NRI represents another reality of the lives of people of Indian origin in the U.S.

September 11 and the yellow cabs
KALPANA SHARMA
May 19, 2002
The Hindu

Bhairavi Desai during the taxi strike in 1998.

SHE is young. She is a Gujarati. And she is different. She is not a software engineer, like the increasing numbers of Indians being feted in the United States. She is not rich like them, or like the well-heeled doctors you find in every corner of the country. The woman I write about this week represents another reality of the lives of people of Indian origin in the U.S. — a reality that is often ignored.

One of my more heartening experiences during a recent visit to the U.S. was to meet Bhairavi Desai in New York. As her name suggests, she is a Gujarati. She looks like one. Her slender frame is usually clothed in a salwar kamiz. Yet, Bhairavi is not the product of a conservative Indian household in the U.S. that insists that girls must adhere to Indian custom. She is also not part of the temple-building brigade in that country who support the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in this country.

Bhairavi Desai is doing what few from the Indian community would choose as a suitable career. She is the organiser of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). Her job entails fighting for the rights of over 3,000 taxi drivers, the majority of them desis, that is from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are members of the Alliance.

Bhairavi's story reminds us that the lives of Indians who migrate to the U.S. are far from glamorous. The majority of the early migrants to that country were blue collar workers. In New York, for instance, 60 per cent of the yellow-cab drivers, that enduring symbol of a city that never stops, are from the subcontinent. And the majority of them earn barely enough to survive in one of world's most expensive cities.

The Indian taxi drivers are mainly Sikhs who came across in the 1980s at the height of the Khalistan movement. The Pakistanis came in the 1990s. And Bangladeshis are the most recent migrants, many from Sylhet. But regardless of where they came from, they face the problems that all migrant workers face in the "the land of the free and the home of the brave". They do not know how to tackle the unjust manner in which the laws of the land are sometimes used against the most vulnerable sections of the country's population. Instances of such injustice have grown greatly since September 11.

Bhairavi's own family are working class. They moved to the U.S. in 1979 when she was six years old from a small town near Valsad, Gujarat. Her mother found a job in a factory in New Jersey and her father ran a small grocery store. "I grew up in a working class household. I have always had a job and going to college was not a given," says Bhairavi.

Yet, she did go to college, graduated in women's studies and history and consciously chose to become an organiser. She began by joining "Manavi", an organisation to help South Asian women who were victims of domestic violence. Many of them had been lured into marriage and then abandoned once they came to the U.S.. Organisations like "Manavi" intervened on their behalf.

She then moved to working for the rights of Asian workers by joining the Committee Against Asian American Violence in 1996. In 1998, she and others set up the NYTWA with an initial membership of 700 workers. The organisation really took off in May 1998 when they called the first strike in 30 years by yellow cabs. Over 90 per cent of New York taxi drivers joined the strike. And as a result, the authorities were forced to revise regulations that the taxi drivers had felt were unfair.

The strike also exposed the many ways in which taxi drivers are discriminated against, specially by the city authorities. The taxi system in New York is fairly complex. While in the past, taxi drivers were deemed workers because they were employed by owners of taxis, the system now requires them to lease taxis and pay the owners. This effectively renders them non-workers. They cannot unionise or seek benefits due other workers. It also places huge financial burdens on them as they struggle to earn enough each week to pay the lease amount.

An estimated half a million people use yellow cabs every day in New York. Since September 11, the business district of Manhattan, which provided substantial work to taxi drivers, was closed off. Even after it opened, most businesses suffered. Taxi drivers were a part of the many who felt the impact.

As an estimated 60 per cent of New York taxi drivers are South Asian, and represent the largest concentration of Muslim workers probably anywhere in the country, they were bound to feel the brunt of the anti-Muslim feeling that prevailed after September 11. Thus, according to Bhairavi, not only did taxi drivers face a downturn in business, Muslim taxi drivers were often picked upon. People would get into a taxi, discover that the name was that of Muslim, and get out. Many desi taxi drivers self-consciously carry an American flag in their cabs.

The day I met Bhairavi in her small office, located in the loft of a downtown New York building, a Pakistani taxi driver had come to ask her help about his problems with the authorities. But he also mentioned that the previous night, four of his Pakistani neighbours were picked up by the Immigration and Naturalisation Services (INS). Over a thousand South Asians have been picked up post-September 11 and many of them continue to be detained for months without being charged of anything more than overstaying their visas.

Apart from dealing with the complex problems that taxi drivers face when they come up against the city's regulatory authorities, Bhairavi and her colleagues are now faced with a new set of special problems confronting South Asian taxi drivers in the aftermath of September 11. But none of this has shaken her confidence that the NYTWA will be able to enrol and help increasing numbers of taxi drivers in the city. Proof that her optimism is not misplaced lies in the fact that the membership of the NYTWA has risen to 3,300 members since 1998. She is confident that it will be 5,000 by the end of the year, representing one quarter of all taxi workers in the city of New York.

"My family were my first set of comrades. They represent the best in working class people. I don't want to stray from that," Bhairavi Desai told me. And she has not strayed.

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