Hyderabad: For more than three hours, Zareena Begum, a wife and a mother, ran continuously for her life to reach the nearest road in Oman. She got help from a kind local cab driver who drove her to the Indian Embassy in Muscat where she stayed for two months before returning to Chandrayangutta in Hyderabad.
Her return was marked with festivities and relief, just days before Eid. With her husband Haneef and her children by her side, she could now laugh wholeheartedly, a sigh of relief that her tribulation of nearly three years was finally over.
“India is the best. At least someone will feed us. Khane ke liye tarsate wahan pe,” she told Siasat.com, narrating her harrowing experiences as if they were happening right before her eyes and she was experiencing them, right there.
“Our employers used to treat us like meat sold in the market. There were 20-25 of us khadims (servants) cramped in a room, not allowed to talk or look at each other. They gave us a small bottle of water for 2-3 days so that we would not go to the toilet often. We would eat only when they want us to eat,” she told Siasat.com.
Zareena’s Dubai dream
Zareena Begum and Haneef, both orphans, met and fell in love and finally wed. Haneef established a business but soon suffered massive loss and the family was shattered economically.
To ease her husband’s burden, Zareena decided to work in the Gulf which could fetch the family some monetary relief.
Zareena was introduced to a local acquaintance who offered to arrange a visa for Rs 40,000 to go to Dubai. Though Haneef didn’t support her idea, she managed to convince him.
In December 2022, Zareena Begum was on her way to one of the richest cities in the world – Dubai; to work as a chef for Rs 30,000. Her eyes filled with hope and dreams of a better future, unaware of the challenges that lay ahead.
Zareena’s nightmare begins
Soon after reaching Dubai, Zareena was led to an overcrowded room, where others just like her had come to Dubai in the hope of a good life. Every day they were sent to a different arbab (master) for work. Zareena started feeling trapped and when she resisted, she was packed off to a house located in the deserts of Oman, where she would be forced to do the household work, including cleaning, cooking, and washing clothes along with picking dates from afternoon till evening under the scorching heat.
Zareena tells Siasat.com how once her master’s wife placed a hot steel spatula on her leg and demanded she work in that condition.
Apart from the physical assault, she faced sexual harassment at the hands of the arbab, an old man, says a teary-eyed Zareena.
Zareena maintained communication with family
Throughout her agony and misery, Zareena was able to keep in touch with Haneef and her children back in Hyderabad by sometimes using free wifi in public places or by sharing her location while taking great risks.
However, all this came to a sudden halt after her phone was hacked and her sim card was disabled for a month. Her family was left hanging about Zareeen’s condition.
Her dramatic escape and finally returning home
Zareena’s escape was just as dramatic as her survival. She hid a pair of clothes in her handbag and, without wearing footwear, she slipped out in the early hours of one morning, perfectly timing her escape when her master left to drop his children at school.
Reaching the road, she managed to find the cab driver and desperately explained her ordeal. With no money and no passport, she had nowhere to turn. In a moment of hope, she called Gangula Muralidhar Reddy, her husband’s acquaintance and a Gulf emigrants’ activist based in Hyderabad.
From Dubai, Reddy meticulously tracked Zareena’s location, guided her every step of the way and relentlessly represented her case to the Indian embassies and the Union Ministry of External Affairs, ensuring she got the help she needed.
Zareena Begum finally reached her home, embracing Haneef and her children in a tight hug and thanking the Almighty.
With the challenges she had endured in the last two-and-a-half years, Zareena, 32. suffers from a heart ailment, sometimes her heart rate goes up to 200 beats per minute.
Zareena present life
Reunited with her family, Zareena has applied for the sewing kits to be distributed to beneficiaries by Telangana Minorities Finance Corporation, so that she can be independent, and at the same time share the financial burden of Haneef.
She takes her of here children by sending them to school, paying a fee of Rs 900. Haneef, meanwhile, works as a painter.
Understanding the migration crisis and its complexities
“If we want to solve these problems, we need to get to their source. We need to start from where it originated, in whose mind, to go to another country, and why! We need to know who is helping them go, and why they decided to go,” opines a social worker from Kuwait, on condition of anonymity.
The social worker notes that people living there for five decades wouldn’t have been living there, had the human rights situation been so bad in those countries.
Many Indians have been living in the Gulf countries for over five decades. Some have been working behind the scenes for decades, due to whose efforts, coupled with the Union government’s support, of late the Indian embassies, have been seeing positive results.
Zareena’s story is just one of the thousands of stories of Gulf emigrants from Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and other states, which remain as great rescues, only to be repeated. While Zareena was lucky to come out of the ordeal, there are several Indians who continue to suffer. While some perish, others languish in the jails of Gulf nations.
“Ultimately the law of the land prevails in every country,” the social worker underlines.
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Indians jailed in Gulf countries
The social worker sheds light on several Indians languishing in different jails in the Gulf countries under deplorable conditions. “Unless the Union external ministry and the Indian embassies push every case, the investigating officers will not take it seriously, which could change the verdict in their cases,” the social worker tells Siasat.com.
“There are translators in the Gulf countries, and they sometimes misinterpret what we tell them,” the social worker says, stressing the need for legal and official support in those vulnerable times.
One such possibility of facts getting lost in translation could be that of 34-year-old Mohammad Abdul Sohail, from Bodhan in Nizamabad district of Telangana. He has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Kuwait in a drugs-related case.
He was arrested on December 5, 2021, and has been lodged at Sulaibiya Central Jail since then.
Telangana man jailed for life in Kuwait, wife claims false charges, seeks help
His distraught wife Anwari Begum recently appealed to the minister of external affairs (MEA), Dr S Jaishankar for legal help. “Whenever my husband calls us once in a week, every time he is saying that he is innocent, and has been implicated in a false case,” Anwari Begum wrote to Jaishankar.
Narrating how her husband was led into the trap, Anwari Begum says Sohail used to work two shifts – 6 am to 2 pm and 8 pm to 2 am during his duty.
After completing his morning shift, he would pick up his lunch from a hostel before proceeding to the next shift. One day, Sohail was handed a packet by a person in the hostel. However, within seconds, police swooped in and arrested him.
Sohail’s wife has been urging the Centre to direct the Indian embassy in Kuwait to provide her husband with legal help so that he can be freed finally and repatriated to India.
Centre’s intervention
To help stranded Indians in Gulf countries, the Union government initiated the Madad consular grievance redressal system, a platform for the Gulf immigrants and their families to represent their issues.
The Union government provides, under the Pravasi Bharatiya Bima Yojana, Rs 10 lakh to victims of accidental death or permanent disability. It is held annually in India, this year it was held in Konark in Odisha.
However, it doesn’t cover natural deaths causing similar miseries in the affected families. Leader of the Gulf joint action committee (JAC) Muralidhar Reddy strongly feels that the Indian government should cover insurance for natural deaths as well, considering this was one of the major rises in deaths there.
eMigrate, a portal launched by the Union government initiative organises the emigration process and educates individuals about their employers as well as the recruiting agents while providing other services for emigration.
Promises yet to be fulfilled
Since the formation of Telangana in 2014, the establishment of a Gulf Board for the welfare of Gulf emigrants with a corpus fund of Rs 500 crore was a promise the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) kept making to the emigrants and their families. However, it never saw the daylight in its two-term as the state government.
Interestingly, the Congress party made the very same promise before the 2023 Assembly elections. A year has passed and the promise remains a promise.
After coming to power in Telangana, the Congress government is providing Rs 5 lakh as ex-gratia to the family members of emigrants who have passed away due to an accident at the workplace or elsewhere while working in the Gulf. Though it has not been done in a saturation mode to cover all those who have perished since 2014, in small batches the state government has been releasing funds.
Both Central and state governments have been collaborating on a case-by-case basis, thanks to the efforts of activists from the Indian diaspora abroad, and in the southern states.
The state government has also sent a group of ministers and officials to Kerala, to study the initiatives for the Gulf emigrants there.
The Kerala ‘Success’ Story
Kerala’s Overseas Development and Employment Promotion Consultants Ltd (ODEPC), established in 1977, became India’s first public sector recruitment agency. To date, it has facilitated over 5,500 job placements, with a strong emphasis on the medical sector. It provides training to emigration aspirants in IELTS, HAAD, Prometric, DOH, DHA, MOH, OET and PTE at ODEPC.
Non-Resident Keralites Affairs (NORKA), established in 1996, is a government of Kerala undertaking which acts as an intermediary to address the concerns of the non-resident Keralites. It takes care of ID creation, attestation of documents, insurance cover (accidental insurance), rehabilitation, and support. It recognizes associations and works in collaboration with them.
The Kerala Pravasi Welfare Board was established in 2008 to envisage welfare schemes such as pension schemes, family pension schemes, medical aid, death assistance, marriage assistance, educational assistance etc., for Gulf emigrants from Kerala after their return. Currently, it has 7.9 lakh registered members.
The Loka Kerala Sabha is a bi-annual event held by the Kerala government to bring all Keralites across the globe under one platform.
Calls for protection for for Gulf migrants
On February 11, BRS Rajya Sabha MP D Suresh Reddy urged the need to expand the coverage of Prawas Bharatiya Bima Yojana (PBBY) to natural deaths as well. He stressed that the emigrants die due to the toll their work takes on their health. He also advocated for establishing the Saudi Arabian embassy and the Kuwait embassy in the country.
India receives USD 120 billion (around Rs 9.6 lakh crore) in foreign remittances—equivalent to a state’s total Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP). Even if we estimate that NRIs contribute just 5-6 percent of this, it amounts to approximately Rs 57,000 crore. Assuming they pay 18 percent of this in taxes, their contribution would still be around Rs 10,700 crore. Yet, all we’re asking for is a Rs 500 crore corpus fund,” emphasizes Muralidhar Reddy.
Observing that the Rs 500 crore corpus fund for a Gulf Welfare Board is not much of a contribution, Reddy wonders how much funds are needed to compensate all the emigrants who died in the Gulf countries since 2014, if the ex-gratia for accidental death is Rs just 5 lakh.
Presently, the Telangana government is giving an ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh to only seven countries.
Muralidhar Reddy wants it to include six GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman), and countries for which an emigration check is required.
Explaining how emigrants have been looking for countries like even Guinea-Bissau and Cambodia among others, he feels that the scope of NRI welfare needs to be expanded to cover NRIs in every nook and corner of the world.
He believes that the state government should not only establish a Gulf Welfare Board but also form a Gulf Advisory Committee comprising experts in human migration.
