Mercenaries or ‘tech coolies’: Time Indians should know which overseas jobs are not for them

Call it self-styled migration or export, the participation of Indian mercenaries in the Ukraine War in a distant land should be viewed with concern for multiple reasons. One, Indian lives and limbs are involved—as if they were or are up for a price. Two, they are not like the ideological types that joined America’s post-9/11 Af-Pak war, where they fought on the Al-Qaeda or Taliban’s side. Nor were or are they like the ones who fought for ISIS in Syria, again for similar reasons.

But most, if not all, of them, numbering around 100, seemed to have known that they were to be deployed somewhere along the war zone. That some of them were recruited as ‘helpers’ but were sent to the warfront is only one part of it. Newspaper reports, quoting family sources in India, indicate that others had gone there knowing full well what their employment would be and how risky it would be too.

At least one of them had reportedly told his family, supposedly from Russia, that he would be proceeding with military training. He is among half a dozen or so Indians who died on the Russian side of the war. According to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the ‘recruitment’ of Indians as mercenaries for Russia was not in ‘consonance’ with the India-Russia partnership. “We have expressly told Russian officials that no matter how these Indians have reached the war front and under what circumstances, they should be returned,” Foreign Secretary Vinay Kwatra told newsmen in Delhi.

Indians not alone

India is not the only country from which Russia has ‘recruited’ fighters for the Ukraine War, which it had once hoped to wrap up early on after launching it in February 2022. From neighbouring Sri Lanka, about a hundred ex-servicemen with military training had gone over to fight for Russia in the ongoing battle. They seemed to be aware of what they were expected to do. As veterans who had fought at least an internal war with the dreaded LTTE terror group that lasted close to three decades, they also knew the consequences.

It can be argued that in nations like Sri Lanka, facing an unprecedented economic crisis, ex-servicemen knowingly became mercenaries in someone else’s war to earn a few thousand or hundred thousand bucks. They were willing to risk their dear lives, though it is not known if their families back home knew the consequences or the risks. In a nation where ‘body bags’ made a difference to every battle-front success and where desertions from the armed forces used to be a harrowing problem during the course of the four ‘Eelam Wars’, for retired personnel to be engaged in mercenary wars is simply unthinkable, let alone unacceptable to the government.

Like India, the Sri Lankan government, for instance, has taken it up with the Russian authorities directly. They engaged with the Russian Embassy in Colombo at the highest level. There has also been talk of the government dispatching a delegation under a relevant minister to Moscow to discuss and ensure that all Sri Lankans recruited for the Russian armed forces, directly or otherwise, should be sent back home safely and that no new Sri Lankan should be hired for the purpose.

Interestingly, in the course of the discussions with the Sri Lankan authorities, the Russian Embassy in Colombo came up with two queries: How come only Russian ‘hiring’ of Sri Lankans for its armed forces has come to light, and not those recruited for the Ukrainian cause? And why is that a ‘powerful country’ is doing it only to Russia and not Ukraine? The reference, of course, was to the US, though the Russian Ambassador did not name the nation.

In India, too, there were early reports of Indian nationals signing up for the ‘International Legion’ to fight the Ukraine War for Ukraine. Such reports stopped doing the rounds following reports of a couple of Indian deaths on the Ukrainian side of the war front. Indications are that the recruitment of Indians for Ukraine’s war efforts has stopped—or, at least, been suspended.

Forced handiwork

Also recently, independent reports emanated about IT professionals from India being recruited for data-operator jobs in Myanmar and Cambodia, promising fancy salaries, but being forced to do phishing jobs under threat to their lives. Some of the cyber crimes attributed to overseas-based groups may be the forced handiwork of our own boys.

Like many of those mercenaries who are fighting someone else’s war without knowing what they were up to, some of these ‘tech coolies’ too have been sent back messages home, rather stealthily, asking their families to get them ‘freed’. Of course, the Government of India has activated its officials to act on those complaints and also ensure that other Indians are not caught likewise.

What can governments do under such circumstances, or under circumstances where Indians seeking overseas jobs find themselves compromised one way or another? Through the 80’s and 90’s in particular, semi-skilled and unskilled labourers from all across the country seeking a Gulf job—mostly in construction sites rather than corporate offices—ended up getting much less than what was promised as a monthly salary.

Even for obtaining those jobs, their families would have pledged and pawned whatever jewellery they had to pay a slimy tout passing off as a ‘recruitment agent’. Hence, they would not want to ‘run away’ from their plight until at least the family had redeemed their goods from the pawnbroker or whoever. It meant facing the harshest realities of life—living in squalor—that too in unbearable summer heat and winter cold, alike.

In states like Kerala, a whole new genre of literature, poetry, and cinema came to be woven around the state of affairs of the Malayali labourers working out there in the Gulf. Actor Prithvraj Sukumaran’s recent celluloid offering ‘Aadu Jeevitham’ (‘Living a Goat’s Life’), based on a Malayalam novel of the same title, speaks volumes—though much of it seems to be in the past, a past whose memories still linger.

It used to be no different in tiny neighbourhood nations like the Maldives, where Indian labour, originally from the southern states, used to be taken for construction or other class four and five jobs in business offices or even private homes, promising a relatively respectable salary in the range of $ 400–500 a month but paid only less than half, if not none at all.

Most of those labourers would have travelled on a tourist visa; hence, the host government also knew who the victims were and who the culprit employers were. There was the other crop of skilled employees like teachers and nurses working for government schools and hospitals in distant islands, at least two of whom were denied their passports for going home on already-sanctioned holidays for their own weddings.

Until about a decade ago, when the Government of India took it up with the host government, nothing much was achieved. These past years, the situation has improved, and more initiatives are being taken, both in individual cases and collective issues.

Spreading the message

Under the late former External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj, the MEA put technology to good use. Phone and mobile numbers and email addresses were shared with the public for anyone taking up their complaints and issues with government officials, 24×7. By publicising the outcome of the governmental initiatives in such matters, the MEA also spread the message that officials in Delhi and individual Indian missions in foreign countries were both responsible and responsive to every Indian worker overseas or his family back home.

The good work has continued under the present EAM S Jaishankar too. Now that new kinds of menaces are occurring, technology too has improved vastly. Maybe the MEA should consider, in consultation with other ministries and agencies of the government, opening up separate desks for clearing the doubts of prospective job-seekers from India seeking jobs in foreign countries.

This definitely involves additional responsibility and will also require additional personnel and maybe even office space, but this is the least that the nation can do for its citizens, rather than mourning their deaths and consoling the victims and their families, and also offering ex gratia payments from the central and state governments.

Maybe the government can also insist on certain types of prospective expatriate labour and even tourist visa holders being tracked while in a third country. In the case of the former, at least, they could be required to have the antecedents of their prospective employer cleared by the Indian missions before being allowed to leave the country.

Can the government insist on such employees being given insurance cover, especially by the prospective employee, for loss of job or maltreatment? Or, can the Government of India consider coming up with some insurance schemes or the like for their benefit? Better still, the government could find ways for them to be employed inside the country. That, of course, would depend not only on the availability of jobs but also on their own aspirations, at times bordering on greed.

The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.