'We Realise Their Importance Now': Gurugram Struggles After Muslim Migrants Flee

Cleaners at posh societies, carpenters, barbers – Muslims migrants can be pivotal to the city's daily functioning.

The regular customers of Cut & Style, a popular salon chain, received a message on 6 August that alarmed them. The message, sent out by its Palam Vihar branch, in Gurugram, informed them that it is “facing shortage of staff” in light of the “current situation.” By the “current situation”, the salon meant the violence that engulfed various parts of Haryana last week, including Gurugram.

The message read as follows:

“Greetings Cut & Style esteemed clients, 
 
This is to inform you all that due  to current situation we are facing shortage of staff. To avoid waiting we request you to schedule your advanced appointment.”

On further enquiry, a management team member of the salon told The Quint that “the hairdressers, a majority of whom are Muslims, have left for their villages.” The management was hopeful that if things improve, the hairdressers should be back soon.

Across job sectors and industries in Gurugram, many employers are reeling under the pressure of Muslim staffers, ranging from hairdressers and carpenters to cleaners and laborers, fleeing the city for their villages. In the last week, visuals of Muslim migrants from different states such as Bihar and West Bengal, being either expelled from their rented rooms or leaving out of fear of violence, have gone viral.

Now, their employers say they are feeling the chasm of Muslim workers, whose labor and worth is suddenly conspicuous by its absence.

'Who Will Pick Up Our Garbage?': High-Rise Residential Societies Ask

Gurugram’s sector 70 saw several migrants pack their bags and leave their jhuggis for their villages in the last week. While the sector has many slums, it is also packed with high-rise residential societies.

In one such society, the Tulip Orange, the housekeeping staff comprises of a total of twelve people, of which ten are Muslims. Eight of the ten Muslims have left in the last few days, leaving the remaining staff to take on the load of cleaning the entire society. “Everyone is feeling the brunt of it now, the residents are complaining of lack of cleanliness in the society. But we are also struggling. A staff of twelve has been reduced to four. The Muslims, who were from Bengal, have all left,” said Mithoo, the chief of the cleaning staff.

It is the Resident Welfare Association (RWA) president of the same society, whose video had gone viral on social media last week. “Our housekeeping staff was so scared that they left...and all our work is stalled. Our society has become so dirty. There’s so much garbage piling up in front of everyone’s home, who will take it,” Kiran Kapoor, the RWA president of Tulip Orange could be heard saying in the video.

One resident at Tulip Orange said that the person who used to come to clean the dishes at his place left last week. “She said she was being expelled from her rented room and had no option but to leave for her village. I am not sure where exactly she was from, but it was somewhere in West Bengal,” said Prajay Karkhanis, 18.

He added that while the issue is “causing major inconvenience”, it may not be leading to heightened political awareness. “People here are not very politically aware or interested here, they don’t really care. I don’t see it changing,” Karkhanis said.

At Paras Irene, another high-rise society in Gurugram, an RWA member said that “thirty people had to be hired suddenly at a significant increase in salary” due to the leaving of Muslim migrants who formed a chunk of the housekeeping staff here too.

However, Awinash Jha, the president of Paras Irene RWA said that while there was a shortage of staff and that Muslim staffers did flee after the violence, it was only temporary.

“The day after violence there was shortage of house keeping staff. However within couple of days the shortfall reduced and things are coming back to normal. The staffs are returning and few have been hired at the same cost to society,” Jha said, in an email response to The Quint on 15 August.

"We Are Having To Do It All": Carpenter, Car Repair Shop Owners

Many chores pivotal to everyday functioning such as the carpentry and repair-work have all taken a hit.

In Maruti Kunj, a commercial area in Gurugram, a slew of wood-work shops where furniture is made, are present lane after lane. The scarcity of Muslim workers was strongly felt here.

At one such shop, Amit Singh, the owner, said that they deal in buying old furniture and also making new one. “We had only one carpenter, Irshad, who had been with us for a long time and was excellent at his job. He left on 1 August for Sondh, his village,” Singh told The Quint. Sondh village falls in Tauru town, which is in Nuh district— one of the most severely-hit districts last week when violence erupted in Haryana.

“He was concerned about his parents who were alone there. He hasn’t been back since. He called me a few days after leaving and asked me to send him the money he was due. I sent that. Now I am hoping he comes back, or our work will suffer a lot,” Singh said.

Similarly, an automobile repair shop in Maruti Kunj has had its owner, Balram, fix tyre punctures for the last week—something that would earlier be done by Nazeer, the 19-year-old mechanic who had been working at his shop for the last four years.

“We told him we will take care of him. But he used to sleep inside the shop at night and was worried something might happen to him during the violence. So he left,” Balram told The Quint. Nazeer left for his hometown, Mathura, on the evening of 1 August, and hasn’t been back since.

“Now I am having to do all the work. From repairing punctures to cleaning cars, all the load has come on me. I realise his importance now. I would really like for him to come back and resume working here,” Balram added.

It isn’t just at these shops, but also at the Gurugram malls where this absence is being felt. The MG road has a string of malls on both sides of the road, frequented by the residents of the city. At the Metropolitan as well as the City Centre mall, housekeeping staff complained of being “overburdened” since those staffers belonging the Muslim community, who were migrants from other states, have left.

'Hindu Gurugram Is Serviced By a Muslim Gurugram': Sociologists

Experts who have extensively studied migration and cities, say that Gurugram, like other modern cities was “built on the backs of migrants.” “Not just that, it is running on the backs of migrants and the day-to-day services they provide,” said Raphael Susewind, a political anthropologist studying urban India, and a professor at the London School of Economics.

Anthropologist Sanjay Srivastava said that "there is a tiny, almost invisible, Muslim middle-class in the city."

"In comparison to Hindus, Muslim migrants are poor and perform a vast number of service sector jobs. So, clearly, the 'Hindu Gurgaon' is serviced by a 'Muslim Gurgaon'," said Srivastava, author of Entangled Urbanism: Slum, Gated Community and Shopping Mall in Delhi and Gurgaon.

Moreover, Susewind said that much of the contemporary urbanisation is a combination of two ingredients: rural distress and communal polarisation.

“The growing number of Muslim migrants as well as their increased segregation within the city is a combined effect of rural distress and communal polarisation: Muslim migrants seek both employment opportunities in places like Gurgaon and the safety in numbers that Delhi’s increasingly segregated Muslim colonies appear to provide.

While RWA groups have been demanding enough safety for such migrants to continue living and working in the city, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are asking for radical changes.

Commenting on this, Susewind said, “The RWAs would want a minimum level of security to keep the flow of migrant labor moving – not at all for any substantive transformation of their precarity. Keeping Muslims just secure enough while perpetuating their precarious position both economically and politically is precisely what works in the interest of the Hindu middle classes.”

“Migrants have no alternative source of income, and the middle classes will continue to exploit their precarious position as both migrants and Muslims to depress wages,” he added.

Mukta Naik, a fellow at Centre for Policy and Research said that Gurugram is a classic case of a city with populations on both extreme ends of the income spectrum. “So wherever there is a concentration of wealthy people, a commensurate service economy made up of informal players is required to fuel their existence. Bengali Muslim migrants comprise of much of the latter,” Naik said.

Naik said that while incidents like the exodus of migrants may create empathy at individual or familial levels—as was witnessed during the first Covid lockdown—it may dissipate soon after. “In this case, especially, it is difficult to create any sustainable wave of political awareness or empathy for the Muslim migrants in the face of terms like ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘infiltrators’ or ‘Rohingyas’ that are used so casually by politicians as well as cops,” Naik, who is an architect and urban planner, said.

She added that it is then up to the political representatives of the city to ensure safety of migrants—regardless of religious backgrounds—if they want the reputation of Gurugram as an “economically vibrant center” to continue to hold.

The report has been updated with a quote from Awinash Jha, the RWA president of Paras Irene society.