Middle East Untouchables

I suppose someone, some official body, somewhere knows roughly how many expatriates from the Indian sub-continent are currently working in the Middle East - perhaps not. I am only surmising. But when I look around certain areas of Manama, Kuwait City, Doha, Abu Dhabi and Dubai - well all I can say is there are thousands! In fact there is one small area of Kuwait City that looks like downtown New Delhi, and I know what New Delhi looks like, I’ve been there twice!

So what are those people doing here? Are they all employed? Are some illegal aliens? Just what is their status? Well, I can tell you something that does depress me from time to time and that is what I am calling the ‘New Untouchables’.

What is an Untouchable, I hear you ask? An Untouchable was a member of, usually, a large variety of Hindu group that was, and in many cases still is, an outcast in their society. They were (and still are) known as Dalits or Harijans. Traditionally Indian society was/is broken up into four castes, or classes, those being:

Brahmans – the priestly or teaching class
Kshatriyas – or warrior and ruling classes
Vaishyas – the merchants and trading classes
Sudras – peasants and workers

The Untouchable found him/herself even below the Sudra. Let me give you an example of how dire these peoples’ lives are and why they are held in so much contempt in their own land.

If a Hindu had the occupation of taking life for a living, such as fishing, butchery, disposing of carcasses or tanning leather, then he or she would be considered an Untouchable. If a person’s job involved any contact with human emissions such as sweat, urine, feces, or spittle, such as street sweepers or toilet cleaners, then they too would be considered to be Untouchables. Also, the activities of a person that include eating meats such as cattle, domestic pigs, and chickens made them an Untouchable also.

Untouchables today are greatly deprived of many rights and activities that are everyday occurrences for higher caste members. Many educational and occupational opportunities are unavailable to these outcasts of society. These victims of racism are also forbidden to enter temples, most schools, and are not even allowed to draw water from the same well where higher castes might draw water. Untouchables are subservient, usually illiterate, and poverty-stricken, who basically lead a life of long humiliation. And it has to be said that higher caste members have inflicted some of this humiliation upon their fellow human beings over the centuries.

So what is this blog all about? Well, here in the Middle East you have a kind of ‘unspoken caste’ system that is loosely based along similar socio-racial-economic lines. You can have the local arab executive-standing company owner, oil executive, or entrepreneur ‘sitting at the top’ of the system. Following closely is the arab higher manager who will usually have an American reporting to him. Then we cascade down the various nationalities or ethnic groups: the British (who usually report to an American – it’s always been like this) together with European and other ‘white face’ nationalities, Australians for example. Depending on which side of the divide you stand, you will get the odd Egyptian or Lebanese coming close behind.

Coming ‘under’ these are the ‘educated’ Indians who would be characterized as the Vaishyas, and I also include educated Filipinos and Pakistanis who usually constitute the upper secretarial and technician class in our system. At this level we will find other nationalities but for this blog we need to dip a bit deeper to reach this New Untouchable.

There is no getting away from it – when we get literally get down to street level, we are talking Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans who ‘end up’ doing all the menial tasks. You will never ever see an arab doing such sub-human work. This appalling pecking order has existed in the Middle East for 25 years and, when I returned here recently, I saw that things hadn’t changed. It is one thing to deploy these people as menial labourers on building sites and for maids to be on call 24 hours a day to their ‘masters’ or ‘mistresses’ but when passports are withheld, overtime isn’t paid, and ‘other abuses’ are rife, then things need to be addressed.

Now you’d think that it would be bad enough for a street sweeper to be paid a pittance for a day’s graft – typical wages would equate to about $0.20/hour for these New Untouchables – but it gets worse. I mean, look at the basic arithmetic. They work a 60-hour week (usually more) x 20 cents/hour = $12.00 per week. Multiply this by 52 and you arrive at the miserable figure of $624.00 per year!

What’s worse?

Workers can typically pay US $2,000 to $3,000 in fees for air travel and visas to local recruitment agencies in their home countries before leaving for the Middle East and, ostensibly, for a better life here. But in the UAE, for instance, this contravenes the Labour Law No. 8 of 1980, which states that such fees should be paid by the employer.

So one comes across such scenarios as, “I borrowed the equivalent of $2,500 from my brothers and cousins to pay an agency to come to Kuwait.” Or, “I’ve been here for 22 months now and am still paying off this debt. With the wages we get, it is very difficult to pay our way, pay off our debts and support our families back home,”

Yesterday, I watched from my apartment window a New Untouchable getting on with his work. His work? Seemingly, his job was to climb into a garbage skip and remove all metal and plastic objects. This constituted mostly tin cans and plastic bin liners and carrier bags. Then I got to thinking. I used this skip for my garbage maybe twice a week. So there would be the leftovers from numerous breakfasts, evening meals and weekend snacks, empty milk and yoghurt cartons, dried-up teabags and God knows what else. But when you imagine perhaps a half-ton of stuff baking under 40oC of unrelenting heat, then you get to appreciate why this is an Untouchable’s job. And no, he wasn’t equipped with face mask or gloves! Who else would have the sheer gumption to climb into that stinking, decaying morass and earn his $0.20 and hour for so doing?

Yes, these are the new Middle East Untouchables!