Fear, curfews & fraternity: Being a migrant worker in Kashmir

Days after terrorists shot dead two brick kiln workers in Kulgam, south Kashmir, here at Alamgari Bazar, a congested neighbourhood in Srinagar’s old city that is home to several migrant workers, the evening is drawing to a close much earlier than it usually does. Police have imposed a strict security protocol, asking migrant workers to return to their rooms by 8 pm and avoid venturing out without reason.

Several migrants work at Kashmir’s brick kilns. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

Mohammad Shahbaz begins pulling down the shutters of his tea-and-snacks shop nearly two hours before his usual closing time. Mateen Ansari’s eggs-and-biryani cart, which is usually a big draw around this time, has just a couple of customers who are now rushing through their orders.

While the lanes in the neighbourhood are quieter and more cautious than usual, inside the cramped, rundown buildings that are home to many of Srinagar’s migrant workers, there is no space or time to put their lives on hold.

In one of the rooms, people sit cross-legged on the floor, eating dal and rice; in an adjacent one, some peel onions and eggs, another chops up capsicum and tomatoes and yet another stirs it all into a pressure cooker. Past dinner time, some lie on the floor, scrolling through reels on their cell phones or video call their families hundreds of kilometres away. The conversations drift between Urdu, Hindi and Bhojpuri.

Downtown Srinagar is home to many migrant workers. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

“Kashmir is far safer than it was a decade ago,” says a senior police officer. “But whenever terrorists are under pressure to mark their presence, they tend to look for softer targets, and migrant workers become easy prey. Given the sheer size of the workforce, it is impossible for us to provide security to each one of them. That’s why we have been advising them to exercise caution.”

But Mehfooz Ahmad, a mason from Bihar, says they can’t afford to slow down. “We get only six to eight months of work in Kashmir. That’s why we mostly work for long hours. We have to pay for rent and food, and still have enough to send back home. These new restrictions are tough. I have to cycle for an hour from my workplace. I now have to leave my worksite at 6 pm and can’t work overtime,” says Mehfooz, who shares a small room with five others.

Why they keep coming

Every year, as the snow melts and temperatures begin to rise, lakhs of migrant workers from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, West Bengal and Assam make the journey to Kashmir.

While there are no official figures on the migrant workforce in the region, an estimated four lakh non-Kashmiris work in the Valley, all of them drawn by the promise of work and decent wages that sustain their households back home, pay for their children’s school and weddings.

Their labour is visible everywhere, from the brick kilns on the outskirts of cities and urban centres to the construction sector, where they work as masons, painters, carpenters. They work on apple orchards and saffron farms, pave highways, cut hair in salons and sift through mountains of waste to search for recyclable material.

Tents where migrant workers live with their families. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

“There is not a single sector where workers from outside Jammu and Kashmir are not visible. Sectors like construction are completely dependent on migrants,” says Faiz Bakshi, General Secretary of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries.

Economist Ejaz Ayoub explains that the land reforms that took effect in J&K in the 1970s played a part in the region becoming a destination for workers from outside. “As ‘land to tiller’ took effect, it created a largely uniform economic class with only a small population below the poverty line (BPL). As per the last Census, the BPL population is just above 10%; the national average is 22%.”

There are, therefore, few takers for labour-intensive jobs among Kashmiris, he explains. “Those from stronger economic backgrounds prefer government service to working as farm hands.”

On an average, an unskilled worker in Kashmir earns Rs 700 a day while a skilled worker earns Rs 900-1,000. On a fixed unit rate contract, they earn around Rs 1,200 a day, far more than what they would get paid back home.

While there are states that pay more, Ayoub says migrants are drawn to the relatively lower cost of living in Kashmir. “Rents are affordable, there is less space constraint, water is not billed — these are factors that impact what a worker sends home.”

Life in a brick kiln

Sitting outside his mud hut that’s draped in weathered blue tarpaulin sheets, Kamlesh Kumar points to the freshly moulded clay bricks his family has shaped. “Around three thousand rupees,” he mumbles, using a twig to make calculations in the mud on how much he is likely to earn from the bricks they have made today.

Every day’s hard labour brings the 38-year-old a few hundred rupees closer to his goal of saving Rs 5 lakh for the wedding of his elder daughter. “She is 17. It will take me around three years to save that much money.”

Kumar, from Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh, first visited Kashmir in search of work in 2012. Since then, every May, Kumar, his wife, their two daughters and seven-year-old son arrive in Srinagar, head to ‘007’ brick kiln, at Heewooder village in central Kashmir’s Budgam, and stay on till the last week of October. Budgam district has over 230 kilns, 199 of those registered.

Spread across more than 25 acres, 007 is barren, hot and dusty, the tall kiln surrounded by small brick huts that are home to 300 workers and their families, mostly from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Children spend all day playing in the mud as their parents knead the clay mix, shape the bricks and lay them out to dry in neat rows. A lone shop, run by a man from Heewooder, caters to most of their needs.

Kamlesh Kumar with his family. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

“Most workers come with their families, so we have at least 500 people living and working here. We can’t imagine a brick kiln without workers from outside,” says Bilal Ahmad Bhat, one of the owners of 007, sitting in his office at the site, from where he monitors every inch of the kiln through high-quality CCTV cameras. “The only Kashmiris here are the owners and truck drivers, and the shop owner.”

Bhat says he has in the past tried to get local labourers to the kiln. “This is hard labour under intense temperatures,” he says. “The local labourers are not made for it. The few times I have tried to get them, they would come for a few months in the winter but as the temperatures start to increase, they leave, saying they can’t tolerate it.”

Economist Ayoub points out that there are more than 400 polytechnic colleges and Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) in J&K. “Though they churn out a lot of skilled and semi-skilled workers, Kashmiris prefer government jobs. The dignity associated with going to an office is immensely valued here as a society,” he says, adding that even a daily-wage job in an office is considered more respectable than becoming a driver, plumber or an electrician.

By 4 pm, Kumar and his family have shaped 3,000 bricks. For every 1,000 bricks, the contractor gives them between Rs 650 and Rs 850. Which is why, most migrants at brick kilns come with their families — more hands, more bricks.

Rafiq Ahmad Ansari, a worker from Uttarakhand, arrived in Kashmir when he was 14 years of age. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

Kumar’s 7-year-old son Sanjit, his hands caked with clay, is now playing with his friends. “What else would he do? I had admitted him to a good school in Shahjahanpur….” He pauses, says the name with pride: “Heaven’s Garden. But he goes there only for six months. I still have to pay his fee of Rs 3,600 for the full year.”

As Kumar talks about the school, Rafiq Ahmad Ansari, a worker from Uttarakhand, interjects. “When you can’t afford two meals a day, how can you think about education?”

Ansari first came to Kashmir in 1984, when he was 14. But he can barely speak Kashmiri. “I can understand many words but can’t speak. Once we come here, we hardly leave the kiln or move into the village; our interactions with Kashmiris are limited.”

Kumar nods. “We don’t have time for anything else. We are here just to earn as much as we can,” he says.

Though Kumar says they never felt threatened in the Valley, police have asked brick kiln owners across Kashmir to set up CCTV cameras and adequate lighting on the periphery walls. “For us, Kashmir feels as safe as our UP, or even safer,” he says. “We heard about the (Kulgam) killings, but there is no such fear here. In any case, we do not move out of our kiln.”

‘I never felt unsafe here’

“Shahid, kativ oosukh (Shahid, where were you?),” asks a customer, walking into Mohammad Shahid Khan’s hair salon at Ghazaliabad in Srinagar. Shahid replies in Kashmiri, saying he had gone to the house of a customer.

“I know every house in this area. I have been here for 29 years now,” says Shahid, 39.

He was barely 10 when he came to Kashmir from his village in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh. “My relatives worked at a bakery in Srinagar and I came with them only to visit Kashmir. But I never went back.”

Shahid says he learnt his haircutting chops from his friend’s father, a barber from Bijnor.

A hair salon at Ghazaliabad in Srinagar. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

When he was 17, Shahid went back to Bijnor and married there. But he returned to the Valley, and set up his own salon. Though the money was never enough, he ensured his four daughters and son — all born in Kashmir — got an education. “All of us went to the local government school,” says his 15-year-old son Mohammad Saalim, who is in Class 10. “I can speak Kashmiri well, but in school and at home, we speak Urdu.”

Shahid and his family have lived among people of the Valley through some of the most turbulent times — the 2008 Amarnath land row agitation, the 2010 street protests, the floods of 2014, the protests of 2016 and the 2019 abrogation of J&K’s special status.

“I never felt unsafe here. The only time I felt a little uncomfortable was during the 2016 protests.”

He recalls how they would slip into the alleys when police chased them. “The Kashmiri boys would run fast and we would be left behind,” he says. “But almost always, someone in those lanes would open their door and let us in.”

Barber shops, run by those from Bijnor, are now part of Kashmir’s landscape. “Bijnor is famous for barbers and sweets makers,” says Shahid.

For decades, even through some of Kashmir’s worst years of unrest, the migrants remained largely untouched. However, that changed post August 5, 2019, after the abrogation. In the seven years since then, over 20 migrant workers have been killed and another 20 injured in terror attacks across Kashmir.

Though the attacks have typically targeted one or two workers at a time, the impact has extended far beyond the immediate victims, striking fear among a much wider and already vulnerable community.

Every such big attack forced workers to pack their bags and leave, but driven by desperation and the lack of opportunities back home, they would come back each time.

‘It’s too hot at home in Bihar’

Walking through an orchard, Mateen Ahmad pauses to straighten a bamboo pole that’s supporting the branches of a young apple tree. “If the pole isn’t straight, the tree droops with the weight of the fruit and it affects the colour of the apple,” he says.

For over two decades, Mateen, 38, has been working in South Kashmir, managing orchards and tending to trees for 10 months of the year. He leaves for home in Katihar, Bihar, only after ensuring that the branches are pruned just before snowfall.

In Katihar, he worked to harvest makhana (foxnuts), earning Rs 100 for a day’s work. “That was in 2003. When I came to Kashmir that year, I didn’t get a lot more for the work on the apple orchards, but over time, the rates went up. I now earn Rs 800-900 a day,” says Mateen, who works on a fixed salary and sometimes finds work in other orchards as well.

An eatery that serves migrant workers in downtown Srinagar. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi)

He says horticulture experts sometimes come to assist him. “But I know my work… a farmer knows his land best. These company wallas can’t teach us much,” he says, laughing.

Mateen has a family of 15 waiting for him in Bihar — wife, three children, the eldest in Class 8, and parents and siblings — but he spends only two months with them. “This is my life now and no one can scare me away,” he says, referring to the recent attacks on migrant workers. “I am happy here and will keep returning. This is my home.”

There is another reason that keeps him in Kashmir. “Humko ab ghar par garmi zyada lagta hai (It’s too hot in Bihar). After 20 years in Kashmir, I can’t adjust to the heat any longer.”