Shackled men and women shuffling out of America’s aerial prisons struck a familiar chord. But it wasn’t quite so brutally humiliating in the Eighties when Goh Chok Tong’s Singapore sent back overstayers and illegals. They weren’t chained hand and foot like the people expelled by Donald Trump’s regime. With the United States of America determined to get rid of unwanted Indians as harshly as possible, Singapore is worried that arrivals are 13% below 2019 levels despite what it misguidedly calls a “booming overall growth in India’s outbound travel sector”.
It’s not a tourist boom but destitution that drives 2.5 million Indians annually to brave unimaginable hazards and join the 32 million people in the world’s biggest diaspora. “We leave India only because we are compelled to” one of the illegals recently thrown out of the US in chains told the BBC. “You can say whatever you want about the economy on paper, but you need to see the reality on the ground. There are no opportunities here for us to work or run a business.” No wonder over 48 lakh applicants jostled for 60,244 police jobs in supposedly prosperous Uttar Pradesh while household debts soared nationwide to 40% of the GDP. Singapore could be the face of India’s future. It may not match David Cameron’s “Namaste, Wembley!” exuberance or Houston’s ‘Howdy Modi’ frenzy but having suppressed the local Indian Association’s early fear that if labourers became members they “would come half-naked to meetings”, it can be said, adapting Dr Johnson, that the noblest prospect which an Indian ever saw was the flight to Singapore (or London).
Indian diplomats were in vehement denial in September 1986 when Singapore’s Controller of Immigration, Lim Ek Hong, announced on television that nearly 9,000 Indian men in their early twenties had been arrested as illegal immigrants. Our high commission continued to plead ignorance of the 88 warning notices from Singapore’s immigration officials. Nor would it admit to setting eyes on the headline, “We Came for the Money”, in The Straits Times newspaper which interviewed some illegals. The paper reported the saga of two brothers, trained lawyers both, who had given up practising in Chennai to become karung guni men, bikriwallas, in Singapore. As Thailand repatriated nearly a thousand illegals, the anger of which one sees little trace of in contemporary India’s political leaders prompted Thailand’s former prime minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, a major-general in the Thai army, to fume, “Instead of sending ships, we should send warships to Singapore!” Angry Thais left a black wreath outside Singapore’s embassy in Bangkok.
Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian and Filipino illegals outnumbered Indians just as today four million Mexicans outnumber 725,000 undocumented Indians in the US. Malaysia is Singapore’s next-door neighbour, just as Mexico is America’s. Distance and diplomatic indifference compounded the complications of repatriating Indians. Some had no money for a return ticket. Others refused to leave jail after serving their sentence. Life behind bars was more comfortable than outside. Some threw away their passports and tried to pass off as Singaporean in the older South Indian settlements. Home meant battling India’s political venality, bureaucratic indifference and economic rigours.
One explosion followed another but successive Indian high commissioners made little attempt to seek details or obtain consular access even when informed of jailed illegals. It was not until 1989 when Singapore amended its Immigration Act to permit three strokes of the cane and jail of up to two years for overstaying more than 90 days that the external affairs ministry in Delhi summoned the seniormost Singaporean diplomat and told him of India’s concern over nine workers sentenced to caning and imprisonment. Though there was no formal protest, a kindly P.V. Narasimha Rao cared enough to warn of “severe repercussions on bilateral ties”. His government expected to be informed if Indian citizens were arrested. There was no sophistry about the “globalization of India” to justify what is no more than a flight from poverty. Nor did Indian officials plead the US’s “standard operating procedure” to excuse Guantanamo Bay-style brutality.
Returning from Indonesia, Kunwar Natwar Singh added fuel to fire by calling caning “barbaric”. Two decades later, an unrepentant Natwar repeated, “I still think it’s outrageous.” But asked how many Indian workers slaved in Singapore, a supercilious high commissioner retorted that it was not his job to store such statistics. Later, a first secretary told the local New Paper that he knew of overstayers and “barefooted tourists” with little or no baggage save the mandatory US$500 to ensure they were allowed in. But he, too, had no idea of numbers. Another Thai ambassador, Asda Jaynama, appeared on television to appeal to Thais to respect Singapore’s laws. In contrast, only an impersonal message was read in English and voiced over in Tamil on behalf of India’s high commission.
The mission did not start registering Indian workers until five months after the new law was enacted. While 1,585 illegals surrendered, another 166 were released from jail, bringing the total to 1,751. They were entitled to go home without being punished and certainly without any unilaterally imposed imprisonment or shackles. But they had no money, no jobs and nowhere to stay while awaiting repatriation. This was one of those rare occasions when Singapore’s entire Indian community, expatriates and locals, rallied to what it saw as a national disaster… and disgrace. Volunteers donated money and material, helped to set up tents in the high commission’s Grange Road compound, served food and attended to inmates’ needs. A former Singapore armed forces regular, K. Johann, dubbed a “one-man show” because of the 12-14 hours he spent every day in the tent city, ordered food at his own expense from a Serangoon Road restaurant and also paid the airport tax for some of those flying back. Forgetting the massacre of their co-religionists after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Sikhs from Singapore’s Sri Guru Nanak Sat Sangh Sabha sent rice, dal, curry and yoghurt every day. Ultimately, complaints from nearby condominiums and hygiene and sanitation considerations prompted the government to remove the illegals to the civil defence camp in Jalan Besar. Presidential clemency spared the nine convicts the cane.
Neither the crisis nor its relatively amicable resolution changed the fundamentals of a situation that is rooted in governmental mismanagement and economic stagnation, exposing society’s inherent and persistent inequality and the determination of its leaders to maintain discrepancies from which they benefit. Indians still constitute a substantial portion of Singapore’s more than 1.5 million foreign workers and still account for only a minute fraction of the island-State’s wage bill. At the bottom end, they are still often at the mercy of travel touts, job sharks, exploitative middlemen and unscrupulous employers. They would not so eagerly have sought menial jobs and a lowly position in the fringes of society abroad if Manmohan Singh’s pledge of “a Bharat in which everyone who seeks work is able to find it, and works for a brighter future for all of us” had been honoured.
A perspicacious young Indian-Singaporean girl once wondered why Lee Kuan Yew didn’t breathe a word to anyone about his annual visits to India and courtship of India’s leaders which he described to me in detail. “Was it because Chinese-Singaporeans were bound to say, ‘What can poverty-stricken India give us?’” she asked. Philip Jeyaretnam’s seemingly slight but perceptive novel, Raffles Place Ragtime, explained attitudes 37 years ago. When a Chinese Singaporean girl with a broken heart mused on travelling to India, another girl remarked, “So dirty lah! Get hepatitis” or words to that effect.
The late Nani A. Palkhivala talked of an Indian who having escaped India’s restraints, could buy from a Scotsman, sell to a Jew and still make a profit. Scotsmen and Jews are waiting for that mythic Indian to escape from bondage.
