[The domestic workers said they feared losing their jobs permanently but had been moved to protest because they believed that Johra Bibi, the maid at the center of the dispute, had been taken advantage of and that they might be next.]
By Annie Gowen and Vidhi Doshi
 |
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Johra
Bibi lies on a cot outside her home in a slum near the Mahagun Modern complex
in
New Delhi. She says she was beaten and detained by her employer after
demanding
two months’ worth of salary that she was owed.
(Vidhi
Doshi/Vidhi Doshi/The Washington Post)
|
NEW
DELHI — A violent protest by
maids at a luxury high-rise in India and its bitter aftermath have rekindled
debate about the treatment meted out to the growing ranks of domestic workers
in the country.
Dozens of angry maids burst through the gates
of the Mahagun Moderne apartment complex just outside the capital, hurling
stones and breaking windows, under the belief that a fellow domestic worker had
been held by her employer there against her will in a pay dispute, police have
said.
Police are still trying to determine the
exact circumstances of the dispute — whether the employer was refusing to pay
back wages, as the maid alleges, or whether she stole money, as the employers
claim. More than a dozen people have been arrested in the incident, and a
flurry of police complaints have been lodged.
The incident has sparked an intense backlash
on social media, with critics portraying the maids as lawless undocumented
immigrants from Bangladesh. It has also prompted calls for India to reexamine
its attitude toward and policies about its more than 4 million domestic workers, many of whom toil
long hours for low wages with little legal protection.
For now, the gates of the Mahagun Moderne, in
the New Delhi suburb of Noida, remain closed to the more than 500 helpers who
work there, washing dishes, folding clothes and tending to the children, after
residents enacted a “maid ban” in response to the violence.
The domestic workers said they feared losing
their jobs permanently but had been moved to protest because they believed that
Johra Bibi, the maid at the center of the dispute, had been taken advantage of
and that they might be next.
“We’ve never done anything like this before,”
said Haseena Bibi, one of the protesters.
For centuries, India’s elite have employed
servants, but economic liberalization and the rise of the middle class meant
that the number of cooks, maids and drivers has grown exponentially in recent
decades, journalist Tripti Lahiri wrote in a recent book, “Maid in India.”
Hundreds of thousands have migrated from villages to India’s five major urban
centers to tend to the needs of the elite.
Some state governments have tried in recent
years to regularize wages for domestic workers — in Rajasthan, for example,
they now must be paid at least $87 a month. But many make less than that.
An opinion piece in Saturday’s Hindu
newspaper called for the government to enact legislation that would protect the
rights of domestic workers, including taking such measures as required
registration and a mandated social security fund.
Class divisions between household staff and
their affluent bosses remain deeply entrenched, Lahiri writes: “We eat first,
they eat later . . . we live in front, they live in the back, we
sit on chairs and they sit on the floor, we drink from glasses and ceramic
plates and they from ones made of steel and set aside for them, we call them by
their names, they address us by titles.”
In Noida, more than 2,000 families live in
Mahagun Moderne, a 25-acre complex with swimming pools, a tennis court and
landscaped pathways. A short distance away, their household help live in
tin-roofed huts in a muddy field, bathing from a communal tap.
Lahiri said such migrant shantytowns often
develop next to buildings in Noida, because the residents don’t want to give
rooms in their homes to the helpers.
“There are also a lot of daily injustices
that people swallow when they’re working as help, and then, at some point, the
suppressed anger and fear coalesce around one particular incident, which is
maybe what we saw,” she said.
Bibi, 26, from West Bengal, claimed that when
she went to her employers’ home to collect $125 in back pay, she was assaulted
and threatened and ended up hiding overnight in another part of the complex.
“Madame said to me, ‘If you try to run away,
I’ll throw you in the dust bin. I’ll kill you,’ ”
she said.
The maid’s husband, Abdul Sattar, a
construction worker, said that after his wife did not return home Tuesday
evening, he went to the employer’s home with police looking for her and was
told she was not there.
“No one does anything for us. No one helps,”
Sattar said. “God makes us poor. What can we do? We do what the rich tell us to
do. We sit where they tell us to sit. They reign over us. Even you know the
rich and the poor can never be one. They think the poor are not human.”
The maid’s employer, Mitul Sethi, said in his
police complaint that the maid ran off after a confrontation with his wife over
a theft in the home. The next day, he said, they were confronted by a crowd
that started “pelting our home with stones and sticks,” breaking windows and
attempting to assault them. The family eventually escaped with the help of security
guards.
In the days since the assault, both the
luxury complex and the tenement settlement where its workers live remain tense.
Workers wonder when police will raid again
and whether the settlement will be torn down. And the residents of the
high-rise have their own concerns — will the rioters return? Will their
children be safe at the bus stop? Meanwhile, they are making do cooking and
cleaning for themselves as they wait for a community meeting to plan a way
forward, according to one resident who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of security concerns.
“Mobs just can’t gather like this and take
the law into their own hands,” she said. “Everyone is scared.”
Swati Gupta contributed to this report.
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