ANALYTICAL MONTHLY REVIEW
Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review. Its October 2013 issue features the following editorial. — Ed.
When the last of the British army departed on February 28, 1948, they marched to the Gateway of India — not yet obstructed by yellow concrete barricades — and played their regimental march. When the British army surrendered to the allied rebel Continental army and the French army and navy at Yorktown, Virginia on October 19, 1781, the tradition is that the British fifes (bashis) and drums played a popular marching tune of the day, “The World Turned Upside Down”.
The imperial point of view persists, even after almost a century has passed since the Great October Revolution in Russia gave the rest of us a different — turned right side up, so to speak — perspective. Among the tasks of critical left media is the endless process of reversing the perspective of stories from the mass media; another way of putting it is “ideology critique”. A clear instance is the “Global Competitiveness Report 2013-2014” of the World Economic Forum, the Swiss organisation that every year gathers some 2500 of the richest and most powerful people in the world (“extremely narrow highly privileged elites” in the words of Noam Chomsky) at the Alpine resort town of Davos. With their various “partners” — in India the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in Bangladesh the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), in Nepal the Centre for Economic Development and Administration (CEDA) — the World Economic Forum annually produces a well-funded slick publication ranking the nations of the world from best to worst.
Our business media then spews this ideology of the “Masters of the Universe” back upon us in the form of revealed truth. From the Economic Times on October 5, 2013: “in the ‘Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) 2013’, on the global index of ‘trade tariffs (tradeweighted average tariff rate)’ India ranks 128, and on ‘prevalence of trade barriers’ (health and product standards, technical and labelling requirements etc), India ranks 61, among 148 countries. Thus, there is a need to improve in these areas.” From Livemint on October 4, 2013: “India ranks 104 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index for burdensome bureaucracy, while China is ranked 14. India’s overall position in the competitiveness index fell to 60 in the 2013 report. The nation has lost 15 places since 2006.”
What is good for the tens of crores turns out to be bad for the tens of thousands: health and product standards are “trade barriers” administered by “burdensome bureaucracy”, and taxes on profits lower “market efficiency”. No surprise there. But the ideological heart of the “Global Competitiveness Report” is its discussion of labour market efficiency and labour management relations, and deserves a closer examination.
At about the same time as the “Global Competitiveness Report” made its way into our media, reports appeared on the scandalous situation of migrant labour in Qatar. More than ninety percent of the labour force in the oil-rich emirate are immigrant, and the largest number are from Nepal. Over one hundred thousand Nepalis left for Qatar in the past year, and the Nepal legation in Qatar has estimated that there are more than five lakh Nepali nationals in the country.
The choice of Qatar as the location of the 2022 World Cup spurred a vast building program and increased the demand for immigrant labour. Reports of horrendous work conditions and suspicious deaths have appeared in the Nepali press in the last several years, but poverty and the absence of work in Nepal — and the influence of wealthy unscrupulous emigration brokers — maintained the flow of work-seeking emigrants.
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