Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Oct 22: Bowing down to international pressures and human rights organisations and buoyed by its international ambitions, Saudi Arabia has finally confirmed scrapping of the controversial “Kafala” labour sponsoring system in vogue for over 70 years benefitting millions of labourers from other countries, the largest chunk of them being Indians.
Reviled as ‘modern-day slavery’, allowing employers – called kafeel – the “Kafala” system gave inhuman levels of control over employees, including confiscating travel documents and deciding if and when they could change jobs, or even leave the country.
There are plenty of instances of the employers treating the imported labour as their personal fiefdom meeting them with inhuman treatments. In some cases, such as the 46-yeard-old nurse from Karnataka Jacintha Mendonca, who was lured by the promise of a lucrative job in Qatar but trafficked to Saudi in 2016. She was even held for ransom; her kafeel demanded Rs 4.3 lakh. Her release was negotiated through diplomatic and legal channels.
Mendonca’s experience was one of hard-luck horror stories involving young Indians drawn to the Gulf and the opportunity to earn in dinars or riyals, get rich quickly and come back home.
Now, however, such horrific incidents would not happen, at least not openly as they have been made illegal in Saudi Arabia, as they already have in Israel and Bahrain. It, however, persists in different guises in Gulf countries like Kuwait, Omar, Lebanon, and Qatar. Across these nations there are nearly 25 million foreign nationals living and toiling under their kafeel‘s thumb. Unsurprisingly, Indians make up the largest – around 7.5 million – group.
In June Saudi Arabia had announced plans to scrap the system as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ‘Vision 2030’ reforms – a multi-trillion-dollar plan to tidy up the country’s image to attract foreign investment, particularly before global events, including the 2029 Asian Winter Games. Around 13 million foreign workers, of whom 2.5 million are Indians, will benefit.
Rolled out in the 1950s, the “Kafala” system was meant to control the flow of skilled and unskilled foreign labour from India and other south-east Asian countries. This labour was crucial to building, literally, the Saudi economy, since many were put to work in the construction or manufacturing sectors.
To ensure the economy was not overrun by this cheap labour, all incoming workers were ‘tied’ to a kafeel, an individual or a company acting as that labourer’s ‘sponsor’. And the ‘sponsor’ was given unholy power over the foreign national; they controlled the labourer’s life, including deciding where they might work and then steal wages, and even decide where they might live.
Worse, the labourer could not file an abuse charge without the abuser’s permission, a provision that must surely have struck the then-Saudi administration as odd, if not outright impossible. The system wasn’t quite as bad for skilled or white-collar workers. Unsurprisingly, the system was denounced by labour and human rights activists.
The International Labour Organization and other global agencies accused the Gulf countries of practicing the “Kafala” system of permitting human trafficking under the guise of ‘sponsorship.’
Women were obviously the worst affected. Rights groups have documented instances of sexual abuse by the kafeel. In 2017, for example, a woman from Gujarat was forced into sexual slavery by her ‘sponsor’ in Saudi Arabia, before being brought back home by the Indian government.
In another example from the same year, a woman from Karnataka, taken to Saudi on the promise of a job paying Rs 1.5 lakh per month, was physically abused and thrown off the third floor of a building in the city of Dammam. The government had to step in again to save her.
Rights groups, including international agencies like Amnesty, say there are thousands of such cases, involving people from India, Nepal, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Ethiopia. International pressure played a major part, as did reports by global non-profits and aid agencies, and disapproving feedback from potential foreign investors in forcing the Saudi Arabia government to scrap the system, a decision prompted by its global ambitions.