AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in Boston. Juan González is in Chicago.

We continue our May Day coverage with a look now at the state of worker rights and freedoms in the world’s most populous country, India. Pressure on fuel supplies from the war in Iran has deepened the cost-of-living crisis across India, and labor unrest is on the rise.

Last month, the industrial hubs around the capital city of New Delhi saw some of the anger boil over. In mid-April, tens of thousands of workers from dozens of factories blocked roads to demand a fair wage and better working conditions. Some of the protests turned violent, were met with a brutal police crackdown on protesters and labor leaders. Most of the workers who struck were nonunionized contract workers in small factories producing electronics, garments, auto parts. Many are migrant workers who live in cramped quarters on the edge of the city and work 12-hour days, seven days a week, for about $120 a month, wages that have gone unchanged for years.

Here are the voices of two workers from the protest just outside Delhi last month.

PROTESTER 1: [translated] Our salary should be increased to $214 a month. We should at least get this much. Only then can we sustain ourselves. Otherwise, this protest will continue.

PROTESTER 2: [translated] We are here protesting just for a salary hike. All the workers were protesting here peacefully; however, the police personnel charged on us. Now, if that happens, you have to do something to protect and defend yourself, right?

AMY GOODMAN: More than 90% of India’s workers are employed in the informal sector. That’s according to the International Labor Organization. Income inequality is extremely high. The richest 1% of Indians hold 40% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half of the country’s population own only 6.4% of its wealth.

For more on the state of labor and rights in India, we’re joined by Neha Dixit, an award-winning investigative journalist, author, based in New Delhi, recipient of the 2019 International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Her book is titled The Many Lives of Syeda X: A People’s History of Invisible India, joining us from Shrewsbury, just outside Boston, a stop on her U.S. book tour.

Thanks so much for being with us, Neha. If you can start off by laying out your People’s History of Invisible India? And talk about who Syeda X is.

NEHA DIXIT: Thank you so much, Amy. And I’m really happy that Democracy Now! is covering May Day and labor unrest, because, increasingly, all over the world, journalists like me struggle with putting stories around labor in the mainstream media.

My book, The Many Lives of Syeda X, is about a migrant working-class woman in Delhi who was displaced by sectarian violence. And in the last 30 years, she’s done 50 jobs, never managing to make more than one-fifth of the daily wage. And I do want to say that Syeda is the person right now who shells all the California almonds, who makes garments for a lot of U.S. global corporations. She’s also the one who’s making exam blue books that are making a return in various universities. These are the people who are from the most socioeconomically marginalized classes in India. Most of them are from the Indigenous communities, which are Adivasis or Dalits or Muslims.

And what happened? What has happened over the years is global corporations, when they started moving and outsourcing manufacturing to countries like India, a huge, cheap, female labor economy came up, where workers like Syeda are paid per piece, and they’re called home-based workers, instead of getting a time-based wage, which could be around 12 for every eight hours of work. So, people like Syeda work for 12 to 16 hours making all these things for global corporations, but never getting paid.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Neha, I wanted to ask you about the impact on the Indian working class especially of the current war, the war in Iran, the global disruption in fuel supply, what that’s doing to the Indian masses, as well.

NEHA DIXIT: I want to say that I’ve spent the last few weeks in the U.S., and I was looking at how life is not so much disturbed for people in the U.S. There is a moon mission, and, meanwhile, there are also drones being sent to Iran.

And how it has affected — affecting people in India is because, increasingly, there’s a shortage of cooking gas, which is LPG. What it has done is it has affected workers across sectors. So, textile sector, ceramics, automobile, electronic parts, all these sectors are affected. That has also meant that migrant workers who cannot access cooking gas, and most of them are not in — do not have the documents to access cooking gas from the formal places, so they have to rely on the black market, and which is why that is leading to a lot of starvation, people not being able to cook. And some estimates tell us that almost more than 3 million workers will be pushed into acute poverty by this crisis.

And what has also happened is this has led to reverse migration. Almost 50, 60 million workers in India are migrant workers, and this is an old figure from 2011, because we still don’t have the new ones from the government. And what it means is that if they do not have access to this cooking gas, they’re all forced to go back to their villages.

That has also led to a number of strikes. In the recent past, we saw, 10 days back, there was a strike in one of the outskirts, suburbs of Delhi, which is Noida, where the workers were demanding $300 per month, a raise from $200. That led to arrests of almost 300 workers on the same day. I also want to remind that this is a state, Noida, which is part of Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in India, which has the size of the population of Brazil. And this is also the state that suspended labor laws during COVID for all for three years, saying that it’s going to boost economy.

So, I want to say this, because these are times where, constantly, various governments in India and the central government have been trying to dilute labor laws. They have tried to introduce new labor codes that restrict strikes, that promote hire-and-fire policy, that promote entrenchment of workers without any notice. And there have been constant protests and strikes against this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk, as well, about the comparisons in terms of leadership in both countries, in India and the United States, both led by authoritarian right-wing leaders, and the growing income inequality in India?

NEHA DIXIT: I want to remind that we had a recent report in India which said that only top — only 10% of Indians can buy nonessential items. So, this is the kind of disparity we are looking at. Inequality is at a historic high.

We have a prime minister — I was laughing, and I was saying that every once in a while, at least, your president holds a press conference, and then you can debate about what he says. Our prime minister has not held a press conference in the last 12 years, since he’s been in power. In fact, Taliban came to India and held a press conference, but our prime minister refused to speak.

And this is also a time where there is a certain valorization of very hypermasculine politics, where aggression, where abuse, where hate crimes, where bigotry have been normalized and become part of the popular parlance. Our prime minister, every once in a while, keeps talking about his chest size and how it’s 56 inches and how he’s going to save everyone, and how, in the same context, there is a kind of oppressive and exploitative language that has been used by various ministers and various people in power, without ever taking into account what is it that people who are from the socioeconomic margins, what are they facing.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can talk more, Neha, about the inequality and repression in India, which you say is at a historic high?

NEHA DIXIT: I want to give an example of Syeda and how it is also related to California. Let me explain that, increasingly, like you spoke about, 90% of the workers are in the unorganized sector, most of them women. And there are various intersections here, as well, which is the intersections of caste, class and gender for migrant workers, which is very important to take into account the moment we start talking about labor in India.

So, what is happening is, for example, Syeda is a person who shells California almonds. So, California produces 80% of the world’s almonds. What happens is that you have — you can’t automate the shelling of these almonds, because the seed is going to break. So, what happens is there is a transnational supply. The California almonds go to the suppliers, contractors, subcontractors, and then to piece-rate workers like Syeda. So, for a 23 kg bag, they are paid half a dollar. And then, export workers like Syeda, if they work for 12 to 16 hours, they get $1. And that same two bags generate a profit of $100 for the suppliers.

And I keep — I’ve written that there’s a joke amongst almond women workers who shell California almonds in India, is that they learn to eat with spoons. And we were talking about it in the context of, recently, when the Mamdani campaign happened, and he was lampooned for eating with his hands. Why women in India are learning to eat with spoons because of these global corporations is because when they have to shell the almonds, they have to soak it in chemicals and acid, and while peeling it, their fingertips corrode, and which is why they cannot eat with their bare hands, and so they have to eat with spoons.

Why I’m giving you this example is because more and more work is shifting towards piece-rate work, towards gig work, and we have no actual attempt or political will to fix this. Our government is constantly, like I said, diluting labor laws, not taking into account these practices and the fact that it is also constantly disenfranchising people from socioeconomically marginalized communities. So, there are various, various intersections that put people in this acute poverty situation, without ever having any structural support from the government to rise above their situations.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned marginalized community. I’m wondering if you could comment on the situation of Muslims within India. Some 9 million Muslims, in recent state elections, have been disenfranchised?

NEHA DIXIT: Yes. So, if I just tell you, when I talk about socioeconomically marginalized communities, every third Adivasi person and every second Muslim and every second Dalit person in India are poor.

What has happened is that the government has introduced a special intensive — which is called SIR. What they have actually done is that they’ve started checking electoral rolls to disenfranchise people who do not have documents. And most of the people — so, if I use the recent example of West Bengal, where 9 million people have been put out of electoral lists by saying that they have not met the qualification to vote in these elections, what they have done is, for example, they have said that parents — people who had parents who were 16 years old and had more than five children, which was very common in the earlier past, they are not part of this electoral list. They’ve also called it a logical discrepancy. A lot of Muslim-majority constituencies are affected. Almost half of the voters have been deleted in these constituencies because of this process. They have also said that, you know —

AMY GOODMAN: Neha, 10 seconds.

NEHA DIXIT: Critics have said that it’s been unconstitutional. Yeah, so, I do want to say it is very systemic in the way people have been put out of electoral rolls and stripped of their citizenship rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Neha Dixit, award-winning investigative journalist based in New Delhi, author of The Many Lives of Syeda X: A People’s History of Invisible India. And she’s on a book tour throughout the United States, speaking to us from Massachusetts today.

That does it for today’s show. I’ll be at AFI Silver in Silver Spring, Maryland, tonight at 6:45 at a screening of the documentary about Democracy Now! called Steal This Story, Please! at a benefit for WHUT, Howard University PBS, with filmmaker Tia Lessin and Ryan Grim. I’ll be back there on Saturday at noon for a screening to benefit Pacifica Radio, WPFW, then at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore at 7 p.m. Saturday night at a screening with Morgan State radio, WEAA, and Sunday at Philadelphia’s Film Society Bourse theater for a matinee screening to benefit Philadelphia’s public access TV station PhillyCAM. For all information, go to democracynow.org. Hope to see everyone in one of these places in that area. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.