By M.J. Akbar
Manuel holds the key. You know who Manuel is, of course. He is the Spanish waiter in that extraordinarily brilliant BBC television series Fawlty Towers, hired by Mr. Fawlty because he is cheap, or shall we be polite and say inexpensive? Manuel no speak Inglis; Manuel say "si si si si" and bring wrong drink; Manuel send Mr. Fawlty's nerves into triple fault; Manuel man with heart of gold and hands of brass; Manuel crazy and drive everybody crazy; but speak-no-Inglis Manuel get job in remote English countryside instead of local Englishman under spluttering Mr. Fawlty because Manuel come cheap. That is globalization. The idea of Europe as a single market, with freedom of trade, and now a remarkable single currency, took a long while to emerge, but it is a splendid culmination of a historic dream. But the reality underpinning this dream is the right of free migration in search of jobs. You cannot have globalization without finding space for economic asylum.
There are two kinds of asylum. The first, being political, is more politically correct. The world has long recognized the need for political asylum when population groups suffer the misfortune of oppression. When the Muslims and Jews were driven out of Spain and Portugal after the restoration of Christian rule, the Muslims rebuilt their lives in North Africa. (For generations they would place a key just behind the doors of their homes. This was the key of the home they had left behind in Spain, and a symbol of the nostalgic urge to return to a land that had been their home for 700 years.) The Jews also came to Morocco and Algeria, but in limited numbers. Most of the Jews sought, and received, asylum under the Caliph of the Islamic world, who ruled from Istanbul, or Islambol, in Turkey. Jews formed more than 10 percent of the capital of Turkey, and lived peacefully in their new nation until they migrated once again after the formation of Israel.
Economic asylum is more troublesome, because it is considered invasive. After all, by declaration, these are migrants who come in search of better lives. Political asylum is for survival; economic asylum is for sustenance. Political refugees can actually add to the economic wealth of the host nation. The Jews brought their skills in banking, trade and scholarship to the Ottoman Empire. Punjabi and Sindhi Hindus, who were driven into India after partition, quickly became substantive contributors to the Indian economy. At this moment, the Sri Lanka-Tamil refugees who have taken shelter in India from the civil war are creating a network of businesses: The traditional asset of education is a good foundation for forced entrepreneurship.
Economic asylum is tinged with less salubrious factors, greed and guilt being among them. We are not talking only about the desire for a better life that drives the poor into a richer neighborhood. There is also the aspect of the rich needing the poor for services that the privileged no longer want to spend their own time on. The syndrome is the same, whether it is the dhobi setting up shop in a posh locality in Delhi, or Britain inviting the sweeping classes from the old empire in order to keep Heathrow airport clean. The difference of course comes when this supply and demand stretches across national borders.
For the rich, the ideal solution is to use the services, pay as little as possible for them, and then ensure that the service-providers go back to where they came from, preferably to a slum that is out of sight. That is what the local British would ideally have liked to do with the Asians. But ideal prejudice does not always work in human affairs, although in some societies (like the old South Africa) it can continue for generations. But not forever. Slavery, or cruel forms of inequity like indentured labor, can never last forever. Human beings will rise above their economic origins, and then demand to live according to values that are associated with modern civilized social behavior. Conflict is inevitable and such conflict resolution difficult. But affluent nations who want the comfort of cheap labor must enlarge their social and political space to integrate such communities, and then provide scope for upward mobility.
This is what the United States did since its inception as a refuge for refugees from Europe. The natural wealth of that continent, combined with a sparse population that proved incapable of defending itself, became a magnet as well as the engine for economic growth. The rationalization of this experience, the consequent creation of an independent nation, provided the energy, harmony and order that a national will can bring to the economic process. The harsh turmoil within the rest of the world in the 19th and 20th centuries turned America into the ultimate dream of the dispossessed, and the disinherited. Immigration was the great powerhouse that drove the American economy to the point where it is seemingly invincible. Every fresh wave of immigration brought the raw power of boiling ambition. You could trace the route map of every wave: First, the street, with jobs in either crime or services like the taxi-trade; then into the factories; then the gentrification; and then the turn of the curve in the parabola, and five-day weeks with pretty homes in the suburbs. It was normally a three-generation process.
In India we have always maintained a generous refugee-regime. It is partly to do with traditional values: The Indian has had little difficulty in finding space for the other, and then, imperceptibly but surely, converting the other into an Indian. But there is a more modern reason as well. The calamity of partition sensitized India to the tragedy of displaced lives. It was a full-blown crisis that could not have been resolved only by the government; it required, and received, the complete cooperation of the people themselves. India understood the challenge of economic asylum early. Social integration was not an issue, since the refugees were Hindus who shared the faith and culture of the host nation. But the Indian experience includes a remarkable variation of this theme that is a tribute to something unique in the Indian consciousness. This is the absorption of a huge Muslim migration into India, from Bangladesh. This is economic asylum on a large scale, with minimal friction. Even the political friction that has been occasionally drummed up by parties like the Shiv Sena and the BJP has a forced element to it. They have not been able to reverse what might be called the traditional Indian refugee-regime.
Bangladeshis have voted against both partition, and their own liberation from Pakistan, with their feet. They have proved, as indeed have other migrating communities, that the ultimate determinant of any boundary is economic. Look at the odds against a Bangladeshi Muslim migrating to Hindu-majority India. First there is the history of partition, and the horror-filled separation from India. This is followed by the mindwash evident in the Pakistan system of education, which has tended to either erase the memory of a united country, or justify separation by the exaggeration of "Hindu" villainy. Even if those at the bottom of the social ladder (who constitute the migrants) were not privileged to become uneducated through such education, since they remained illiterate, there is always the collective view that is formed through the experience/memory of riots on one level, and the transmission of such a viewpoint through the vehicles of mass culture - cinema, television, and political oratory. To come to an India that has been so vilified entails a willing rejection of this imposed historiography. It also requires a degree of faith in economic compulsions that rises above experience, most notably the evidence of continuing communal riots in India. I am willing to wager that even in December 1992 and January 1993, when the Ayodhya movement had culminated in the destruction of the Babri Mosque and widespread riots, there were Bangladeshis trickling into Siliguri offering to become cooks in middle class homes for a salary lower than what an Indian would demand.
The unity of India itself is protected, during the placidity that eats up 95 percent of time, by two facts: Free trade and free movement. India is large enough and disparate enough to become a model for the prevalent theories of multinational globalization. In a sense, the makers of the Indian constitution offered a model which Europe has now applied to its own circumstances, a mixture of local rule by linguistically different communities and a supra economic structure that is designed for the greater benefit of all. No structure can prevent imbalance, which may arise from the frailties and imponderables of human behavior. But the Indian model corrects the fallout of this imbalance by the option of economic asylum. If Bihar has not exploded into a Maoist-type anarchy, of the kind we see in neighboring Nepal for instance, it is because the Bihari below the poverty line can seek to redress his condition by free movement to wherever he can find work, whether in front of the Bombay Bakery where Salman Khan drove his infamous vehicle, or in the road works of Kashmir. Hunger accommodates the insolence of a superstar as much as the violence of a terrorist. Without free movement, the Indian union has no economy; and without an economy, India can hardly remain a union.
If globalization is the prevalence of free trade, then it existed before it was called so. India's problem was that it did not extend the principles that had worked so well within India, to its economic relationships outside India. We paid a heavy price for this mistake.
But the mistake being committed by those who understand this, is when they forget that globalization must, in order to succeed, be a composite idea rather than a single-track focus. It is in danger today of becoming synonymous with injustice, and with a form of quasi-colonialism. This perception may not be wholly correct, but it is gaining strength on the street because globalization has become the private property of a number of vested interests, multinational corporations and governments of rich nations included. It is particularly astonishing that post-Reaganite America should turn its back, for instance, on immigration in such a sharp manner. You cannot take natural resources out of a country, even if you pay a notional price for them, and expect the people who once owned the resources not to share the rising value chain.
It is welcome therefore that one of the gurus of globalization, Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, argues, in a splendid paper ("A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration and Democracy") that "the world needs a World Migration Organization to complete the international superstructure of 'governance.'" The WTO can best survive with a WMO as its companion. The professor traverses heights of slightly non-academic eloquence when he writes: "As people walk, fly, and swim across borders, as migrants or refugees, fleeing or simply seeking a better life, and their numbers steadily rise, the time has come to address institutionally the ethics and economics of this flow of humanity instead of leaving it to the whims of individual nation-states. Anything less would be a shame."
It would also be a mistake. Make no mistake about it: Manuel holds the key.
