you are young you can do everything, but when it is the time of dying, then you remember god, and then god will ask,
You didn’t remember me when you were doing those things, so why should I listen to you now? So I left all of that.”
15 Here too it is difficult to discern motive, but it seems plausible that as human rights interventions reframe bonded labor as a criminal practice rather than as an acceptable cultural norm, this fact may precipitate a break between those willing to continue despite the new stigma and those unwilling to do so for personal reasons. Whether this is the case deserves further attention.
16For the majority of interviewees, however, desperation—the recognition that they lacked the political opportunities and economic resources sufficient to bolster their cultural strength in the face of a movement challenge—explains why they had quit, or were in the process of quitting, their involvement in the bonded-labor system that had sustained their families for generations. It is here that the theme of ennui and world-weariness reemerges, after making brief appearances in the previous chapter. In Sonbarsa, because the original efforts to launch a countermobilization failed to suppress the laborer insurgency, farmers have resigned themselves to doing the work themselves. The head of the family of the murdered contactor explained that that the laborers are now afraid of his family and that, although the insurgency affected everyone in the community, it was farmers who got cheated and are being held back. This is of serious concern to him because the past “will never return again. Workers will never come back and work under us.”
17 With these options closed, he confides that he is tired of farming and asks me how he can emigrate to Tanzania, where he knew I lived at the time.
Resignation takes many forms. For some, it means doing the work oneself or giving up on farming altogether. It may involve settling lawsuits rather than engaging in extended courtroom struggles over bonded labor.
18 For others, the decline in status is too severe, so leaving the community may be a last chance to salvage one’s dignity.
19 “Somehow,” another landlord told me, “we just have to sustain.”
20 Resignation often requires patching things up with laborers informally or in settling court cases with a more formal compromise.
21 It may also involve overlooking subsequent issues, since it could prove difficult to get a loan back if a worker refuses to repay or work it off. Rather, “we have to think first” and hire daily laborers, not bonded laborers, because “if you get bonded laborers, and they leave and don’t repay the money, then nothing can be done. It’s our mistake only.”
22This realization is particularly salient for those lacking capital. Most smaller farmers do not secure bonded labor with cash that they have on hand. Rather, they will take a loan from other landowners,
23 “from a bank, or pawn gold and jewelry, or pawn their land papers.”
24 For smaller farmers, the loss of a bonded laborer may mean bankruptcy. When I asked one farmer whether the bonded-labor arrangement would stop if the cost gets too high, he replied, “it’s already happening! We wonder why we should take such a great risk, and give them the money, and then lose it. It’s been the last two years. [Bonded labor] might even go away altogether; now farmers are thinking,
It’s okay that workers aren’t here, we will work in our farms ourselves. It’s happening in the whole state.”
25While we have already seen how workers’ attitudes and behaviors are in decline, those laborers who have some land of their own are thought to be even more derelict. While a worker may come to work on the farmer’s land, they produce less, as they are also “saving their energies to work on their own lands.” This is contrasted with the landless, who are more likely to “work properly.” The net effect, for this farmer at least, is that “it’s no use fighting them, all I can do is watch…. If I pressure them, then they won’t work for me. They will leave me. I am helpless…. Where will I go if I force them? Who will do my work? I cannot manage my land alone.”
26Some former employers, especially in the agricultural sector, simply become resigned to conducting the work on their own. Others do not feel they can manage. Some say they are too old to farm; others confide that it is only the old and those without other employment options who are still farming.
27 Those determined to continue their work with day laborers find that they are competing with factories and other city jobs where there are higher wages and arguably better working conditions. Those who want to maintain the family business may find that the next generation is simply not interested. In the final analysis, many decide simply to give the land for sharecropping.
28Many of the farmers I spoke with have resigned themselves to their situation, lacking the resources, the wherewithal, or the desire to persist in this form of exploitation. This is not only a practical and economic decision. Resignation is also an emotional state that came through in our conversations. It often took the form of nostalgia for the past and a lack of enthusiasm for the future. This sense appears pervasive among landlords involved in agriculture. Often, they have nothing else, or they are going to take advantage of what little they do have, such as a relative in the city or a plot of land to sell. Their predicament obscures their motives. Perhaps they would prefer to maintain the old style of socioeconomic relationships and in so doing restore the moral order. One can only surmise.
We can state with confidence, however, that interventions affect the strong and the weak differently. I did not speak to a single powerful landlord whom I would consider resigned to their condition. They had doubled down on the bonded-labor relationship through repression and had found new ways to extract resources from laborers through adaptation. Subsequent mistreatment takes many forms. Exploitation identical to, or adapted from, bonded labor permeated my interviews with both bonded laborers and landlords. Sufficient resources allowed the powerful to persist or pivot, as they chose. The once powerful had far fewer options available to them.
This broader context is indicated by a partner group’s leader, who explained that the real issue facing rural employers was the gap between urban and rural regions and between technology-rich and technology-poor sectors: “So it’s not that there is a huge gap between landowners [and laborers]. The gap is between urban and rural.”
29 In other words, the gap is between growing and shrinking sectors of the economy. This came through in countless interviews with targeted incumbents—larger and more powerful employers are able to innovate while smaller landlords, often farmers, are left behind. This fact is underscored by the rash of suicides among farmers over the past decade (Patel et al. 2012, Kennedy and King n.d., Mishra 2006).
PERSISTENCE AND ADAPTATION
Persistence is the continuation, in identical or nearly identical form, of the originally targeted behavior. We tend to know less than we should about movements that fail, and as a result, we know little about the persistence of targeted behavior. This gap exists in the literature on contemporary slavery as well. There do not appear to be reliable statistics on what percentage of movement targets are able to persist after being targeted for trafficking or bonded labor. The leader of an antitrafficking initiative suggests that in 20 percent of their cases, a movement target will persist in their efforts to exert control over bonded laborers.
30 Perpetrators with strong and stable cultural, economic, and political positions are able to choose whether to persist in exploitation by virtue of their financial resources, caste and social position, and political context.
Lest my argument be mistaken for a tautology—that weak targets cannot keep bonded laborers, where weakness is defined as an inability to keep one’s bonded laborers—a counterexample is worth examining. When human rights advocates
31 helped Tarun
32 escape from the sericulture operation where he was bonded, the landlord—Aadi,
33 whom we first met in
chapter 3—replaced him with two additional bonded laborers, who continued the work along with their wives and children. When I interviewed Aadi later in the year, he reported matter-of-factly on this continued use of bonded labor: “I only use it because of this sericulture, and I need workers to be here nights.” Bonded laborers do not leave at the end of the day but instead “stretch the time a bit to work later.” As indicated earlier, Tarun had come back to work, this time as a daily laborer doing the same work as he had before. Aadi struck me as less interested in holding on to the older cultural practices than in protecting an economically fruitful enterprise. It may be worthwhile to explore briefly why his experience lies outside the model presented here.
Why has Aadi not quit despite being targeted? As a relative newcomer to the state, he does not hail from an extended and embedded family in the region. As a member of an Other Backward Caste group, he is “middle caste” but by no means of sufficient status simply to power his way forward on caste alone. Likewise, he has a small truck and a bore well, making him generally independent of others for raw inputs, transportation, and the like. Part of his land is dedicated to plantation crops, and combined with his well, this presents a component of his enterprise that could be expanded and adapted to replace the sericulture production. In sum, he has adequate resources to transition to a new form of production but does not appear to have so many resources that he can behave with ambivalence in the face of a movement challenge. Nothing in my many hours of conversation with him suggested that he held on to bonded labor for any reason other than profit and convenience. The fact that Tarun returned to his plantation as a daily laborer is perhaps testimony to that fact.
There are several reasons why Aadi may have persisted despite these countervailing factors. The first is the possibility that sericulture is simply too profitable a cash crop to give up and is therefore worth risking an escalated response from human rights advocacy groups. The second, and more probable, reason is the fact that Tarun continues to work for Aadi in an effort to repay an additional 2,000-rupee loan. While receiving support from a human rights group and working on the meager plot of land he now shares with his brothers, Tarun now lives in freedom with far less certainty than he had in bondage. Emancipation has meant economic uncertainty where previously there had been the repetitious ritual of duty. Considering the options available to him, it may be the case that actually losing Tarun, losing a second round of laborers, or being targeted by a more invasive movement strategy would push Aadi to shift from sericulture to plantation crops. This outcome depends entirely on the movement’s ability to respond to this new situation with a strategy that recognizes these factors, including the postintervention challenges faced by the former bonded laborer. This cannot be overemphasized.
Background interviews with other movement groups working on this issue suggest that profitability provides the resources necessary to persist. In one instance, a perpetrator’s operation was raided and the perpetrator held before being released on bail. As that first case moved forward in the courts, it came to light that he had retrafficked laborers into the same operation. He was rearrested, and the second wave of laborers was released. Upon posting bond, he returned to his operations to retraffic a third wave of laborers. This story suggests anecdotal support for the argument that perpetrators will go to great lengths to protect highly profitable enterprises and also that highly profitable enterprises (and the political and economic clout that comes with them) provide perpetrators the means to continue their work despite the involvement of the police, courts, and human rights groups.
34Two techniques are used in the process of persistence in the cases under consideration here. The first is a shift away from formal paperwork. The second is a shift to a year-to-year contract system. Bonded laborers themselves consistently reported to me that there is no longer any need for their debt obligations and the terms of their labor to be captured in written form, since now everything is “done by trust.” Trust is a euphemism for the fact that unscrupulous employers have eliminated hard evidence of the debt and its repayment history. It is unclear whether this is in response to increased concerns of being caught or in response to better-educated and more inquisitive laborers. I suspect it is the former. Though laborers insisted there was a log of their debts and repayments, many had never seen the putative book. Even if they had seen the book, not a single respondent had seen its contents.
The second technique to obscure the nature of the bonded-labor situation, despite its persistence, is the year-to-year contract system. This system appears to address laborers’ need for cash and lack of credit by providing lump-sum payments in exchange for a single year of the laborer’s total productive capacity. Yet, under these conditions, the laborer incurs running debts that ensure that at the end of the year they cannot leave unless they repay the new debt amount or find someone willing to pay the debt on their behalf. In the case of Karan, a middle-aged bonded laborer, his current employer paid his previous debt and in this way secured Karan’s labor for the foreseeable future.
35 By his own account, Karan had been working as a bonded laborer for twenty-five years, ten years of which have been year-to-year contracts strung together in an otherwise unbroken decade of debt bondage.
There is a tendency in some academic circles to mistake these multiple consecutive year-long contracts as individual agreements that reset at the end of every year. The lack of realistic alternatives, demands for education and marriage fees, a lack of credit, and the duplicitous tactics adopted by employers guarantee that the annual advance is not the only economic interaction between the landlord and laborer. Rather, a host of new needs and old debts conspire to increase, rather than decrease, the laborer’s economic exposure and obligation to the landlord. A year of work, in reality, is not a discrete event but rather one link in a larger chain that keeps laborers bound to the landlord-creditor until that point when—barring some unforeseen event—the debt is purchased by another, as happened when Karan came to work in his current condition.
Persistence is fundamentally attributable to profitability. A number of sectors—kilns, quarries, and large-scale agriculture—are connected to an urban and globalizing economy rooted in the commodification of sand, stone, and cement. What these sectors share is a reliance on manual labor combined with high profitability from growing segments of the Indian economy—the country’s national growth rate has been relatively high over the past decade, despite some ups and downs.
Agriculture, conversely, is on the ropes. The implication of this was clear to interviewees, who told me that bonded labor was only for large and powerful farmers.
36 Furthermore, those farmers with large amounts of land have a greater range of motion on a number of issues, not just labor. The sense from smaller farmers was that “we may be suffering, but the big landholders are not suffering anything. They are making money and have investments. The small farmers like us are suffering too much.”
37 One landlord who lost control of his bonded laborers complained to me that “others, big and powerful farmers, they wouldn’t let the workers go until they repaid their debt.”
38 The implication is clear—when it comes to human rights violators targeted by social movements, Thucydides was on to something when he declared that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
39ADAPTATION: RECONFIGURING EXPLOITATION
While former perpetrators may attempt to reestablish control through repression or countermobilization, many realize they have insufficient capacity to maintain such tactics in the face of sustained pressure. Rights violators may instead, or subsequently, respond in a way that avoids bonded labor but has the net effect of reconfiguring patterns of inequality and exploitation. In this category are employers who work to survive in a way that maintains a semblance of the old system, including land attachment and sharecropping. This category also covers the shift into new sectors altogether, such as politics and extractive industries like mining. These tactics have the effect of adapting and reconfiguring systems of inequality despite social movement efforts. A recent assessment of bonded labor, sponsored by the Government of India Planning Commission (2012), did not find any instances in which perpetrators attempted to reexploit laborers. Interviews with bonded laborers and employers alike suggest a greater level of complexity at work, with many more opportunities for exploitation than simply a relapse into debt bondage. Sharecropping and land attachment are two survival strategies that draw on and perpetuate certain aspects of the old system of debt bondage.
ADAPTATION: SHARECROPPING
Many farmers, upon losing bonded laborers, are left with naught but their name, their land, and a set of recently reconfigured social relations. Efforts to recombine these resources in such a way that ensures survival often result in sharecropping. Sharecropping—in which the laborer works the farmer’s land and the harvest is divided between them—may be continued with the same workers, on the same land, with very similar power dynamics. One farmer in a focus group explained that, if a farmer has a labor problem, he can give half the land to laborers, and in this way, the farmer’s income remains constant. Presumably this tactic also has the effect of pacifying laborers, since “what you get, you get in peace.”
40 Another tells me farming is no longer worthwhile.
41 Since his sons are employed as engineers in Gujarat and Madras and his daughters are married and living elsewhere, he turned his large farm over for sharecropping.
For laborers, sharecropping may be a step forward from debt bondage, and the former perpetrators may hold no ill will toward their former charges. However, I consider sharecropping to be a social and economic relationship that has the effect of maintaining dependency and inequality, regardless of the landlord’s intent. While the practice may lead to benefits for both groups, sharecropping laborers rarely have easy access to capital, rendering them vulnerable to usurious advances on everything from seeds and fertilizer to food and medicine. Sharecropping under these conditions is more likely to evolve into new forms of caste-based inequality.
This complexity may be seen in the system of sharecropping prevalent in the American South after the Civil War. While sharecropping was a suboptimal solution for both plantation owners who wanted slavery and for former slaves who wanted economic freedom in the form of land, it was preferred to the alternatives, which included chain gangs and landlessness (Royce 1985, 1993; Shlomowitz 1979; Woodman 1977). Its origins notwithstanding, the effect was that the new institution of sharecropping was laid overtop of the old institutional arrangements, roles, and relationships. It is not difficult to see a similar process at work among landlords and former laborers. The prominent social theorist Charles Tilly (1998) argued that inequality is durable for that exact reason—institutions can be replaced or overturned, but there is likely to be persistence in the material and cultural conditions that underpin inequality.
42There is some evidence, however, that while sharecropping may be preferred by landlords eager to work the land with another’s hands, broader labor scarcities and laborers’ reluctance may thwart this effort. As laborers are freed up, they are likely to try to migrate to urban opportunities or to search out jobs in growing sectors of the economy. A once powerful landlord explained to me, in the midst of his fallow land: “Sharecropping happens here too, but people are no longer willing to farm. Most of the laborers have gone to Bangalore, where it is easy to get work, so why should they be stuck on the land? There are many ways the laborers are being attracted to the factories and the metros.”
43The postintervention puzzle in the agricultural sector is the task of properly matching remaining laborers and the land. Sharecropping brings erstwhile bonded laborers back to work under a new scheme in which benefits and risks are more evenly distributed. This approach predominates, since it is virtually always the case that laborers have no land of their own. In a handful of notable cases, however, bonded laborers may own small parcels of their own land that they simply cannot afford to cultivate. It is also possible that an emancipated bonded laborer will have received a small plot of land as compensation for their exploitation. In both cases, the newly emancipated laborer tends to lack capital and may thus be convinced to essentially sharecrop his or her own land. Under these conditions, a land-attachment arrangement may be proposed.
ADAPTATION: LAND ATTACHMENT
Land attachment is similar to sharecropping in that it draws on many of the same raw resources—labor and land—yet it is a solid step closer to extractive dependency in that it makes use of the laborer’s own land but leaves the worker reliant on the landlord for raw materials. In these cases, the bonded laborer’s former employer may agree to advance all of the material necessary to work their land in exchange for a portion of the harvest. Former bonded laborers pay a premium to till land they already own. While the former perpetrator was obligated to provide a measure of grain to the laborer, the laborer is now obligated to repay a significant percentage of the total harvest.
Social movement groups admit that postemancipation scenarios are complicated and that these situations are not necessarily forced on laborers. Indeed, a staff member at a partner organization makes it clear that “we have discussed this with the workers who are giving these lands to the landlord, and we said not to do it. But they are not ready to do this. They say,
What will I do being free? I cannot cultivate anything over here. So at least I will go and ask his help, something will come, a small amount.”
44 The land-attachment system perpetuates dependency and reinforces inequality by ensuring that the landlord continues to be the lender of last resort and that the laborer is only able to access resources through credit obtained by the landlord against future crops. While land attachment and sharecropping maintain a semblance of the old system, former perpetrators may also shift into new sectors altogether, including politics, finance, and industries such as quarry and stonebreaking.
ADAPTATION: CONTRACTING
Contracting in the quarry industry is thought to be lucrative or, at least, more lucrative than farming. This potential for higher income has attracted farmers and farmers’ sons. Mining may be pursued with only a modest capital investment, since only a lease, rather than outright ownership, is required. This is especially true in parts of Uttar Pradesh, where agriculture, brick kilns, and stone quarries are often situated within the same region. The second requirement, alongside the lease, is laborers. Laborers in extractive industries are more likely to be brought in from nearby states, though this varies by industry and by proximity to states with high unemployment. It is reasonable to assume that securing and managing laborers draws on management and personnel skills honed in the agricultural sector.
Farmers who can afford to may shift laterally into an exploitative and higher-yield industry. As one formerly powerful perpetrator explained to me, “some rich farmers sold their farms and went into quarry work.”
45 Indeed, several of the contractors I spoke with had been farmers or were the sons of farmers. Like land attachment, contracting work may be benign, or it may reproduce bonded labor and even expand into human trafficking. Powerful farmers who face declining options and restive workers may shift their operations to more accommodating regions or to sectors of the economy where patronage and profits remain sufficiently high.
46ADAPTATION: POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
Well-resourced incumbents may also choose to go into politics or government service. Policies like MNREGA have funneled an incredible amount of money, or control over money, to local governing bodies. According to one report, an estimated 70 percent of MNREGA funds are lost to overhead and corruption, suggesting that oversight of MNREGA in a particular locale may be a lucrative position (Rai 2012). Rukum, the son of a bonded labor–holding family, has helped manage his father’s land.
47 However, he says he has moved on from farming. He is now responsible for implementing MNREGA benefits in the area. When I asked him about recent changes in his community, he was glowing in his assessment of how greater awareness of rights had led to greater respect and more demands for wages, and that technological advances had increased crop yields. While I cannot gainsay his enthusiasm, this assessment of the community’s condition seemed more closely linked to his role as a government spokesperson than as a member of a recently challenged landholding caste. There is no evidence from my interviews in Rukum’s community that he is currently engaged in fraudulent activity, but the shift from his father’s profession into the management of a government-run aid program ensures he is in a position to continue distributing resources to the landless and to skim from the top if he so chooses.
Prabhav, a former perpetrator who made a move into politics as the village leader (
pradhan) but who clearly had larger ambitions, was the only employer I interviewed who initiated a conversation about bonded and child labor.
48 When we first met, he launched into an animated explanation of how “these things” had been prevalent but that he had gotten involved in politics “for the people.” His preference for the ruling Congress party, the party of Nehru, was rooted in their commitment to all people, unlike the Dalit chief minister Mayawati, whom he perceived to be biased in favor of the lower castes. When I asked who in the area persisted in maintaining bonded laborers, he answered that it was a small percentage—“1 or 2 percent”—who are able to continue because they have “500 bigha [roughly 165 acres] and the ear of politicians.” From this perspective, it makes complete sense to go into politics, as it is a high-profile form of power and the source of new benefits and resources.
Politics is also a place where proxy struggles with social movement groups play out. Each of the organizations involved in this study pursues a strategy in which groups of emancipated laborers are encouraged to stand members for election. This gives laborers an opportunity to engage in collective action and to experience important successes or failures. These challenges also provide opportunities for landlords to create schisms—as indicated earlier by the quarry contractor’s effort to split a self-help group by sponsoring competing members—while also providing an avenue to create new, or maintain old, forms of power. In some of these instances, local leadership—in the form of the village leader—becomes an important symbol of the continuance of past power. The head of an important family, who briefly lost an election after more than four decades of uninterrupted control over the position, seemed pleased to inform me that a laborer under his control had won a recent election, thereby restoring their position of influence in the community. Such incidences suggest that, while landlords may lose their bonded laborers, they go to great lengths to maintain overall control.
The net effect, one organization’s founder argues, is that landlords are not only powerful in terms of bonded labor, but they are often also
in control of all the old and new economic ventures. They keep control over them and pocket the benefits. Like now MNREGA—only workers should get it, there should not be machines. But [landlords] will employ the machines and employ ghost records [of laborers] and pocket the money. All sorts of things go on. They will be pocketing all the contracts of the government.
49These forms of adaptation—whether through sharecropping and land attachment or contracting and politics—point to the extent to which power evolves in ways that affect laborers and landlords alike. Efforts to respond to movement mobilization and laborer demands have the effect of tracing over existing cultural patterns and caste dynamics, thereby perpetuating inequality. The greatest impact of this process is on formerly enslaved individuals, a fact that highlights the complexity of developing sustainable emancipation strategies. Land ownership has been shown to be the most effective and durable form of postemancipation compensation. Leaving aside the fact that it is extremely rare for workers to obtain compensation in the form of land, an assessment of landlords’ coping mechanisms suggests that this benefit runs the risk of being co-opted.
RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES
Here we may finally return to this book’s third and final puzzle: why do these particular targets respond as they do? Interview data presented here suggest that options and resources are the key causal mechanisms that explain the difference between who quits and who continues with bonded labor in rural India. This is especially true in the absence of broader shifts in cultural norms. Under ordinary conditions, the powerful are able to retain their position despite the threat that broad changes pose to existing settlements. Their survival is predicated on key resources, including social status and financial means. In the absence of these two sources of power, however, success is not guaranteed. Resources matter for movement mobilization and success, and they certainly matter for target repression or resignation. Targets are in a unique position, since they often possess resources associated with incumbency, and these resources are often rather diverse.
Outrage and entitlement carry the day only when they are backed by newer forms of coercive power, especially capital. Since the 1970s, social movement theory has recognized the critical role of resources. Movement mobilization was seen as a logistical and organizational puzzle—how is it that those isolated from political venues can bring their grievances to the attention of decision makers and the general public? The answer, the resource-mobilization theorists Mayer Zald and John McCarthy (1977) argued, lies in the increased mobilization capacity provided through the infusion of new resources.
In this light, mobilization is the process by which “a social unit gains relatively rapidly in control over resources it previously did not control” (Etzioni 1969, 243). It is this expansion of resources, not social alienation or social strain, that explains mobilization. Movements required an influx of management and money and also the role of institutional infrastructure, such as unions and churches, in helping movements solve collective-action problems. The unspoken assumption is that movement targets do not face significant problems mobilizing resources. By now, the reader may anticipate my critique: target resources and opportunities are not constant. We now know, for example, that actual resources and perceptions of market strength play a significant role in explaining how corporations will respond to collective action (King 2008).
50 In fact, we can invert Etzioni’s (1969, 243) conceptualization to define demobilization, deflation, and resignation as those moments
when a social unit loses relatively rapidly their control over resources it previously controlled. The sociologist Rory McVeigh (1999) shows one possible outcome from such power devaluations: right-wing mobilization. It would be reasonable to anticipate the emergence of conservative farmers’ movements in rural India in response to the sorts of grievances articulated here.
SUMMARY
A brief look backward in history suggests these efforts to mask and continue exploitation are not new. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the carpet-weaving industry in Uttar Pradesh was at the center of antitrafficking and child-labor advocacy. As a result of this unwanted attention from advocacy groups such as Mobilizing for Change and Rugmark, loom owners shifted their work into worker’s homes and initiated a complex leasing scheme that kept costs low but protected the owners legally. The net effect was that laborers continued to work under similar conditions, elites maintained control, and costs were suppressed.
Slaveholders report facing similar challenges from laborers yet respond in a wide variety of ways. This chapter reviews major responses to movement activity and suggests that resources and opportunities shape the decisions made by targeted incumbents. These ultimate decisions often differ from initial responses, an observation we return to in the book’s conclusion. Tactically, even in those cases where powerful perpetrators quit, their manner of quitting differs significantly from the less powerful. While those threatened with escalating costs had to content themselves with sharecropping, when they could get it, or tilling their own fields, if they could stand it, those with a more flexible form of power were able to take on more impressive opportunities, such as bank presidencies, brick kilns, management of village leadership, and other alternate forms of power.
This observation circles back to the fact that perpetrators feel that their world, certainly in agriculture, is in decline. A paternalistic caste mentality, imbricated in the everydayness of social and economic relationships, left many respondents with few options when movements singled them out. The prevailing sense of resignation is evidence of this fact. Perhaps paternalism works best with the wind at its back, the road lying before it, and the marginalized willing to follow the rules. Significant changes in the broader political economy undermine some targets’ ability to mount a robust and sustained response to mobilization, despite initial attempts to do so. Over the past two decades, India has experienced tectonic social and economic transformation. Like all such transformations, it has created both winners and losers, and a certain class of employers senses this. As one interviewee explained: “The laborers are below. The capitalists are above. The farmer is in the middle.”
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