Month: July 2016

Passed by Parliament, the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Bill fails our children, again

India employs 4.35 million children between the ages of five and 14, according to Census 2011.(HT File Photo)

Ten years ago Mehboob Hossain didn’t know the meaning of the word future. Ten years ago Hossain, now 20, worked in a zari sweatshop in Delhi’s Shahpurjat, embroidering glittery saris. “I know what it’s like,” he says about child labour. “We were beaten, abused, kicked and made to work 16 hours a day.”

Ten years ago, Hossain got lucky when he was rescued by Kailash Satyarthi’s Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) and reunited with his family in Birsinghpur, West Bengal. It was his father, a marginal farmer, who had agreed to pull him out of the 8th standard in school and send him to Delhi with a ‘recruiter’ who promised a ‘fabulous salary and a good life’, says Hossain.

After he was rescued, Hossain, the eldest of five children, told his father that he intended to go back to school. “My father did not support me, but I knew that if I had an education, I could at least get a good job,” he says.

Hossain is a voice that our lawmakers should have heard before passing the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Amendment Bill that restricts the employment of children below 14 in all occupations and enterprises — except those run by their families after school hours. It’s an exception that creates an enormous loophole.

Read | Everything you need to know about Child Labour Amendment Bill

Of the over 5,000 child labourers rescued by BBA in the past five years, one in five was part of a family trade. “This Bill uses Indian family values to justify economic exploitation of children,” said Nobel Laureate and BBA founder Kailash Satyarthi in a press statement.

‘Family’ includes uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews. If a child is found working at a bakery and his employer insists that he is his nephew or niece, how will this be disproved?

There are concerns also about the reduction in the number of hazardous industries where children cannot be employed from 18 to just three — mines, inflammable substances and hazardous processes.

India employs 4.35 million children between the ages of five and 14, according to Census 2011. Three out of four of these children work in agriculture or in household industries, most of which are home-based.

Read | Now, stricter penalty for hiring children

The counter-argument by the government centres around ‘socio-economic realities’. Allowing children to assist their families in occupations such as agriculture or artisanship not only helps poor parents but also enables children to learn a skill, goes that line of thinking.

But it also condemns them to life in the same trade — a potter’s son, a potter, a weaver’s child, a weaver. It entraps them in low-paying, unskilled work. When you create an exception for allowing kids to work in family enterprises, it is the poorest and the most marginalised — those who most need skills and knowledge — who will lose out on education.

A child at work is a child out of school. Legitimising child labour above the age of 14 (and below, if employed by ‘family’) incentivises dropping out of school by the state, which is supposed to protect the rights of the voiceless. It also adds to the confusion of who is a child in India; 18 years for sexual consent but 14 as a source of cheap labour?

The links between education and population, health and economic growth are well established. Do children drop out of school because of poverty, or do they work because the system enables them to stay out of school?

Read | This goes against children’s rights

Hossain is clear. “A poor farmer would rather have his son help in the field than send him to school,” he says. The law allows him to do that.

Last year Hossain says he topped his school 12th board exams. He then sat for the law entrance exam, but failed to make the cut. Undeterred he now plans to enrol in open university and will study law after he graduates because, he says, he wants to be a judge.

India’s Hossains are born into poverty, and yet we seldom see or hear them because we choose to render them invisible. Denied a vote, robbed of rights, we have, as Satyarthi says, once again failed our children.

Read | New child labour law has failed kids again, says Kailash Satyarthi

In the narratives we weave, Kashmiri citizens must be blamed for their own swift repression. In the Kashmiri narrative, the crackdown is yet another instance of the mainland’s immoral suppression of the natural Kashmiri longing for azadi. Neither side is prepared to hear the other

A man injured during clashes in Srinagar, July 10(AP)

At the time of writing, 37 people are dead in protests following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. Hundreds of others have been injured, many with eye wounds from pellet guns that could cause them to lose their sight. Amongst them is a 14-year-old girl, shot by forces from within her house.

As curfew continues in the Valley, the front pages in New Delhi have shifted attention to India’s statement to the United Nations denouncing Pakistan’s use of ‘terrorism as State policy’. On TV channels, talking heads either focus on perfidious Pakistan or bemoan the growing alienation amongst Kashmir’s young and angry.

There are casualties on both sides. On July 11, protestors pushed a police vehicle into the river Jhelum near Sangam, drowning its driver Afroz Ahmed. Close to 100 officials and 2,000 civilians are reportedly injured. There are reports of ambulances being attacked. Depending on which side of the argument you are hearing, these attacks are either by security forces or by protesters.

Read: CM Mehbooba repeating my mistakes: Omar Abdullah on Kashmir unrest

These are our people, our citizens. Can you imagine the outrage if 2,000 people were injured by forces during a protest anywhere else in India? Can you imagine the consequences if instead of water cannon and tear gas, police in Delhi in December 2012 had used pellet guns?

Yet, on social media, there is such prevailing vitriol that I am taken aback. Protestors are ‘pigs’. Those who ask questions about the crackdown are ‘Islam apologists’. Let them go to Pakistan, or elsewhere. We should have bombed those who attended Wani’s burial. One news channel even suggests that instead of a burial, Wani should have been burned with garbage.

Read: From Ashfaq Majid Wani to Burhan Wani: Are protests in Kashmir a redux of 1990?

“What kind of people celebrate the death of people they never met, never knew and whose existence does not impact them at all,” questions a blog posted by a ‘Rich Autumns’.

Social media does not represent official State policy. It does, however, give a broad indication of a prevailing mood. I am not making a case for Wani. I do not for a second condone Pakistan’s involvement. Yet, when thousands of our own citizens are out on the street should we not be concerned? Can we claim Kashmir as a piece of real estate minus those who — no matter how misguided in some eyes — live in it?

Twitter’s nationalist snipers are quick to pick out journalists who report the ‘other’ side as anti-nationals. And it takes a brave reporter to tell the story of anguish from the ground. In this environment, news gets co-opted to peddle a certain type of narrative through magnification or black-out. Nobody is just reporting the facts.

For Delhi papers, ‘the civilian death toll…is a statistic’, writes Manisha Pande in Newslaundry. But ‘for the Kashmiri media, dead protestors are not a mere number, they’re actual people’.

Read: Social media hits out at top politicians for Silence on Kashmir Violence

We don’t want to see the other side any longer. In the narratives we weave, Kashmiri citizens are denied the right to protest and must be blamed for their own swift and brutal repression. In the Kashmiri narrative, the crackdown is yet another instance of the mainland’s immoral suppression of the natural Kashmiri longing for azadi. Neither side is prepared to hear the other. And the cycle of violence continues, each fuelling and fanning the other.

Why should we stand up for people who don’t apparently believe in India? It’s quite simple really. The land does not come without its inhabitants. Keeping it by force is costly for both sides, nor has it produced a solution so far. No State — no matter how strong its will or its army — can afford to have in its midst a large group of alienated citizens. If there can be no India without Kashmir, then surely it logically follows that there can be no Kashmir without Kashmiris.

In an unequal battle of stones versus pellet guns, it’s clear how this round will eventually end. The State will assert its might and a sullen normalcy will return. But unless we learn to listen first, you can be sure that the lull will not last for long.