“Programmed as they are only to obey the landlords, the freed Kamaiya now require a lot of support to be reintegrated in society and to know how to manage their own lives.” -Mike Dottridge

The president of Anti Slavery International, London, Mike Dottridge was here in Nepal last May to assess the status of the Kamaiya and see for himself how the rehabilitation work for the erstwhile Kamaiya were being carried out by the government. Mike collected a wealth of knowledge through observations, and interactions with the freed Kamaiya and senior government officials concerned. The MS Nepal Information Unit had a brief interview with him at the CO. Excerpts:

Anti Slavery International (ASI) is rather a very old organisation. It is the world’s first human rights organisation established about 200 years ago in Great Britain against the involvement of Britain in the slave trade across the Atlantic, Africa and the Americas and in other parts of the world controlled by British colonies. And when that campaign was successful 160 years ago, the ASI was formed to campaign against every case of slavery that occurs in any countries of the world. At the end of the 90th century it seemed that most countries were abolishing slavery but in the 20th century we still have old forms of slavery to combat. I think it was in 1926 when we registered a first victory with the abolition of slavery. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia finally abolished traditional slavery.

Now we see the remnants of traditional slavery but to add to the problem, many other new forms of slavery have emerged. One of the major forms is bonded labour, which we find here in Nepal. But one of the surviving forms, which is not strictly slavery but is closely related to slavery, is what they call Begga in Hindi, connected very much with caste system. For instance, at village level, people will do certain tasks not fully out of their will but because they have to do those tasks for other people. And the combination of both bonded labour and these traditional obligations has created a situation in many parts of South Asia including Nepal, India and Pakistan, in which millions of people are trapped still as slaves today. Mostly, it is in rural areas—in agriculture—but it is not restricted to agriculture alone. For example, everywhere in South Asia where we see brick kilns we know we will probably find bonded labourers.

Well, it’s very nice for governments when they declare the end of slavery or the release of people. But often it is dishonest, may be it is deliberately dishonest or may be it is consciously dishonest because ending any form of slavery or forced labour is not a question of being a magician or a God, who declares from the top of the mountain, “it is the end.” It means doing a lot of very practical things. In the case of the Kamaiya, the members of the Tharu group were working for the non-Tharu landlords. They had land and they were working for the landlords and some producing for themselves. They had houses on the land of the landlords. In terms of law, they had a lot of legal rights— they had the right to their house. Secondly they had the right to the land because they had been tilling land for more than one year and in many cases, for generations. They had the right to own that land. And actually the government’s declaration, in many ways instead of helping them, made their situation much more difficult because those Kamaiya were conditioned for many years to obey the landlords so when the landlords began to chase them off their land, the Kamaiya not only lost their livelihood, they lost also their basic rights. Of course, they stopped being bonded and stopped being exploited as slave labours. But it is very crass, unfortunate action of any government to try to end any slavery just by declaration. My colleagues had been to Kathmandu seven months earlier talking to officials here about the vital need for the government to control the process of ending not only the Kamaiya system but all bonded labour systems in Nepal. And we are aware that there are many people in bonded labour outside the Tharu ethnic group in different parts of the country.

There are two possibilities. First is that the government restores the rights that the Kamaiya were deprived of since July 2000 and says everyone who was working for the landlord must have part of that landlord’s land and must have their house back. That is their right but it will be difficult for the government to enforce those rights. The second option for the government is to say, as an alternative, we must restore at least something which will give the displaced kamaiya enough land to produce food to last 12 months. Now at the moment the government has announced some distribution of land and the amount they are offering is grossly inadequate, and the amount that is received is even less. That looks to me, as an outsider, like a criminal act to force the Kamaiya go back to their landlords. How can they survive if they are given just a very small patch of land, which is not enough to maintain the family for a whole year? So the very minimum that will be feasible for the Kamaiya will be 10 katthas (1/3 of a hectare) or something of that sort. Sadly that is not being offered. Plenty of land is available in Nepal. I know countries where a major obstacle I that is there is no land to give and in which case it has to be redistributed. And that’s what should have happened. The Kamaiya should have had land which they had been working redistributed to them. The government failed to confront that and to deal with their basic rights. The very least that can be done is giving them from government land or other sources, adequate agricultural land to build their own houses on.

Well, the very minimum there is that the civil society must identify what the kamaiya needs and insist with the government that it takes necessary action. And civil society has to be careful not to be trapped by the government’s inefficiency and ineffectiveness. There are all sorts of bureaucratic channels, which the question of land distribution is now lost in. None of the government’s arguments can justify its failure to give every Kamaiya family enough land on which to live before this coming monsoon. That there are a lot of landless people in the Terai, who will join the kamaiya is also no good reason why the rights of the Kamaiya cannot be enforced. Politically, it may be complicated but governments exist to solve, sort out political cases, not to sit in grand houses and do nothing.

It’s especially important this year because the world as a whole is giving greater attention to the issue of discrimination. Next August and September there will be a big world conference against Racism. And the discrimination that we see on a day to day basis against Dalits, against indigenous peoples has its roots in racism--racism which is an ideology that some people are better than others, usually in history with some invasions or occupations, literally of different people but which over many centuries or millennia can take so many different forms. But the discrimination against Dalits is one of the most entrenched and one, which like MS Nepal ASI is committed to ending.

The beginning point is to analyse the problem and to know what forms of discrimination exist and how extensive they are. This week in Nepal we had the Chair of the National Human Rights Commission denounce the scale of discrimination against the Dalits. I was very pleased that he was using the public platform to express the National Human Rights Commission’s determination to end the discrimination. There it’s not a question of government policy, it’s a question of not one action but of several questions at the same time to influence the way people think and behave not only in cities but at the village level to change their standards of behaviour over many years, accepting that change can’t come overnight. If the government tries to declare that untouchability is prohibited and the discrimination has ended, like they declared the Kamaiya freedom on 17 July, then that would be almost meaningless. The government should speak out against discrimination and put into very practical programmes, with emphasis on education. And, of course, here there is a huge responsibility with religious leaders because discrimination is believed to be justified by religion. So it’s important to work with religious leaders in order for them to see the differences between religion and abusive practices and tell their followers how they should be respecting the equality and rights of others.

I think you have asked me many questions relating to Nepal but at one point you said Nepal has the bonded labour problem like in many poor countries. I think we are sad to report today that the rich countries have many bonded labourers as well. They haven’t been recognised as bonded but many people from poorer countries are migrating to the richer countries and in order to migrate, they have to take loans, often they can’t migrate legally so they have to seek illegal means which they make out by means of a smuggler who take them to the frontiers of the rich countries like my own the United Kingdom or others such as Italy or Germany, they become the victims of exploitation, sometimes slavery. We have in London also the cases of migrant domestic workers 7who are enslaved, not as bonded labourers but because their employer take their passport, they don’t pay the wages.We have actually far more cases of this sort in industrialised countries than we recognised until recently. And it’s been reported that there are tens of thousands of people being trafficked into both north American countries and into European countries every year who are ending up in a situation of debt bondage or similar bonded labour.

It is not a question of poverty, it is a question of exploitation. It’s also a question of resources. Of course, they migrate because they want to do better on the other side of the world. So one of the solutions—the ambitious solution—is to reorganise the world’s economy so there is less inequality. These days poverty is blamed for a lot. I myself believe the better culprit is the inequality of the distribution of resources what precipitates exploitation.

Certainly, there are all sorts of economic strategies, which one person says will lead to growth and another person will say the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, and the poorer will end up worse off. And I think it’s important when looking at the macro trends in the world’s economy to distinguish between the growth in overall wealth and the situation of ordinary people. Clearly every society should be judged by how it treats its children and by how the worst-off 10 percent of the population are treated. At the moment, the world’s economy is expanded with the top ten percent getting fantastically richer. This is an absolute obscenity. Economic growth in itself is undoubtedly a good instrument for improving people’s well-being but it’s not automatically in their interest.

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