Hello, everyone. Good morning, afternoon or evening, and welcome to this edition of Notes from South Asia. You can find all the articles in the series here (along with my other diaries).
Today, we will cover exploitation of women in iPhone assembling in India, Civil War in Myanmar, and Women in Afghanistan.
India
From China to India: What Is Labour Rights for Anyways?
Johanna Deeksha writes for Scroll: India’s iPhone factory is keeping women workers isolated
When Radha joined the Foxconn factory in 2020, it had roughly 15,000 workers – according to estimates of activists, women comprised around 80% of the plant’s workforce.
Radha felt intimidated at first. “The job was kind of hard in the beginning,” she said. “But after a few months, I got used to it and it became routine.” (Radha and other workers asked to be kept anonymous for this story or be identified by pseudonyms because the company had instructed them not to speak to the media.)
Radha came to enjoy her job. “I like that I get to make a living,” she said. With her salary, she began paying her younger brother’s college fees. She was also happy about the impact her work had on women in her village.
“Women in my village are not typically allowed to leave their homes and work,” she said. “But after I started working, my relatives and neighbours started to encourage young women in their households to work.”
By creating jobs for rural women and bringing them into the workforce, Foxconn is enabling a transition that economists say is essential for agrarian economies to transform into industrial hubs. But there is a hidden cost, as Radha found out.
She shared a room with five others in a company hostel that was at an inconvenient distance from the factory. She disliked the food that residents were served and also found the facilities unhygienic and poorly maintained.
She also found that she was expected to keep strict timings. From Monday to Saturday, residents were not allowed to leave the hostel for anything except to commute to the factory. On Sundays, the women were allowed to travel between 7 am and 7 pm. “We have to hurry back, because if we go to Chennai, it takes us almost two hours to make it back,” another woman worker said.
If they wanted to go out on weekdays, the women needed to obtain permission to do so. Specifically, the women had to make a request to the hostel administration, a member of which then called up their parents. “They have to inform our parents about the request and only after they confirm the reason for the request, we are allowed to go,” Radha said.
What a strange thing. This sounds like our college hostels where also we had to get signed permission slips from parents to go out. Sort of hard when we were studying communications M.A and had to go out pretty regularly for projects (though the rule was relaxed somewhat for our specific department).
Foxconn giveth with one hand and taketh away from another—that is, it breaks norms on one hand and reinforces them on the other.
No paywall. Please read the whole piece if you can.
Racism Towards South Asians in East Asia
Recent remarks by a Taiwanese labour minister demonstrates racism that South Asians face in East Asia. Abhik Deb writes for Scroll.
On Monday, the Taiwan foreign ministry issued an apology for their labour minister’s claim on February 29 that as a consequence of an agreement signed by New Delhi and Taipei to facilitate employment for Indians in the island-nation, jobs would go to residents of India’s northeastern states.
This, Labour Minister Hsu Ming-chun said on February 29, was due to the Christian faith of people from this Indian region and their similarities with the Taiwanese in skin colour and dietary habits.
Even as the apology from the Taiwan government stated that Indians will be recruited “regardless of their ethnic background”, the minister’s views reveal anxieties along racial lines that have been expressed previously too.
Experts in Taiwan also voiced conern about the conditions Indian labourers would have to work in, pointing out that migrant workers from other countries are often treated unfairly.
The possibility of Indians being recruited in Taiwan surfaced in November when Bloomberg reported that one lakh job seekers could be sent to the East Asian country.
The report sparked outrage, with many Taiwanese social media users arguing that allowing Indians in Taiwan would result in an increase in crime rates and women’s safety would be compromised. The Taiwan government intervened, characterising the remarks as racist. It said this was part of China's "cognitive warfare" aimed at hampering Taipei's relations with New Delhi.
In December, the Taiwanese labour ministry said that the reports about one lakh Indians being recruited was "false information" and that the labour mobility agreement with India was in the "evaluation and consultation stage".
Brian Hioe, editor of the Taipei-based online magazine New Bloom told Scroll that the matter was an issue even during the presidential elections in January, as the Opposition party, the Kuomintang, opposed the entry of Indian workers.
After the elections, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate Lai Chiang-te became president of Taiwan, but his party did not win a clear majority. Sana Hashmi, a research fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation in Taipei City, said that this could have been one reason behind the labour minister’s recent comments, as the agreement with India needs to be ratified by the legislature.
This is not new by the way. I have seen articles with quotes in articles on South Korea such as—if you see a snake and an Indian, kill the Indian first. It just shows not much has changed in the past couple of decades. Of course xenophobia and prejudices are part of every region or group; things just get difficult when power dynamics are involved. Labour agreements and migrations are situations where there is asymmetric power relations, even when it is Global South to Global South.
India may be a big country but East Asians do occupy a higher tier developmentally than us (and Africans and Latin Americans).
Muslim Tailors in Colonial South Asia
Scroll has a book excerpt from Amanda Lanzillo that looks interesting: Twentieth-century texts show the relationship between Muslim tailors, their trade and their faith
In 1909, Sheikh Khwaja Muhammad, an “expert in the art of sewing” and a tailor in the city of Allahabad, published a short, seven-page history of his trade through a small local press. Titled the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah (The treatise of Idris), the community history articulated a Muslim past for tailors, known in Urdu as darzīs or khayāt̤s. Tracing the precepts of sewing to the Prophet Idris (Enoch), Khwaja Muhammad sought to provide a religious lineage for Muslim tailors in North India. In doing so, he spoke to and for members of an artisan community that sought new forms of social status in the context of stratified North Indian Muslim society.
Framing the work of tailors as a divinely inspired art with a prophetic genealogy, Khwaja Muhammad claimed that it was Idris who first sewed a garment to clothe himself and that tailoring skills were revealed to him by God. He maintained that sewing was “perfect and complete” upon its revelation to Idris and that the responsibility of contemporary tailors was to pass on this knowledge. He went on to position tailors as fundamental to Muslim belief and practice. He referenced, for instance, the “holy tunic” (pīrāhan-i sharīf) that the Prophet Muhammad wore on the night of his ascension to heaven (miʿraj), noting that the garment was made following the principles revealed to Idris.
In addition to providing a Muslim past for sewing, Khwaja Muhammad articulated a set of moral and social precepts for tailors. The Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah taught Muslim tailors not only how to be good Muslims but also how to demonstrate their religious piety through their trade. For a young or apprenticed tailor to fail to adhere to these precepts and morals would, in Khwaja Muhammad’s terms, “bring shame to the teacher and unemployment to the student.”
Sorry for Scroll focus but well, since I was there, I thought I’d share multiple interesting articles.
Myanmar
The Civil War and Draft
Hein Thar writes for FrontierMyanmar about his time in Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA).
During my six months in northern Shan State in 2021, whenever I got the chance to chat with a young soldier in the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, I always asked them a slightly personal question.
“Are you an a-nyi?” I’d query, using the Ta’ang term for “second son”. More often than not, they’d look at me a bit surprised and reply: “How did you know?” while I hid a smile.
Around two-thirds of the more than two dozen fighters I spoke to were second sons. Finally, I started to ask some of the more senior TNLA leaders and generals. Compared to my other, more probing questions about the war, this topic hardly seemed sensitive. But the officers were typically perplexed by this line of questioning and would even begin debating among themselves whether soldiers they knew were second sons.
It’s well known that the TNLA has a strong mandatory service policy in their territories, where each family with at least two sons must provide one to the armed group. So, why so many second sons? Is it because second sons are less loved?
Reminds me of a very old story: the story of Shunashepha from the Ramayana (retold in many other spaces; and probably taken from far older content since Shunashepha’s hymns are in the Vedas and the gods involved in the story are old, such as Varuna, rather than the latter gods—Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva).
An ancestor of Rama, called Harishchandra, a king of the Surya Vamsha (Sun lineage) was childless (or did not have a male heir—retelling of early stories seem to treat both as the same tragedy)). When he prayed to Lord Varuna, Varuna said that the god will bless him with a male child if he promises to sacrifice the child to Varuna once he is born. Harishchandra promises.
Once the son is born, the king was loathe to sacrifice the infant to Varuna. So he asked for delays. The delays kept on and on until the boy was an adolescent. Finally, Varuna got angry and struck the king with disease. When he prayed again to Varuna, the god said he had the option of giving someone else in place of Rohita. Or I think one of his many ministers advised him to do that. But the king was loathe to ask anyone else for his son. So, he remained ill.
Rohita left the country and went in search for some solution. In one village, he found a family living in destitution and offered them wealth in exchange for them to donate one of their three sons to be sacrificed in his place. The father would not allow the eldest son to be given. The mother would not allow the youngest son to be sacrificed. That left the second son who was willingly given away.
The story goes that the second son sought refuge from Sage Vishwamitra (another maverick with interesting mythology) who gave him a hymn to Varuna to chant when he is positioned for sacrifice. The boy chants the hymn. Varuna is pleased and releases him. He also forgives Harishchandra’s debt (I am not entirely clear on why this was done—perhaps to save other boys? Later in his life Harishchandra loses all his kingdom, his wife and his son to keep his word, due to which he came to be renowned for his integrity. So, perhaps he learnt his lesson.).
Sorry. That is a long story. But it appears Myanmarese second sons bear similar fate. Drafted by the rulers to give their life for the cause.
Civil War Update
Brian Wei writes for Irawaddy that Myanmar Resistance Fighters Poised to Capture Key Town in Sagaing Region
After five days of fighting, resistance forces are poised to capture Sagaing Region’s Kani town and the junta is responding by bombing it, a resident of the town said on Thursday.
“The military’s aircraft are attacking us nonstop. Even now, they are flying overhead and bombing the town. We need to hide,” he said.
Allied resistance groups began attacking the town on Saturday. It is located in southwest Sagaing Region about 35 miles from the region’s capital, Monywa, where the Northwest Regional Military Headquarters is based.
A resistance fighter said the resistance groups are operating under the Yin Mar Bin district command and that they had control of about 80 percent of the town as of Thursday afternoon.
Afghanistan
The Fall in the Status of Women
This is not the only story from Afghanistan. However, today we are covering this.
Freshta Ghani, Mahtab Safi and Mahsa Elham, all journalists at Zan times (Ghani is also editor), write for Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) about women in Afghanistan: “I Don’t Want to Live. I Want to Die”
When Tahmina’s father realised the Taleban were on the verge of returning to power, he quickly married her off to a man whose family had ties to the militants. Aged 17, she moved into her husband’s family home in the Dand-e-Ghori district of Baghlan province, in the north of Afghanistan.
There, she was abused from the moment she stepped over the threshold. Her husband slapped, punched and beat her, often at the urging of her father-in-law. Her new family mocked, humiliated and abused her.
Life became even more unbearable when Tahmina’s husband was ambushed and killed by bandits. His father insisted that the young widow, then the mother of a two-month-old boy, marry her husband’s eight-year-old brother. When Tahmina refused, he killed her infant by cutting his throat.
"Afghanistan has become a hell for women,”
“The horror and anger I’ve experienced are so overwhelming, I don’t want to live. I want to die,” Tahmina said. She said that she could not seek justice because her father-in-law had close ties with the Taleban.
Afghanistan already had a high rate of violence against women before the August 2021 Taleban takeover. Under the re-established regime, the situation deteriorated even further. All legislative gains made in the previous two decades to protect women were quickly destroyed.
The vast majority of the 60 women interviewed for this article from across 17 provinces in Afghanistan reported being subjected to violence, including physical torture, verbal abuse and forced labour. Only eight had lodged formal complaints with the authorities.
I would have thought boy babies would be considered valuable in such a patriarchal household.
That is it for today. Until next Friday, everyone. Stay safe. Be well. Take care.
May there be dignity and freedom for all sections of women—underprivileged caste groups and races, minoritised people, gender and sexually queer, disabled, and poor—across the world and this universe.