TENSION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA, STEMMING FROM the latter’s actions in the South China Sea, has spilled through to the Indian Ocean, with the growing risk that South Asia could once again become enveloped in a wider global struggle. South Asia comprises Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Under British colonialism, it also included Myanmar, which was governed as part of India but is now firmly categorized as part of Southeast Asia. Thus, to the east South Asia begins along Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh and India and to the west along Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s borders with Iran. Its northern edges bleed into China and Central Asia, and its southern edges form the coastline of the Indian Ocean where Chinese money has funded a string of new ports stretching from Myanmar to the east coast of Africa.
While East Asia is dominated by China and Japan, South Asia is dominated by India and, in purely material development terms, has fallen far behind. South Asia is one of the world’s most densely populated regions with 1.75 billion people living in an area of nearly two million square miles.
I will examine the fragility of South Asia and how it impacts the future of Asian waters through three prisms. The first is its poverty and lack of development. The second is its nuclear weapons, which will be discussed in chapter 10: both India and Pakistan broke international protocol to become nuclear armed states. And third is how it is either embracing or resisting China’s influence, which will be discussed in chapter 11.
This chapter will examine poverty, which India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi, described as the worst form of violence. A newborn baby in India is more than three times likely to die in its first year than one in China and nine times more likely than one in Taiwan. Indians are more than twice as poor as Chinese and seven times worse off than Taiwanese. India has been a democracy since independence in 1947. Its neighbors in Bangladesh and Pakistan have swung between democracy and dictatorship, and life for the very worst-off is about the same in all of them. Pakistanis are slightly poorer, with a $5,100 gross domestic product per capita against India’s $6,700, and Bangladeshis are way down at $3,900, more on a par with Cambodia.48
According to a 2011 Indian census, half the population does not have proper shelter. Thirty-five percent of households have no water nearby, let alone in the house. Eighty-five percent of villages do not have a secondary school. There are no roads connecting forty percent of villages, just paths. India is home to ten of the twenty most polluted cities in the world. If it had the will to house its people, it would have to build thirty-five thousand homes every day until 2024 to keep up with demand. But it almost certainly will not, whereas China is addressing similar problems all the time. Between 2012 and 2016, China put down more railway track than India had since its independence in 1947. Seventy percent of Indians have no access to toilets. Millions of men, women, and children have to defecate in the open, giving rise to a raft of diseases. India’s average growth since 1950 has been 6.32 percent, almost double America’s 3.2 percent. But where has all the money gone, and how has it been shared?
India has high levels of corruption. Far from bringing progress, its democratically elected institutions too often block it. Many officials and elected politicians are corrupt and use bad practices to get to office. A third of the members of the federal parliament elected in 2014 faced criminal charges—186 out of 543 lawmakers. Of those, 112 faced charges that included kidnapping, extortion, causing communal disharmony, and crimes against women. Nine were accused of murder, and seventeen of attempted murder.49
India’s development, its leadership in South Asia, its system of government, and the culture that drives its society will have a pivotal impact on the future of the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and other maritime territories. India is the world’s biggest democracy and a nuclear weapons power, and its history with China makes it a natural ally to those who want to temper Beijing’s ambitions. Both the United States and India have invested much in building a stronger, closer relationship that was fractured during the Cold War. Both may well be setting themselves up for disappointments. Despite every incentive, it remains far from clear whether India is up to the job. And if it is not, America’s long-laid plans to retain a balance of power in Asia are at risk.
Since the opening up of its economy in the early 1900s, India has created corporate wealth with companies like Airtel, Reliance, the Tata Group, Wipro, and others. But, that wealth has not been spread fairly. The wretched disparity shows as soon as a visitor drives through any major city, raising questions about how India, and much of South Asia, treats its people.
India and China became new nations within two years of each other—one a new democracy in 1947, the other a new dictatorship in 1949. Their relationship has never been easy, partly because of a misunderstanding about each other’s vision. In his 2014 book Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality, John Elliott describes how Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had naive misconceptions about the world order. “Nehru idealistically saw India and China as parallel civilizations that could work together,” he writes. “He did not realize until too late that this clashed with China’s ambition to achieve regional supremacy.”50
In March 1947, before India’s independence from Britain, Nehru hosted the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, an attempt to forge a single Asian identity, arguing that such identity had been fragmented by colonialism. He spoke about how all countries should come together with the “mind and spirit” of Asia faced with a common task. Yet, as noted earlier, the name Asia itself comes not from what defined the continent but from what it was not, from the Greek word that referred to the region east of Europe, beginning on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, covering Anatolia and Persia and from there expanding into the Asia we know today. There was no Pan-Asian identity that united Chinese, Indians, Japanese, or Papua New Guineans, and very little in culture, language, food, or religion that gave India and China shared common ground. Instead there was the mistrust of neighbors.
South Asia still tolerates practices like forced marriage or the stoning to death of couples who fall in love and thereby offend family honor;51 the tradition of Chhaupadi, when a menstruating girl or woman is banned from the home, from touching others, or from going to school;52 and bonded labor, in which millions of the very poorest live in conditions defined by the UN as slavery.53 While these practices are technically illegal, the governments of South Asia have been so weak, corrupt, and ineffective that little or nothing has been done to stop them.
Bonded labor affects some ten million Indians, and it works in two ways. The first is when children inherit debt from parents and grandparents and are born into a system structured so they can never earn enough to end the debt. They begin work very young, usually with little or no schooling. The second is when a family is so impoverished it takes a loan from a labor contractor to work in a key industry such as cotton harvesting or brickmaking. Again, the victims are desperate and have little or no education, and the arrangement is structured so they can never pay back the debt.
I first met a bonded laborer family in 1991 when I was in Delhi to cover the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. It was a piece to run in the lull before the funeral, along with several others aimed at explaining India to our audience. The Mota family, a husband and wife and their two daughters and son, ranging in age between about seven and eleven, worked less than a half hour’s drive from Delhi, breaking rocks by the side of the road. They were malnourished, their skin marked with welts, their noses running and eyes red. Bonded labor had been formally banned since 1976, and twenty years earlier had been categorized by the UN as slavery. It is just as easy to find a family living in similar conditions in India today.
The UN’s International Labour Organization estimates that twenty-one million people are in forced labor worldwide, at least half of them in India. If Bangladesh and Pakistan are taken into account, South Asia is by far the worst regional offender as regards modern-day slavery. This labor black market creates an annual revenue of $150 billion, exceeding the gross domestic product of many developing countries. More than $40 billion has been traced to everyday industries such as construction and agriculture, which feed straight into the global economy.54 Only in 2011 did the UN introduce guidelines that held responsible any corporation that allowed human rights abuses in its supply chain.
In the sugarcane fields of Central America and the cocoa plantations of West Africa, I have seen improvements over the past twenty years, but very little in India. Returning time and again, I have found substantive progress, or any political will to make it happen, hard to detect. Scrutiny has been met with denial and, recently, there has been a lashing out against Western democracies for even raising the subject.
STORIES TOLD BY those who have escaped from lives of slave or bonded labor are widespread and horrendous. Workers are kept in check by a wall of fear and threats that reach right back to their villages. On one visit, I headed far into the Indian countryside to meet laborers who had been freed from bondage and were being looked after by a charity, the International Justice Mission. They were in a two-year treatment program to rid them of the trauma they had been through. One of the worst cases was that of Dialu Nial, a teenager who had tried to escape from bonded labor, but was caught. His punishment was to be dragged to a forest, made to kneel, shown an axe, and told by his captors to decide if they should sever his neck, his foot, or his hand. Nial chose to lose his right hand. He was seventeen years old and illiterate. What happened to him and how he managed to put his life back together illustrates the suffering of the people of India, its dysfunctional systems and its, at times, uncaring society. It questions, too, whether India could ever counter China as offering an alternative model as a beacon for the developing world.
Nial’s family lived a half day’s drive from the small and chaotic city of Raipur, capital of the state of Chhattisgarh. As we drove, the road deteriorated as did everything else: brick buildings became straw shacks; food stalls became sparsely stocked; animals wandered the dirt road and, to our left, there was a range of mountains that marked the beginning of the “red corridor,” occupied by left-wing insurgents. Various rebel groups control swaths of central and eastern India where they fight regular battles with the security forces. In the past twenty years Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have been racked by similar rebellions, whether under the banners of Islam, Maoism, or straight ethnic separatism. China has been responsible for encouraging and sometimes arming some of these campaigns.
I visited Dialu Nial as he was trying to relearn the family’s trade. They eked out something from it, not enough to live on, and barely enough to eat. “I didn’t go to school,” he explained through an interpreter. “When I was a child, I tended cattle and harvested rice.” He was sitting on the earth outside the cluster of wood and straw huts that made up his family’s home. His village, Nauguda, is a three-hour drive from the nearest town, Bwanipatna, and a day’s journey by bus. It has no sanitation, electricity, school, clinic or government services of any note.
Those living in communities like this are driven to become bonded laborers because there is no other way to feed their families. They work in key industries that are crucial contributors to India’s transformation into an economic powerhouse, fueling profits of global Indian brands and multinationals. None of that wealth was visible in Nauguda, however.
Nial had been deceived into getting a job in the brick kiln industry, grueling work that involves kneading mud by hand and slapping it into a brick mold, then shoulder-carrying hods up the kiln, like climbing a pyramid, where the bricks are baked hard, taken out, and sold to the construction industry. Many kilns operate with child and illegal labor while the bricks are used to build India’s new skylines and shopping malls.
In December 2013 Nial was asked by a friend, Bimal, from a neighboring village if he wanted to take a job working in a nearby kiln. Nial would get ten thousand rupees ($165) up front, which he could pay back as his salary came in. Another neighbor, Nilamber, who was in his early thirties, agreed to go as well, together with ten others from the area. They took a bus to the nearest town, where a labor contractor lived.
In the eyes of many activists, India’s labor contractors are the modern-day equivalent of slave traders. In the eyes of others, they are employment agents giving people an opportunity to work. They advance loans, and through black market muscle ensure the workers do their bidding. They calculate interest and payment schedules in sums that rarely add up, thus producing a debt that puts the worker and his or her family into bondage. With illiteracy rampant and education minimal, most have no idea what they are getting into.
Anyone visiting the small railway town of Kantabanji in western Odisha in November can witness this practice at work. Tens of thousands of farmers who have failed to earn enough from their harvest queue up to take loans to work in brick kilns outside faraway big cities in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
Nial immediately recognized his labor contractor. “I knew he was a rich man. He had a motorcycle and wore a tie,” he said. The contractor showed them the promised money, but took it straight back. They would not get it up front, as promised, but sometime later. They did not need it because the kiln was only a few miles away and transportation had been arranged. Nial and Nilamber still believed they would be paid. With a fingerprint, they signed a document agreeing to work.
The next day their friend Bimal took the twelve men to the railway station at Raipur, where they boarded a train. Instead of a short journey, they discovered they were heading five hundred miles south to Hyderabad, a huge city and a pillar of India’s booming high-tech economy. Some in the group had heard stories of forced labor there and planned an escape. When the train stopped at the next station, they ran. Nial and Nilamber were too slow. They were caught and taken back to Raipur. “The contractor’s henchmen were waiting for us,” recalled Nial. “They held us and put their hands over our mouths to stop us shouting.”
At this point his friend Bimal slipped away. Nial and Nilamber were taken back to the contractor’s house and held hostage. “They called our families telling them to pay money for our release,” he said. “They beat us hard, so my brother could hear me crying in pain down the phone.”
The contractor demanded twenty thousand rupees, about $330. Nial knew his family would be unable to raise the money. He and Nilamber were held for five days and made to work on the contractor’s farm. Every evening, he said, they were beaten.
When it became clear that neither Nial nor Nilamber would be able to deliver the money, they were driven to remote woodland to be punished for trying to escape. It would be a lesson to others. First they severed Nilamber’s hand and made Nial watch: “They put Nilamber’s arm on a rock. One held his neck and two held his arm. Another brought down the axe and cut off his hand just like a chicken’s head. Then, they demanded I decide which I should lose—my life, my leg, or my arm. I told them to do the same as Nilamber. They made me kneel and put my arm on the rock.”
He stared out stoically, gripping his leg hard with his remaining hand. “The blood was so much. The pain was terrible. I thought I was going to die. They threw my hand into the woods. I wrapped my left hand around my wound and held it tight. I squeezed it to stop the bleeding until the pain became too much and I released it. Then I had to grip it again.”
Basic survival instinct took over. Nial and Nilamber found a stream where they washed their wounds, bound them, and covered them with plastic bags. They followed a stream to a village and from there found a hospital.
Nial’s face flashed with impatience. He was keen to get on with relearning the family business. Laid out beside him were old plastic sacks. He needed to unravel them and turn the individual threads into binding cord, which the family then sold. Awkwardly, Nial wedged a wooden spool of thread between his toes. He held another in his remaining hand. His brother, Rahaso, sat next to him doing the same. With just one hand, Nial struggled to wind the cord. Rahaso worked quickly, outpacing him. Nial’s spool flipped out of his hand. Rahaso gave it back to him. Disappointment and anger flooded through Nial’s expression. Briefly he lost his composure. “How will any girl marry me, when I’m like this?” he whispered, his eyes lowered, his fingers clawing into the arid soil.
NIAL’S STORY WAS shocking enough, but the International Justice Mission had given me a pile of forms with photographic identities of bonded laborers they had freed. Several were as young as three, their little faces staring out from an official form entitled “Release Certificate.” It carried an official government stamp, referring to the 1976 legislation banning bonded labor. Alongside that was the photograph, the age, the home village, and the place where the victim was made to work. Most were brick kilns. There is something very wrong with a system that needs an official government stamp to free a child from forced labor.
On the long drive to see Nial, we had met by chance a local member of the state assembly, Rajendra Dhulakia, who was having tea at a roadside stall. We pulled up behind his black sedan with its tinted windows. He was dressed in the politician’s traditional garb of a white cotton, loose-fitting dhoti and was friendly at first, speaking about how well the local economy was doing. His mood changed when I showed him copies of the bonded laborers’ release certificates. His expression became half bored, a common reaction when I mentioned human rights to people in Delhi, and half irritated that he was being put on the spot.
He said the documents were fake. “But right here,” I countered, showing a specific sentence. “It is written clearly, ‘bonded labor.’”
“I am not accepting this as bonded labor.” He swatted a fly away from his face. “Bonded labor has been illegal by law since 1976.”
“On these documents, there is an official government stamp.” I pointed to it. “That can’t be fake.”
He gave his teacup to a staff member and turned to leave. “I am not accepting these documents.”
“You recognize this document, but you don’t accept it?”
“Yes, I am telling you, I don’t accept it.” One of the staff members opened the car door. Another moved to step between me and Dhulakia.
“Just to confirm,” I pressed. “You say there is no problem with organized crime, people getting beaten up and enslaved by bonded labor.”
“YES, SIR. AS I have told you, sir.” And with that, with limousine tires throwing up a cloud of dust, the member of Parliament was gone. Dhulakia was not alone in his world of denial, and his response was, sadly, unsurprising.
We drove to a series of buildings in a compound just over an hour’s drive from Nial’s village where he and two hundred others were going through trauma therapy. We arrived to an almost biblical scene. Groups of freed workers had just finished a session sitting under the shade of a tree on an arid grass slope stretching back from the compound. They were walking down for lunch, the bright reds, greens, and blues of their saris blowing back and forth in the wind. From a distance, here was the India we see in the movies, dignified, elegant, filled with humanity. When the line reached us, a dispiriting silence hit us. No one was speaking. Eyes were locked ahead, no expressions, nothing to indicate surprise, relief, fear, security, love, hope, that melee of emotions that dart about our minds all the time.
“There are no words to explain how it feels when you see a human being not being treated as a human being but as a machine,” said their counselor, Rosean Rajan. For the 150 people there, Rajan was the matriarchal rock who defined their new security and eased the transition back into an independent life. She explained that the human mind was conditioned to protect itself against abuse by sealing itself off from everyday emotions. The first year of the program concentrated solely on releasing these basic human feelings. “They have been bought and traded as property, and that is how they see themselves,” she said. “They don’t know how to show emotions. They can’t smile or frown or express grief because when they are enslaved, they work on muscle memory. We have social and psychological programs to move them out. But it takes at least two years”
Each had a release certificate to prove that he or she was debt free and not obligated to any labor contractor. One was a three-year-old boy holding a sheet of photocopied paper in both hands that had his photograph in the top right-hand corner. It stated that he had worked in the brick kiln and must not be sent back. Next to him was a seven-year-old girl who had been at a kiln near Hyderabad. She had been released on February 26, 2014. Once freed, the International Justice Mission took the workers’ documents to a local government office to get an official stamp put on them.
Rajan introduced us to adult victims. One was a young pregnant wife who had tried to intervene when her husband was being beaten up. She was dragged away, repeatedly kicked in the stomach, and lost her baby as a result. Another had to watch as her husband was thrown off a moving train and killed. When she tried to stop the murder she, too, was kicked in the stomach. Her baby survived.
One family had to endure an unspeakable horror. A woman was repeatedly raped in front of her husband and two children. Rajan explained that this was a common mechanism of instilling fear and obedience, which was why so many labor contractors preferred to recruit an intact nuclear family: it was easier to control.
The International Justice Mission’s work was separate from any government service, even though millions of Indians live in a similar illegal predicament. Andy Griffiths, the regional coordinator, explained that slavery in India is not regarded as a serious human rights violation. “No political party includes human rights in its manifesto,” he said. “Even if a labor contractor or brick kiln owner is charged, it will take four to six years to go through the courts, usually resulting in a $30 fine.”
The system, therefore, gave those involved in bonded labor a sense of immunity. “There is an ownership mentality,” said Griffiths. “In our work, we see rape, we see all kinds of sexual violence and murder. Unfortunately, if you believe you can own somebody, that’s the kind of mentality you have.”
The seven-year-old girl being looked after by Rajan had been a worker at a brick kiln area outside Hyderabad called Ranga Reddy which I had filmed some months earlier. My guide then, Aeshalla Krishna, was an activist with a labor rights group, Prayas Center for Labor Research and Action. In the first brick kiln we visited, there was a mound of coal just inside the entrance, where women and children squatted, breaking up chunks with bare hands. Farther along, men churned mud to mix the clay and water that was slapped into brick molds. In front stood the furnace itself, a huge smoldering, cube-like monument about two stories high. Smoke seeped out of its edges, making the air so acrid that it caught the throat and tightened the lungs. Workers carried hods across their shoulders and then, with the strain of the weight creasing across their faces, climbed the steps to the top to deliver them for baking. Beyond the furnace lay piles and piles of bricks ready to go to construction sites.
“All of this is against the law,” said Krishna, reeling off a list of legislation. “The Minimum Wage Act, 1948. The Bonded Labor Act, 1976. The interstate Migrant Workers Act, 1979. Child labor. Sexual harassment. Physical abuse. It’s all happening. Every day.”
Children were everywhere, sick and hungry. There was no safety equipment. Stories of illness and withheld wages were commonplace. In a squalid mud hut we found Madhiri Mallik, who was only five. Her hair was matted and filthy, her face streaked with dirt, her eyes expressionless, with no evidence of laughter or childhood. Her only clothing was a pair of shorts. She had come from Odisha with her parents and two-year-old brother, the nuclear family unit preferred by labor traffickers because it was easier to control. Krishna crouched down to check her eyes. “She is suffering from an eye problem because of the smoke,” he said. “See how the eye is white? The hemoglobin is very low. She would have a headache from the smoking bricks and her stomach would be bad because of the water.” He was guessing because Madhiri, like her parents, was operating on the muscle memory that Rajan had explained. There was no expression of pain, of fear, of hope.
Through contacts in the Andhra Pradesh Labour Department, Krishna got us in to interview the labor commissioner, A. A. Ashok, who worked from a vast room ballasted by a wide, dark wooden desk at one end, in front of which stood rows of upright chairs for visiting delegations. On the wall hung photographs and award certificates, several issued by various UN agencies, on how well Andhra Pradesh was doing in tackling poverty and human rights abuse. Ashok was a bear of a man with a huge presence and a big smile, at home with power and his senior government job in an Indian state of fifty million people. He was a snappy dresser too, with thick black hair swept back and slightly tinted glasses that gave him the look of a middle-aged rock star. I began by asking, “What’s the problem you’re facing in the brick kilns—you know, child labor, bonded labor, minimum wages?”
“No. No,” he said quickly. “There is no such thing. I’m very happy to share with you that everyone is paid the minimum wage and the conditions are fine—housing, drinking water, health care system, and so on. Go see for yourself. Ranga Reddy is our model scheme. There are no bonded laborers there.”
I told Ashok we had just been to Ranga Reddy. He said I must be mistaken. He showed me a certificate on his wall from the United Nations Development Programme praising his department’s work in the Hyderabad brick kilns. It was not unusual in the aid industry for agencies to tour model projects and proclaim what good work was being done. “Tell your big companies that Andhra Pradesh is a perfect investment climate for them,” said Ashok enthusiastically. “We will take them on a trip and they can see for themselves that there will not be any exploitative conditions. I give a hundred percent guarantee.”
With Prayas and other groups, I had looked at human rights violations in other parts of India. One was the cotton industry in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which stood as a model example of India’s economic growth.55 In the cotton factories we easily found children trafficked in from far away. The air was so thick with dust that by their late teens or early twenties many contract byssinosis, a chronic lung condition; they call it “the horror of the white cloud.” I had also examined the Indian tea industry in Northeast India, where workers lived on tea plantations made to look so idyllic in the brochures. They are not. The UN had found that these were among the most marginalized communities in India, illiterate and suffering from anemia, malnutrition, and a range of poverty-linked diseases. Private companies controlled them under a cradle-to-grave system left over from British colonialism. Like bonded workers, their salaries vanished in levies for food, accommodation, and health care that they barely understood. In many ways they were even more disadvantaged than the bonded workers because the system cocooned them from the outside world. Issues like child trafficking, forced marriage, domestic violence, and ill health went unchecked.
I had tried to get comments from big multinationals like Nestlé, the Indian conglomerate Tata, and Unilever, all of which had huge operations in India and the rest of the world. Nestlé refused to engage, as did Tata. The British supermarket chain Tesco, which uses Indian-sourced products, described the conditions as “shocking” and said it had “the opportunity and responsibility to help make a real difference.”
At a lunch in London for Indian industrialists, I raised the issue of bonded labor, but eyes glazed over with irritated boredom. “It is up to the government to handle this. We are just businessmen,” said one. I began to counter that his company benefited from the cheap labor, but by then he had moved on.
Peter Frankental, Amnesty International’s economic relations program director, summed up the situation. “There are deep-rooted problems of business-related human rights abuse in India,” he said. “Much of that involves the way business is conducted, an unwillingness to enforce laws against companies, and fabricated charges and false imprisonment against activists who try to bring these issues to light.”