Bigger Terrorists Spared & Condoned
And Not a Candle for the Departed Ones
Just imagine the gruesome journey. 3-4 hundred men on a rudderless, motor-less, compass-less boat with barely some couple of days' ration of boiled rice and potable water. Their boat was tugged deep into the sea wherefrom any coast whatsoever is nearly a thousand kilometres away! Then that boat was left there on its own to be floated where nobody knows. That boat drifted for days. For how many days that the travellers forgot. Soon they were out of food, and there was 'water water everywhere but not a drop to drink'. Men started dying one after one, and the dead-bodies had simply to be dumped overboard!
One night suddenly a few saw a flicker of light. Was that an illusion of short distance often seen at the seas? But the brains of even those once seafaring men were not simply working and they jumped into the sea to swim to the source of light - and life. They swam and swam, but the light seemed as far as it was before. The dawn was breaking, and they were losing energy to swim the rough waves of the Bay of Bengal. Will they all have to die, or will they survive, will some 'divine hand' rescue some of them?
timesofmalta.com || Monday, 29th December 2008 || 300 migrants feared dead off remote Indian islands
Reuters
About 300 illegal migrants, mostly Bangladeshis, are feared dead after they jumped from a boat and tried to swim ashore in India's remote Andaman islands, the Indian coast guard said yesterday.
A senior coast guard official said they had rescued 88 people from a small boat near Little Andaman island, about 90 kilometres south of Port Blair ... ... "Around 300 of them reportedly jumped into the sea hoping to swim across to the shore," Mr Sharma told reporters in Port Blair. "While all of them are feared dead or missing, search operations are still ongoing," he said.
A survivor told officials (that) there had been 412 men, aged between 18 and 60, on the boat, which had little food or water and only a plastic sheet for a sail. ... the men told police seven others had died at sea and their bodies were dumped overboard ... the men had left Bangladesh bound for Malaysia in six motorized boats about 45 days ago ... One survivor, identified as Mohammad Ismail Arafat, said he and others had paid a Bangladeshi agent for promised jobs. "We were left to the mercy of God... after drifting for 10-15 days when finally we saw a lighthouse, many jumped into the water," ...
These "illegal immigrants" sold all their precious family properties like utensils, their wives' silver ornaments [they cannot afford golden ones]. Each one could amass a sum of about $ 200-250 to pay the job agents, so poor were those Bangladeshi fishermen. They never fancied solvency. Just a job in the Malaysia to make both ends meet was their 'dream'.
But unluckily their boats were intercepted by the Thai Navy, remember - not an armed force of some Islamic Country, not a single Muslim terrorist was there to curse for the cruel act or their ill fate! And the men in milky white uniforms gave the horrid 'punishment'. They tugged motor-less boats packed with Bangla fishermen deep into the sea, gave them little food and water and left those hundreds at Nature's mercy.
15 days before Dec 29 works out to be Dec 14, not even 3 weeks past 26/11. More lives were at stake than 26/11. That time Indian media have been giving extensive focus on Pak/Islamic terrorism day in day out. Even at the time of the serial blasts in Mumbai suburban trains some years back not this amount of hullabaloo was raised, perhaps due to the 'commoner' nature of the commuters who died that time. Have many eyes in India noticed this story printed inconspicuously in inside pages if printed at all? Even for a photo of those saved sickly-n-bony fishermen saved by very much 'Indian' coast guards why one has to visit foreign websites like, say, http://www.timesofmalta.com/ or http://www.timesonline.co.uk/? Have the 'Civil Society' of Shining-n-Elite Mumbaikars [or Delhiites or ...] lighted a single candle for those deceased and thrown away in the sea?
But then why should they! The capitalists needed immigration at the time of production expansion in older days when the organic composition of Capital was far f-a-r less than today's - that means much more variable capital per unit of constant capital or, roughly speaking, much more workers were needed per machine. Now also they need a supply of cheap labourers, but their source is now the pauperised lot from the villages and the workers of the closed factories or retrenched ones. Now they need foreign investors and some very specialized educated person as immigrants. So who cares for an illegal-immigrant and that too a Bangla Muslim poor fisherman. No permutation and combination of the five attributes mentioned above can attract any attention from the ladies and gentlemen of the topmost 10-15%, the most probably urban-n-hindu, Anglo-Hindi speaking, high-caste, high-income, aspiring 'middle class' who are now vociferously trying to exert her/his right to be treated like a VIP of the govt or top politician class by the state. Why only the VIP-s will get security cover and not the 5 or 7 star hotels too, where millions are spent and change hands as 'marketing cost', is an anger that boils in them!! So when those Mumbai hotels reopened, all TV channels excitedly showed the 'spirit' of billionaire Hoteliers and Guests of those hotels re-entering gracefully, protected by hundreds of governmental security staff, and some sniffer-dogs too, to again have a toast with expensive foreign spirits.
These ladies and gentlemen are not bothered at all at this kind of rude treatment to the Bangla immigrants and also harassment of (Indian) Bengali Muslim labourers who share the same slums in Delhi or Mumbai etc on some pretext or other, rather, they support eviction and forcible deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants. But working class knows that immigrants are immigrants; they hail from different countries, they speak in different tongues, their religion or faith is immaterial in determining their fates, and the great bond of pauperization-poverty-landlessness-joblessness-homelessness-malnourishment binds them all and make them equal. So an illegal-immigrant Bangla Muslim poor ex-fisherman or peasant going to South-East Asia is not much different from a Mexican, Indigenous or Catholic, Spanish speaking, ex-peasant or contract-worker or unemployed illegal immigrant in USA or a Bolivian, Indigenous or Catholic, Quechua or Aymara speaking, ex-worker-peasant-unemployed illegal immigrant in Argentina. The working class knows that only extremely harsh condition of life push persons to undertake such a risky venture as to clandestinely enter a country as illegal immigrants to seek some job to live on and send some bucks back home for a bit 'decent' life, if you at all call per capita $1 a day a decent life! In these days of post-defeat long-running lull in the world working class movement the temporary workers have little choice. 155 years ago Fredrick Engels wrote "Naturally, the workers are perfectly free; ... he [capitalist] says to them ... 'If you don't like to be frizzled in my frying pan, you can take a walk into the fire'." [from: The Condition of the Working Class in England] It is indeed an irony when the capitalists, their governments and armed machines of the state, are even qualifying the fire on which they can allow the workers to have a walk - on a fire within national fences (boundaries)!
Working class never knelt before national chauvinism. From its initiation as a class in the battle ground among classes the working class was truly international. The Communist League prepared its first manifesto way back in 1847 where its internationalism was inscribed as a cardinal aspect of communists. As organisational venture they built up International Workingmen's Association. Its first 'State' - the Paris Commune, was an international effort judging from both the nationality of the participants and fighters in the barricade and also the support, response and help received from abroad.
The above are not some "commie's" old days' fairy tales. The present day worker activists too are coming slowly to fight taking up the cause of immigrant workers. Not long ago Ms Elly Leary, an ex-worker activist of General Motors who worked in the assembly lines of the car factory , came forward to organize immigrant Mexican Tomato-pickers, succeeded to make their wage-rise issue a powerful and countrywide issue by their struggle and after a tough fight the capitalist had to relent. Worker activists are becoming vocal and coming to the streets against governments' attempts to cruelly push back immigrant labourers. In the huge cauldron of capitalism in the newly developing industrial zones workers of various nationalities are getting mixed, pulverized, which only shows that they will rise up together shoving back their national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, caste, etc differences. Perhaps the capitalists world over will get terrorised again seeing again that old spectre of communism. And workers the world over will loudly proclaim - Down With The Borders! Rage the Border Fences to the Ground!!
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