Workers from Bihar in Mumbai grapple with uncertainty and fear

Anwar Kamal and his family have just returned to Navi Mumbai from Bihar at the end of the children’s summer vacation from school.

He had paid a broker Rs 2,000 extra for each ticket while going home on holiday to Champaran. Now, he has just been informed that he and his wife are required to rush back to fill up the forms for enrolment in the electoral rolls. “I cannot afford to pay for another trip so soon. I do not know what to do,” he said.

A CPI leader in Bihar, Prabhashankar Singh, is active on the ground. He tells National Herald over the phone that in his own village of Rahimpur, not a single migrant worker has returned to fill up the forms.

They travel to Punjab, Delhi, Bengal and Mumbai for work, he says, and of late, they have started taking their wives and children with them. A large number of the migrant workers may find themselves disenfranchised as a result, he suspects.

Former Rajya Sabha MP Ali Anwar, also from Bihar, echoes him. Both Muslims and Hindus are affected, he points out, and people in Bihar are both bewildered and angry.

Many migrants workers in Mumbai in the age group of 35–45 do not seem to have birth certificates. Panchayats and municipal corporations still do not function as they should, they angrily point out. Nitish Kumar has made Bihar a labour-surplus state, but institutional support systems have been slow in developing.

The migrants admit that ahead of the earlier elections, the JD(U) and BJP leaders used to make arrangements for them to travel and cast their votes. But they have not been seen in the last few weeks.

BJP workers are active in preparing lists of migrant workers, but claim that they are waiting for a plan from the BJP headquarters on how to proceed and what to do.

Ahsan Hussain from Darbhanga has been living in the Kurla area in Mumbai for over 40 years. He says he got his family members included in the voters’ list in Mumbai and casts his vote in the city. He is worried about his mother and brothers’ families back home, though. Their names were on the electoral rolls, but they may not have the documents the ECI requires, he says, adding that officials were not proving very helpful.

Expressing his inability to leave his work and go home, he hopes Prime Minister Modi and the Election Commission shall step in and make alternative arrangements.

Manoj Jha, watchman in a society in Goregaon, arrived in Mumbai two-and-a-half years ago. His wife and a 10-year-old daughter live in the village. His and his wife's names are already in the voters’ list. His wife is not educated and has not been able to give him any information, he laments.

He turns stoical and says, “What can be done? If our names are deleted, so be it”. What use is casting votes anyway, he wonders aloud.

Sanjeev Yadav works in a private bank in Ghatkopar. He has been trying hard to get transferred to Patna and has no leave left to be allowed to travel. Even otherwise, the workload is such that getting leave is out of the question. His father has been calling, asking him to come back and fill the form to get his name included in the voters’ list.

Mohammad Manjar Alam Sheikh is a social worker in Dharavi. He himself is a voter in Mumbai, but says that there are hundreds of Biharis working in Dharavi who earn between Rs 15,000–20,000 a month. Most of the migrants labourers he has spoken to, he says, seem clueless about the exercise.

A million migrants from Bihar, it is estimated, are working in the city. It is difficult to assess how many are voters in Bihar, how many have the documents required or how many of them are able and planning to go home for the sudden and unexpected exercise initiated by the election commission.

Everybody, however, is afraid of the future — and wondering whether disenfranchisement will render them stateless.