NYT on Noida ‘maids and madams’ war is another scathing article by foreign press on India
What happened in Noida — the accusations, the violence, the riot-like situation, the abuse and mutual display of antipathy, the arrests and the banishment — have made international headlines, naturally. In a particularly singeing account, The New York Times reported on the “maids and madams” going to war at a “luxury complex” near Delhi, exposing India’s bitter class hierarchies, its newly moneyed class viewing those left out from the “India story” just as condescendingly as the traditional elites look down upon the neo-rich. 21st century India is a boiling pot, and the foreign press knows it, reports it with relish.
The NYT piece is particularly disturbing because in its reportage it extracts the mutual distrust and fear between the employers and employees at Mahagun Moderne, the upscale residential complex which was the scene of violence last week. It is observant that the “madams” of those two thousand flats head for their “yoga classes”, or take their toddlers to play groups, while "the maids soundlessly whisked away dirty dishes and soiled laundry before retreating, at night, to a nearby shantytown of tin sheds and plastic tents".
That shantytown, or ghetto, Barola, was where Zohra Bibi did not return to one night, when the altercation with her “madam”, Ms Sethi, took place. Sethi accused Zohra of stealing Rs 17,000, and the NYT piece gives its paltry equivalent in US dollars — $ 265 — while the maid made the counter-allegation that Sethi hadn’t paid her salary in fact. The truth, without contracts and fettered by oral arrangements deeply entrenched in old feudal and caste structures, is lost in translation.
But what the NYT piece reflects is the mutual disdain that the two sections have for each other. The well-heeled Sethis, and their neighbours, have filed police complains, got a number of “rioters” arrested, have banished “Bangladeshi maids” from the society. It’s appalling how Bengali Muslims — which Zohra Bibi happens to be — are easily and conveniently conflated with being an illegal immigrant, and therefore already a criminal in the country.
The violence too has been described with menacing details. Iron rods and stones were hurled at the glass doors and windows, the Sethis’ apartment was ransacked, they had to lock themselves in the bathroom to avoid getting injured. There has been an open declaration that they could no longer trust their maids.
The NYT writes: "A dispute between a maid and her employer erupted into a full-blown riot, as hundreds of the maid’s neighbours, armed with rocks and iron rods, forced their way into the complex and stormed her employer’s apartment. In response, thousands of families have locked their maids out, saying they can no longer trust them in their homes."
The article quotes Ashok Yadav, Mahagun Moderne’s head of security, on the “symbiotic relationship” between the madams and the maids, and wondered how each of them could survive without the other for long.
“The fact is that it is a symbiotic relationship between the madam and the maid. Right now, the residents are very angry and shocked at the violent way the mob attacked the society. But before long, they will have to find new maids. How will life go on otherwise?”
Let’s unpack this “symbiosis”. This is the symbiosis of cheap labour, lack of regulations, no law to define and regulate domestic work which is rendered invisible, feminised and othered, occurring in an environment of exploitation and rampant abuse, of furthering class, caste and religious hierarchies, and more. This is the symbiosis that perpetuates inequality as a social virtue, while occasionally resorting to patronising handouts in gifts (used clothes, some paltry bonus, maybe an extra paid leave), while retaining the very structures that ensure the inequalities never go away.
“India’s vast disparity between rich and poor means members of a newly moneyed class are able to hire domestic help for low pay, with no contracts and few legal obligations,” the news article said.
Between Barola and Mahagun Moderne lies India’s story of development, or liberalisation-induced growth that has excluded as many as it has included in its shining story of GDP numbers. The very fact that domestic workers feature routinely in crime stories but not so much in a mass uprising — Noida episode being an exception and a tipping point — is because the mutual antipathy is contained within households, and is not allowed to unionise, come together to protest. How will the domestic workers unionise if their work isn’t even recognised as labour fit for minimum wages, that must be underlined with legal safeguards in terms of job security, hiring and firing standards, work conditions and more.
The “mutual respect” that some of residents speak of and are quoted in the NYT piece, is actually a mutual dis-acknowledgement, an apartheid of sorts in which the splendours of the moneyed class and the deprivation of the poor are rendered mutually invisible, to avoid a class war like that occurred in Mahagun Moderne. Hence, the gated colonies have humungous walls; the entry and exit are regulated and security becomes a primal concern. What must be avoided at all costs is the class contamination, couched in the name of security of course. And crime, or avoidance thereof. Hence, the investment in CCTV cameras everywhere.
But as Tripti Lahiri, author of Maid in India: Stories of Inequality and Opportunity Inside Our Homes, puts it, the proximity of Mahagun Moderne and Barola, the luxury complex and the shantytown, is not just symbiosis but “a perfect setup for an us versus them clash”.
What the NYT calls "subterranean anxieties about the true relationship between the rich and the poor", which have surfaced in the Noida class war episode, is also the diagnosis of India in the 21st century. A deeply feudal and caste-ridden society, class becomes the latest manifestation, or at least the post-1991 version, of insecurities that are in fact centuries old. Regional and class divides surface because they have been simmering for long, and no amount of “development” — which is anyway exclusionary — can erase the stink of that class battle, which has been pronounced dead, prematurely.
But the barrage of disparaging articles on India in the foreign press signals another development. From The Economist, to The Washington Post, or The New York Times, established media outlets in the United Kingdom and the United States — countries India takes seriously in gauging the international opinion — have started bursting India’s superpower balloon. While The Economist has called Narendra Modi a “constant tinkerer” and “not much of a reformer”, the NYT has commented on “India’s battered press”, “Modi’s strongman economics” and have raised concerns on how Hindutva is hijacking the world’s biggest democracy.
Today, in the Chinese press, we have a piece that explicitly argues that Hindutva and India’s new cultural nationalism along religious lines have “hijacked India-China policy, that could lead to war”. Though strange an argument, the very fact that India is becoming a “hollow power” torn by sectarian forces and is hardly retaining moral fibre that comes from a vibrant democracy in action, is now being plastered all over the international press, and Global Times is only taking advantage of it.
India’s reputation is in tatters, and a riot-like situation in an upscale residential complex in Noida lays bare one aspect of India’s dysfunctional present. We must course-correct now, or face international ostracisation soon enough.