Last week the bodies of two Indian nationals killed fighting for Russian forces against Ukraine were received in New Delhi. The families of both Ajay Godara, 22, and Rakesh Kumar Maurya, 30, have said their sons were forced to join the Russian military after being lured with the promise of work as cleaners. In response to a question raised in parliament on December 18, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has said that 202 Indian nationals have been illegally recruited into the Russian armed forces. 26 have been killed, seven are reported missing and around 50 are still being forced to serve.There are tragic parallels that can be drawn between the fates of these young Indians, who died far away from home, fighting for a cause that has nothing to do with them, and those of the thousands of Indian colonial soldiers that were once used by the British Empire to fight its wars around the globe. While the material circumstances are vastly different, at the heart of both situations is a similar dehumanisation – where the people of a country are reduced from human beings with precious lives, to products for export. Historically, the Indian government has been paternalistic about working class migrants. In a sense this reflected a desire to show that there was a difference between being a subject of a colonial Empire and a citizen in a post-colonial state. While piecemeal, embassy responses to human rights crises involving labourers in the Gulf were generally well intentioned and prompt. The domestic public discourse also concurred that bringing back workers in crisis abroad was a collective national responsibility. In comparison, the earliest reports of Indians deceived into fighting for the Russian forces were received in November 2023. After more than two years, the crisis is still far from resolved. Despite family protests and dozens of deaths, there has been little media or public interest in the story. Earlier this month, India warmly welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin to New Delhi. Labour agreements signed during this visit provide a pathway to send tens of thousands of more Indian workers to Russia. While the MEA has argued that formalising the labour pathways is sufficient to safeguard these workers, this requires us to believe that the Russian government had no knowledge of (and bears no responsibility for) the recruitment of Indians into the Russian military over the past two years. Beyond foreign policy considerations, this seeming indifference to worker safety points to a more fundamental crisis in how the Indian state views its working-class citizens. India’s employment crisisIn India, the pressure to create new jobs today is twofold. Employment must be found for both the surplus labour steadily being forced out of agriculture and for the large young population aging into the labour force every year. A generation that was once touted as India’s demographic dividend, is now seen as a ticking time bomb for a state that is unable to generate employment for it. The scale of the problem is immense. In the last seven years, India added 90 million young people to its workforce and only 60 million jobs. Further, India’s agricultural sector employs 40% of the Indian workforce while contributing 15% to the GDP. Increases in agricultural productivity could (in the worst case) push a staggering 25% of the Indian workforce out of employment in the coming years. The thrust of some recent Indian industrial policies suggests that the employment crisis is not being considered with the urgency it deserves. By granting huge subsidies to semi-conductors and to AI data centres, for example, the government has chosen to focus on industries with particularly low ratios of jobs created to investment. Experts warn of a growing disconnect between growth and employment. Meanwhile, laws that once attempted to provide the rural working class with some measure of employment and social security like the MGNREGA are being whittled down to nothing. While there is considerable debate among economists on whether development in India should be led by services or manufacturing, the government seems to be sidestepping the debate on domestic job creation altogether by shifting the conversation to exporting labour. Exporting labourOver the last decade, the Indian government has focused on creating labour corridors for semi-skilled Indian workers to work abroad, through bilateral agreements. Between January 2015 and March 2023, India entered into 17 bilateral arrangements on labour mobility. Indians today are by far the largest migrant population in the globe and foreign remittances into India have risen from about US $ 68.9 billion in 2015 to US $ 111.22 billion in 2022. In the dominant thinking in India, striping labour of rights increases their employability. When this thinking is applied to migration, the push to create exportable labour is accompanied by a reduction in their legal rights and de-emphasising public concern with their safety. In a recent speech, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar asked young Indians to not be overly concerned with rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and to “look at the world as a global workplace”. The MEA is also currently pushing a new overseas mobility bill in parliament that experts argue sacrifices migrant worker rights and makes them more vulnerable to exploitation. Recent bilateral labour agreements have included countries that are in active conflict. In addition to the dozens killed in Russia, the MEA has confirmed that almost 6,800 Indian workers have been sent under a bilateral framework agreement to work in Israel since October 2023. One agricultural worker was killed in Israel in March 2024, while three more were injured. As we dehumanise and endanger our citizens to make them more globally employable, there is little to suggest that this strategy will offer meaningful gains to the Indian economy in the long term. First, the scale of India’s unemployment problem is massive. Migration and labour corridors are not a solution for more than a very small portion of this labour force. While migration will certainly continue to be a part of the Indian story, its role will be peripheral. Second, local populations do not generally welcome immigration, no matter how much their economies need the labour. This means that in addition to the risk of exploitation, working-class Indians being sent abroad are likely to face increased racist violence and backlash. Finally, even if this labour force successfully immigrates, remittances tend to taper off after a generation, as the migrants lose their linkages to their home country. Migration can shore up foreign remittances in the short term but does not offer long-term benefits to the Indian economy. The Indian state’s relationship with a vast majority of its citizens today is fundamentally extractive. The impacts of this are evident in multiple areas. The working classes in India today wrestle with colonial levels of inequality, crumbling public healthcare, transport and education systems, the wholesale scrapping of environmental protections in the name of development, and the dismantling of hard-won labour protections, in the name of growth. Even clean air and water are treated as luxuries in India’s cities. For minorities and women, the rule of law and physical safety are also not guaranteed. For an extractive state, the employment crisis is seen almost entirely from the perspective of how best labour as a resource can be exploited by capital. The state focuses on removing worker protections and often the jobs created (like the celebrated gig economy) tend to offer the worker low job security, low levels of training, limited avenues for growth and are rarely a path to generational mobility.It is imperative to shift this perspective. While India’s unemployment crisis is undoubtedly real and difficult to solve, resolving it requires governance that acknowledges the need to centre the working class – not as products to export or inputs to capitalist growth but as full and equal citizens and human beings, with legitimate aspirations that the state must do its best to help fulfil. This isn’t mere rhetoric. When the worker is centred, the state is more likely to focus its resources on development strategies that generate meaningful employment, address inequality and broaden domestic consumption. When this perspective is applied to foreign policy, the path forward becomes clear. No matter how desperate migrant workers are to work abroad, their safety is always the Indian state’s primary responsibility, and must always be non-negotiable.