Despite all the claims made by the panjandrums of contemporary international order that our world has become a global village what Sultan Bahu, a seventeenth century classical Punjabi poet, says about the feelings of helpless individuals forced to be away from their ancestral home rings true: “May no one be wayfarer in an alien land where twigs tend to be weightier than them”.

Notwithstanding the sage’s warning, the Punjabis have traditionally been given to wandering far and wide. Geographically Punjab is far away from the sea routes but the Punjabis were perhaps the first to migrate from India to distant lands in the colonial era. The fact was significant in a society that forbade its members to undertake sea journey in the name of some vague ancient religious injunction. But socially mobile and religiously liberal Punjabis, especially the Sikhs, in defiance of strict caste rules, started sailing across seas in the mid-nineteenth century. They, in fact, sailed to Canada, the other end of the world. Remember Komagata Maru?

It’s a well-known episode in the history of migration from the subcontinent. It was a Japanese steamship which carried 376 people from Punjab, British India to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914. Passengers were from diverse communities of Punjab; 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. Of 374, only 24 were allowed to enter British Columbia. Exclusion law was used to refuse entry to the rest and the ship was forced to return with 352 hapless passengers on board. That the people driven away from the Canadian shores didn’t know which way to turn is another story.

But the question is why do people decide to migrate? Plausible reasons anthropologists and sociologists offer are the lure of better economic future and escape from religious persecution and racial discrimination etc. In our case first two factors play an important role. The spectre of persecution, no doubt, haunts religious minorities for which economic, social and religious space shrinking under the pressure of ideologically frightening transformations which on the one hand have encouraged and unleashed the forces of extremism and on the other have visibly weekend the writ of the state. As a result, we witness desperate attempts by minorities to leave Punjab, their homeland, to find refuge in foreign lands regardless of the risks the unseen entails. No member of the majority can fully experience the experience of the minority whose life and limb, properties, businesses, religious practices and young men and women are under constant threat creating a state of perpetual fear. How they feel when people from the minorities find apparently safe havens in foreign countries is described by poet Brecht: “I always found the name false which they gave us: Emigrants. That means those who leave their country. But we did not leave, of our own free will choosing another land. Nor did we enter into a land, to stay there, if possible forever...”.

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What is described as craze for foreign lands, especially the Western ones, among the general populace is an outcome of economic compulsions which are organically linked with socioeconomic structures evolved over a long period of time. Young men, from the countryside in particular, find challenging the inequitable established order almost an impossible task that fills them with despair. Their plight is further exacerbated by the increased lack of job opportunities in the agricultural sector which has never been a priority for any regime, past and present. The only way out left for skilled and semi-skilled young men is to reach the developed or resource rich countries by hook and crook. This is the point when, to use lingo, “agents” enter the scene.

Agents are, in fact, the mountebanks who pose and operate as immigration consultants in cahoots with officials of the departments concerned of the state. They would reach their promised land provided they are able to raise sufficient funds, agents tell young men evoking the images of an affluent society which they would soon be members of. Young men go back to countryside full of hope. They have a family huddle and persuade their parents or elders to dish out whatever little they have in order to have a better life in the years to come. Family decides, in the face of all odds, to sell its jewellery, livestock and a piece of land in the hope that once their boy reaches his desired destination, he will be able to send money back home easing out the things.

But what happens in most of the cases is quite the opposite. Human smugglers with no-holds-barred attitude try to send the young men aspiring for European soil through the most dangerous land and sea routes imaginable on fake documents. But national borders are tightly controlled in our “globalised world” where only capital and multinationals which own it have free trans-border movement. So we routinely hear stories without batting an eyelid such as these: a number of men packed in a container like sardines died of asphyxia while trying to sneak into Europe from Turkey or a boat capsized close to the shores of Greece and a score of “illegal” immigrants drowned or still worse, some aliens, in their bid to reach Italy, died of thirst and exhaustion in the desert.