India has reason to feel relieved at the fortuitous turn of events in Iraq leading to the release of 46 nurses held hostage by the rebel militia of the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria. Proactive diplomatic efforts by the Indian Government has ended the ordeal of the captive nurses, a majority of them hailing from Kerala. They were flown back from Erbil, a town in north Iraq not far from the actual conflict zone. Whether it was Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj’s SOS to her counterparts in the region late on Thursday or some other buttons being pushed in the multi-point crisis situation in Iraq and further afield in the entire West Asia is not known. But it is clear that the handling of the situation by the Indian Government, with the PMO actively involved at every step, did the trick. Remarkably, the Congress Chief Minister of Kerala Oomen Chandy, who took up the case of the nurses with the Modi Government, was gracious enough to acknowledge the bipartisan manner in which the crisis was handled. Neither party sought to extract mileage from it, though the Congress Party spokespersons could not help repeat the trite lines in criticism of the central government on nightly television. Meanwhile, the safe return of the nurses does not signal the end of the hostage crisis in Iraq. For, an equally large number of male workers is being held hostage somewhere in and around the conflict zone. Their whereabouts are unknown. A construction contractor is said to have confiscated their passports and seemed to have abandoned the workers when the ISIS jihadis overran the town where they were located. The Indian mission in Iraq is making efforts to facilitate their safe return home, but at the weekend there was no word about their whereabouts. Admittedly, it is hard to anticipate situations in which foreign workers become collateral victims of the highly disturbed conditions in the Middle East. Given the job opportunities in the region, Indians knowingly brave tough conditions and rough treatment by their employers to be able to earn and repatriate some money back home. Even in the case of the freed nurses, some of them defied the warning about the disturbed conditions in Iraq to report to their employers for fear of losing the opportunity to earn a `decent’ wage. The fact that agents in India pocket sizable sums in commissions and bribes to find them jobs in the Gulf also makes these workers risk terrible conditions to locate themselves in disturbed areas. Indeed, the Indian Government would do well to use its good offices in order to stop the exploitation of our workers in the Gulf, which begins with their employers virtually holding them captive once they confiscate their passports. This practice prevalent in all West Asian countries must end. It is notable that none of the male workers now being held hostage in the war zone in Iraq have their passports with them. Even the Indian missions fail to render any help to the workers, who generally perform menial tasks, whenever they are tormented by their employers. Though the Gulf employs lakhs of Indians, who repatriate billions back home, the challenge for Indian diplomacy is to negotiate certain ground rules with the host countries. Maybe with the spread of education and modern values emphasising individual rights, even the West Asian employers will adapt to be less exploitative, less arbitrary in their conduct towards the Indian workers.
Meanwhile, the government should issue an advisory to Indians working in the strife-torn Iraq, Syria, Turkey, etc., to consider returning to safety in view of the uncertain conditions in the entire region. The ISIS jihad might seem a simple Sunni-Shia conflict on a superficial view, but too many other factors complicate it. Regional aspirations, religious extremism, internal struggles over leadership, claims and counter claims of various tribes in Iraq and outside, make it a huge jigsaw puzzle hard to be slotted in a simple Sunni-Shia binary. Aside from the well-being of lakhs of Indian workers employed there, we are crucially dependent on crude oil supplies from Iraq. But our immediate concern, of course, is the safe passage of our workers from the strife-torn areas in Iraq. Hopefully, soon we will be able to bring back all Indians trapped in the conflict zone.
