Sudeep S has spent most of his recent days confined to a small room in Qatar. The Indian milk-delivery salesman’s daily routine of early-morning routes and quiet evenings ended abruptly on February 28, 2026.

That morning, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on multiple sites across Iran, killing its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the top Iranian military leadership. The strikes triggered a chain of retaliatory Iranian drone and missile barrages targeting American military bases across all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

In the days since, the distant thunder of geopolitics has become the immediate sound of sirens echoing through the streets of Doha, where Sudeep earns his living.

“Safety sirens blared repeatedly through the streets of Doha, piercing the otherwise quiet mornings and evenings. My phone inbox overflowed with urgent alerts from authorities and the company alike, warnings of incoming threats, instructions to stay indoors. Then the call: don’t come to work today; the delivery route is off-limits. That’s it,” Sudeep told The Polity over the phone from his small room.

A labour camp at Sonapur, Dubai (left), and a worker sleeping at the Sonapur camp (right); photo credit - Victor Romero

Since February 28^th, Sudeep has managed barely a few days of work. He does not yet know whether the forced leaves will count as paid or unpaid; that reckoning, he says, will come at the end of March or in the first week of April, when his salary slip arrives. Around him, fellow workers pick sides, debating geopolitics and the wild swings in crude oil prices. But Sudeep is thinking of something more elemental.

“They’ve forgotten the real, immediate danger hanging over our heads every single day,” he says. He is not leaving. Almost none of them are.

35 million in crosshairs

The US–Israel war on Iran, now entering its fourth week, has produced one of the gravest humanitarian emergencies for migrant labour in the modern history of the Gulf.

More than half of the roughly 62 million residents across the six GCC countries, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, are expatriates, totalling nearly 35 million migrants drawn to the region’s economic opportunities.

The largest groups are Indians (about 9.1 million), Bangladeshis (5 million), and Pakistanis (4.9 million), followed by Egyptians, Filipinos, Yemenis, Nepalis, Sudanese, Syrians, and Sri Lankans. They form the backbone of construction, hospitality, retail, logistics, transport and domestic service, the sectors now being devastated by war.

Since the conflict began, Iran has launched thousands of drones and missiles at GCC countries. For the first time in history, all six member states have come under Iranian fire.

Human Rights Watch reported that as of mid-March, at least 16 civilians had been killed across the Gulf and over 260 injured, with the majority being migrant workers. Thirteen of the dead were South Asian nationals, six Indians, four Bangladeshis, two Pakistanis and one Nepali—working as drivers, labourers, cleaners and sailors (these numbers have incrementally increased in the subsequent days as the attack on GCC nations continued sporadically, despite Iran’s assurances to the contrary).  

The dead are not collateral damage in any abstract sense. They are men and women who were at their workstations, delivering water, guarding a building entrance, repairing ships, when debris from intercepted missiles rained down.

In Ajman, a Bangladeshi water-delivery driver named Saleh Ahmed was killed when fragments from an intercepted missile pierced his truck cab. In Bahrain, a 48-year-old Bangladeshi shipbuilder, SM Tareq, died from missile debris at the Arab Shipbuilding and Repair Yard. A 29-year-old Nepali security guard, Dibas Shrestha, was killed in the UAE.

The latest Indian casualty underscores the arbitrary cruelty of this war for those at the bottom of the labour chain. Ravi Gopal, a worker from Telangana, was stationed near an oil refinery in Riyadh on the night of 18 March when he called his family around 9:30 p.m.

The conversation lasted about twenty minutes before the line suddenly went dead. His relatives tried repeatedly to reach him, calling his co-workers too, but every number was unreachable.

The following day, his friend Ram Vilas broke the news: Ravi had been killed by debris from an Iranian ballistic missile intercepted over the Saudi capital. He is one of the first confirmed Indian fatalities linked to falling debris from intercepted strikes in Saudi Arabia.



The calculus of staying put

The question that haunts every conversation among Gulf migrants today is simple: why not leave? The answer, as it turns out, is a thicket of economic compulsions, structural traps, and hard-earned lessons from past crises that make departure almost as dangerous as staying.

The first and most immediate barrier is cost. Even if a worker in Bahrain or Qatar decided today to flee, the logistics are prohibitively expensive.

Commercial airspace across the Gulf remains heavily disrupted. One-way tickets to India are commanding INR 70,000 or more, at least five times the usual fare, driven by surging demand, airspace closures and the broader panic gripping the region. For a low-wage worker earning INR 15,000–25,000 a month, this is not a month’s savings but of half a year.

Ramakrishnan P, a manager at an Indian manpower-supply company in Bahrain, described to The Polity the near-impossibility of packing up and leaving. To exit Bahrain, he would first have to travel overland to Dammam in Saudi Arabia, itself a risky and uncertain journey, then hope to secure a flight to India, if any are still operating. With his family beside him and dozens of workers depending on his company for their livelihoods, he feels he cannot run.

“I can’t just run away, even if missiles are flying right above us,” Ramakrishnan remarked. 

The second barrier is financial. Most low-wage Gulf migrants arrive in the region carrying debt. Rajesh Kumar, a Keralite working as cleaning staff in Saudi Arabia, paid nearly one lakh rupees to an agent to secure his job just nine months ago. On his meagre salary, he has not yet repaid that debt.

The workers and the high-rises they build; photo credit - LaboraAccommodation and Building.co.uk

If he leaves now, he loses everything: the pending salary, the end-of-service gratuity, and the possibility of recouping his recruitment costs. His company is telling workers to go on leave and return when things improve, but Rajesh knows the code: if he leaves, he will not be recalled.

“Like the majority of low-paid migrant workers here, I came after paying nearly one lakh rupees to an agent to secure this job about nine months ago. With the meagre salary, I haven’t been able to repay that debt. Now, with this crisis escalating, I have no other option but to stay back. Returning isn’t in my plans,” Rajesh Kumar, cleaning worker, Saudi Arabia, added.

The third barrier is structural. Under the kafala (sponsorship) system that still governs employment in most GCC states, despite piecemeal reforms in recent years, a worker’s legal residency is tied to the employer. Leaving the country without employer consent can mean forfeiting legal status, end-of-service benefits and any outstanding wages.

In a crisis where employers themselves are haemorrhaging revenue, securing a no-objection certificate or an orderly exit is rarely straightforward. Workers who abandon their posts risk being classified as absconders, a legal designation that can result in travel bans and blacklisting from future Gulf employment.

But perhaps the most powerful force keeping millions in place is the memory of what happened last time.

Why they learned not to go home

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, Gulf economies slowed sharply due to lockdowns, travel bans, and a collapse in construction, hospitality and retail.

Millions of migrant workers lost jobs or were placed on unpaid leave virtually overnight. Many were confined to labour camps, unable to work and unable to return home due to flight restrictions, surviving for months without income.

The economic shock exposed and intensified pre-existing vulnerabilities embedded in the kafala system. Delayed and unpaid wages, already common before the pandemic, escalated into widespread wage theft.

Surveys of returnee workers from GCC countries found that nearly 68 per cent did not receive wages owed after February 2020, with average losses exceeding USD 2,000 per worker. Between mid-2020 and 2021, more than 3,000 migrant workers from countries including India collectively lost over  USD 25 million in unpaid wages and benefits.

The Indian government, for its part, lacked any proper reintegration plan for returning migrants. Hundreds of thousands came home shattered and empty-handed, forced to return by circumstances but welcomed by nothing, no structured employment programme, no debt-relief mechanism, no systematic attempt to recover unpaid wages from Gulf employers.

This experience has seared itself into the collective memory of Gulf migrants. Mini Mohan, a migrant-rights activist based in Kerala with extensive contacts across the GCC, identified this as the critical factor shaping behaviour in the current crisis.

“Migrant workers in the Gulf countries have learned from that experience. Despite missiles and drones flying overhead in the current conflict, many are choosing to stay put. They know that if they return now, they risk losing their pending salaries, end-of-service benefits and other dues. Coming back empty-handed would not be welcomed at home, and at their age, mostly in their mid-40s and 50s, it would be extremely difficult to survive in India, where educated unemployment rates remain high,” Mini Mohan told The Polity.

The lesson of 2020 was brutal in its clarity: the Gulf may exploit you, but India cannot absorb you. Workers who returned during the pandemic discovered that the Indian labour market, particularly in states like Kerala, where much of the Gulf workforce originates, had no space for them.

Kerala’s youth unemployment stands at around 29.9 per cent. Graduate unemployment has hovered between 20 and 42 per cent in various reports. Nationally, the ILO’s India Employment Report 2024 found that youth unemployment among graduates reached 29.1 per cent, nearly nine times higher than for illiterate workers.

For a man in his late forties or fifties, returning from the Gulf with neither savings nor a job waiting, the prospects are dire.

Hence, they stay; not out of courage or of ignorance of the danger, but out of a rational, desperate calculation that the risk of death by falling debris is still better odds than the certainty of penury at home.

An economy in free fall

While workers weigh personal risk against personal ruin, the Gulf economy around them is cratering. The war’s most consequential economic weapon has been Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow chokepoint through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply passes.

Maritime traffic has plummeted due to attacks on vessels and heightened risks, halting most commercial transits. Brent crude has surged past  USD 112 a barrel. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency has confirmed at least 21 attacks on commercial vessels and offshore infrastructure since March 1^st.

The cascade effects are devastating. GCC states depend on desalination for roughly 90 per cent of their water supply. Food reserves are limited. The aluminium smelters that supply nearly a tenth of the world’s primary production are shutting down or curtailing output.

Qatar’s Qatalum has declared force majeure and begun shutting down operations, a process whose restart could take six to twelve months. Aluminium Bahrain has curtailed approximately 19 per cent of capacity. London Metal Exchange aluminium prices have surged to four-year highs.

On the ground, this translates into paralysis for the industries that employ migrants. Vargheese George, an Indian limousine driver in the UAE, described the collapse of the hospitality sector that sustained his livelihood.

“Many drivers, including myself, have been placed on forced leave because the hospitality sector is crumbling under the weight of the war. Flight operations remain heavily disrupted, deterring new arrivals. Hotel bookings have plummeted drastically. Why should a 100-key hotel stay fully open and keep its restaurant running if there are only 10 occupancies?” Vargheese George, limousine driver, UAE, told The Polity.

Ramakrishnan’s manpower-supply firm in Bahrain, which places workers with cleaning companies and small retail outlets, is haemorrhaging. Clients insist there is simply no revenue to justify keeping staff on payroll.

A major shopping mall has slashed its workforce. Ramakrishnan does not know if he can keep his company running past March. Even when workers are not placed with clients, he feels a moral obligation to cover at least a portion of their salaries.

A labour expert based in the UAE for the past decade, speaking anonymously to The Polity, offered a sobering forecast: the true scale of damage to migrants will not become clear until the end of March or early April, when salaries are calculated and paid. Companies are placing workers on forced leave with vague assurances that losses will eventually be settled, a promise the expert views with deep scepticism.

Workers in probation periods, particularly those who joined in the last six months, are being terminated outright, often without full end-of-service benefits or repatriation tickets. The hardest-hit sectors are hospitality, event management, logistics, and, increasingly, construction.

The Shaikh Zayed road of Dubai in the 1990s (left) and the high rises that dot this avenue many years later (right); photo source - Wikimedia Commons
  

A USD 50-billion lifeline under threat

The stakes of this crisis extend far beyond the Gulf. India is the world’s largest remittance recipient, with inflows estimated at USD 135.4 billion in the 2024–25 financial year. The Indian diaspora in GCC countries alone contributes nearly 38 per cent of this total, roughly  USD 50 billion annually.

Kerala alone receives approximately INR 16,000 crore each month from Gulf remittances. In the 2023–24 fiscal year, Keralite expatriates contributed  USD 23.39 billion to the state’s economy. One in four Kerala families has a member working in the Gulf.

In the short term, banks and remittance firms have reported a perverse surge in transfers from the Gulf, an estimated 20–30 per cent above normal in March, not because workers are earning more, but because they are frightened.

Faced with rising security risks, many expatriates are sending larger sums home as a precaution, accelerated by the rupee’s depreciation, which means each dirham or riyal now buys more in India. But analysts warn this should not be mistaken for good news. It is a sign of anxiety, not prosperity.

If the conflict drags on, the picture darkens rapidly. During the pandemic, the World Bank projected a nearly 20 per cent fall in remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries, the steepest drop in recent history. A repeat is plausible.

Gulf construction, hospitality and retail, the sectors that employ the bulk of Indian migrants, are precisely those industries that are most vulnerable to the current disruption. A slowdown will translate directly into job losses, wage cuts, and collapsing remittances, with cascading effects on millions of households across Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar.

The state’s economy, its housing market, its consumption patterns, and its entire development model are built on the foundation of Gulf remittances. When that foundation shakes, as it did during the 2008 financial crisis and during Covid-19, the reverberations are felt in every village and every household budget.

Workers retire for the day at cramped labour camps; photo source - Travelling Jezebel 

A system designed to trap

The reason migrant workers are so vulnerable in this crisis is not the war alone. It is the architecture of Gulf labour governance, the kafala system, the absence of portable social protections, and the power asymmetry between employer and employee that turns every economic shock into a humanitarian emergency for workers at the bottom.

During COVID-19, the pattern was laid bare: employers absorbed the initial economic shock, but costs were systematically passed on to workers through wage cuts, non-payment, and the loss of benefits.

The sponsorship system ties the legal status of the workers to their employers, limiting their ability to change jobs, seek legal redress, or leave the country without permission. As companies cut costs, workers had almost no bargaining power. Many were repatriated without compensation.

The same structural trap is now reasserting itself. Workers on forced leave do not know whether they will be paid. Workers in probation are being terminated without full entitlements. The sectors collapsing fastest include hospitality, events, and logistics, which are the ones with the highest concentration of recent arrivals, the very workers most indebted to recruitment agents and least protected by tenure.

Meanwhile, the Coalition on Labour Justice for Migrants in the Gulf, in a joint statement from organisations across nine cities, has called on GCC governments to guarantee wage protection during the crisis. The Coalition also sought non-discriminatory access to shelters and medical care, prohibit termination and forced repatriation during the conflict and provide safe, voluntary pathways for departure.

But the statement is a demand, not a description of reality. On the ground, migrant workers are navigating the crisis largely on their own.

The impossibility of evacuation

India has a storied history of large-scale evacuations from the Gulf. In 1990, during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, nearly 200,000 Indian nationals were airlifted home, still one of the largest civilian evacuations in history. The Indian government has set up a special control room to monitor the current crisis, and embassies have activated round-the-clock helplines.

But the scale of the current exposure makes any comparable evacuation practically impossible. Nine million Indians live across the GCC states. Even if only a fraction sought to leave simultaneously, the logistical challenge would dwarf any precedent.

Western expatriates, far fewer in number and typically better resourced, have already begun leaving or being evacuated by their governments. For millions of South Asian workers earning daily wages, the option simply does not exist in any meaningful sense.

The evacuation of Indians during the Gulf War of 1990; photo source - The Brighter World, Wikimedia Commons

As one Indian diplomat has told reporters, embassies are currently focused on evacuating stranded passengers, citizens in Iran and individuals in dire medical or financial need. The millions of low-wage workers in GCC countries who feel unsafe but are not in acute danger are, for now, being advised to shelter in place and follow local authority instructions.

Most, in any case, have already made their choice. They are staying.

They cannot afford to flee

On a quiet evening in Saudi Arabia, Rajesh Kumar sits in his shared accommodation and waits. He does not know if the war will end in days or months. He does not know if his salary will come. He does not know if the debris from the next intercepted missile will land somewhere near him.

What he does know is that he paid a lakh of rupees he did not have to get here, that he has not yet earned enough to repay that debt, and that nothing is waiting for him in Kerala except the certainty of unemployment.

Across the Gulf, millions of Sudeeps, Rajeshs, Ramakrishnans and Vargheeses are making the same calculation. The missiles overhead are real. The drones are real. The sirens that pierce the mornings and evenings of Doha, Dubai, Riyadh and Manama are real. But so is the knowledge, earned through the bitter experience of Covid-19, that going home empty-handed is its own kind of catastrophe, slower, quieter, but no less devastating.

Workers queue up for purchase and leisure after a day's work in Dubai; photo credit - Rejimon Kuttappan

They stay because they cannot afford to leave. They stay because the debts are unpaid and the agents are owed. They stay because the kafala system has made their legal existence contingent on an employer’s goodwill.

They stay because India’s labour market has no room for a 50-year-old returning from the Gulf with no savings and no skills that the domestic economy values. They stay because the last time they went home in a crisis, nobody was waiting with a plan.

They stay, in the end, because the architecture of global migration has been built in such a way that the people at the bottom, the milk deliverymen, the cleaners, the drivers, the construction hands, always bear the cost of other people’s wars.

And in the calculus of survival, a missile in the sky is a probability. Poverty at home is a certainty.

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