The fault-lines between domestic workers and their employers in luxury apartments in gated communities was waiting to happen. From rate cards in Mumbai posh apartments to separate lifts in Gurgaon high rises, the stories have been distressing and the narratives stark. While the Devyani Khobragade-Sangeeta Richards issue barely got any reportage from the domestic worker i.e. Richards’ side, the latest incident in Mahagun Moderne Society in Noida Sector 78 has brought back the festering tension. From 4.2 million domestic workers (as per 61st NSSO-National Sample Survey in 2004-5) to 20 million domestic workers as per Amod Kanth (Govt of India’s Domestic Workers’ Sector Skills Council) recently, the numbers are staggering, whichever way you look at it!

In this recording of our Facebook Live, Biraj Swain (international development writer and consulting editor Newslaundry) discusses with Sonal Sharma (Research Scholar at Johns Hopkins University), Dr Indu Prakash Singh (of ActionAid and leader of CityMakers campaign), Prof Sanjay Srivastava (of Institute of Economic Growth, Sociologist, writer-commentator on Urbanism) and Vivek Gopal (Editor with Newslaundry).

They discuss the definition of domestic work, the workers’ working and living conditions, the legislations (or lack of the same) regulating their work, the numbers as per different surveys and census. They focus on the recent incidents at Mahagun Moderne, the police’ differential response to Zohra Bibi’s FIR and the Sethis’ FIR, the Noida authority’s response and the local MP and India’s culture minister Mahesh Sharma’s statement. They also discuss if the state is promoting and perpetuating exploitation through its various omissions and commissions.

They talk of the hate mongering by social media, the biased media narrative, the insular writings on the topic by most Indian writing (fiction and non-fiction) in English. They share their concern regarding the appropriation of the phrase “common (wo)man/ordinary Indian” by the rich in luxury condos. They conclude that if this othering, alienation and exploitation continues unabated then it has all the makings of a class war. Indu feels it is caste war and a war on minorities too.

The discussion concludes with a passage from Harsh Mander’s book Looking Away. After reading Katherine Stokket’s book The Help (which was adapted into film and won Viola Davis an Oscar), Harsh writes: What deeply troubled me after I read the book was that the humiliation and exploitation suffered by domestic workers in southern US half a century earlier was, in fact, in many ways less oppressive than the daily lived experience of an estimated three million domestic workers in middle-class homes across urban India in the second decade of the 21st century. And that this causes us so little outrage.