Stolen citizenship, stolen freedoms: Locating the rights of India’s circular labour migrants

With the rise of capitalism in post-colonial India, initially as a subsidiary part of a mixed economy with the state occupying its ‘commanding heights’, and later, especially after 1991, in the context of a new hegemony of globalised neoliberal capital, it was widely assumed that unfree labour, especially feudal forms of slavery in debt bondage, would vanish into history. This, however, has not happened. Inter-generational bondage to a single household has indeed become rarer. But the spread of capitalism has not created conditions of ‘free’ labour in India; instead pre-capitalist relations of labour unfreedoms continue to persist in abundance in the modified form of neo-bondage. This paper looks closely at one category of Indian workers – namely circular labour migrants – who are particularly susceptible to these forms of neo-slavery.