When he boarded the train for Kerala from his home district of Kandhamal in Odisha, Rajendar was just 16 years of age.
Since then he has lived here and is now settled with his family, including two little children, at Manjapetty near Perumbavoor. He is now 34.
However, 18 long years after and turning into as much a Malayali as his neighbour next door, Rajendar has still not been able to shake off that feeling of outsider completely.
“People continue to maintain a distance, and the entire migrant community gets a bad name when a member from among us gets involved in a crime. They need to realise that every land has its share of good and bad people, and there is no place full of good people alone,” he said in fluent Malayalam.
The alleged rape and murder of a woman at Perumbavoor on Wednesday by a resident of Assam has brought back that by-now familiar sense of alienation that visits the likes of Rajendar every time a migrant is hauled up by police.
“There is a convenient stereotyping of migrants as criminals, which is not substantiated by any data. The number of crimes registered in the State has come down progressively since 2016, while the arrival of migrants has only increased. This shoots a hole in the theory that migrants shoot up the rate of crimes,” said Benoy Peter, executive director, Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development.
He warns against jumping into conclusions about the number of migrants nabbed in drug cases, pointing out that in most cases there was some Malayali connection like the large-scale ganja farming carried out by Malayalis in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Malayalis also manage to evade arrest or get bail, whereas migrants languish in jails for want of support. Lissy Varghese, district secretary of Asha Workers Union, said addiction to tobacco remained an issue among migrants who start it at quite an early age on account of their easy availability back home. She, however, said that personal hygiene and that of the places they reside in have improved tremendously going by the feedback from Asha workers who inspect their places almost on a weekly basis.
K. Bijumon, DySP, Perumbavoor, said a system had been put in place whereby employers are asked to account for migrant workers engaged in work sites. However, that system has discrepancies since employers submit lists of only a fraction of migrants. “Migrants keep moving, so it is not always possible to track them though we try to verify their credentials with the help of their identity documents,” he said.
Mr. Peter said criminal elements might take cover exploiting the heavy concentration of migrant communities, but registration was likely to expose them as those with criminal backgrounds were unlikely to register their names. “Migrant-friendly policing whereby the police take migrants into confidence is the need of the hour,” he said.
