By Adv. Bhavya Razshree — April 2026

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint air strikes on Iran. Iran retaliated across the Gulf. By March 4, the Strait of Hormuz was functionally closed. The International Energy Agency called it the "largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market." Twenty thousand mariners and two thousand ships were stranded in the Persian Gulf. Among them, an unknown number of Indian women whose employment contracts contain no force majeure clause, whose passports are routinely held by employers in violation of Article 12 of the ICCPR, and whose right of consular access under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963 is honoured only where the host state allows it.

The war is being reported in barrels and geopolitics. This piece argues something narrower. The crisis is, at its root, a failure of three legal regimes operating simultaneously: international labour law, India's statutory framework for emigration, and the constitutional duty owed by the Indian State to its citizens abroad. Each of those failures has a name. Each has a remedy. Neither has been pursued.

I. The kafala question — when private contract becomes public bondage

The Gulf labour market for migrant women operates under variants of the kafala sponsorship system. Under kafala, the worker's legal residence in the host country is tied to a single employer-sponsor. Termination of employment automatically terminates the right to remain. The worker cannot change jobs without sponsor consent. In several Gulf jurisdictions, leaving the employer's premises without permission constitutes "absconding" — a criminal offence punishable by detention and deportation.

The legal effect of this arrangement is to convert what should be a contract of employment into a relation of personal dependence enforced by the criminal law of the host state. Domestic workers — overwhelmingly women — bear the sharpest end of it. In many Gulf countries, domestic workers are excluded from labour laws entirely. Their working hours, rest days, minimum wages, and termination rights exist only as private contractual matter, unenforceable through labour tribunals.

India is not without instruments to address this. The ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (C189) requires ratifying states to extend basic labour rights to domestic workers, including written contracts, weekly rest, social security, and protection from violence. India has not ratified C189. Nor has it ratified the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 1990. The legal vacuum this creates is not theoretical. It means that when an Indian woman in Riyadh is denied wages, has her passport confiscated, or is sexually assaulted by her sponsor, India's domestic statutory machinery has no extraterritorial hook to act, and India's diplomatic posts have no treaty-grounded obligation to demand redress.

II. India's Emigration Act — a 1983 statute for a 2026 crisis

The principal Indian statute governing labour migration is the Emigration Act, 1983. It was drafted to regulate the post-Gulf-boom rush of male construction workers. It defines "emigrant" in male-coded terms, treats migration as a transactional event rather than a continuing legal relationship, and contains no specific protections for women in domestic-worker streams.

Section 22 of the Act criminalises emigration without registration. In practice, the criminalisation falls on the worker, not the recruitment agent. Section 24's provisions on agent fraud carry a maximum imprisonment of two years — lower than the punishment for many property offences. The "Protector of Emigrants" structure, set up under Section 3, has not kept pace with female migration: no cell within it has standing jurisdiction over domestic-worker contracts, and no statutory mechanism exists to register, verify, or escrow the wages of women migrating under household-employment visas.

The proposed Overseas Mobility Bill, 2025 is a long-overdue replacement. But the draft, in its current form, retains the centralised licensing model, omits a private right of action against fraudulent recruitment, and is silent on social security portability. A Bill that does not give an aggrieved migrant worker a cognisable cause of action in an Indian court is not a protection regime. It is an administrative reorganisation.

III. The constitutional question — Article 21 does not stop at the border

The Supreme Court has held repeatedly that Article 21 of the Constitution — the right to life and personal liberty — applies to Indian citizens wherever they are. In Nagendra Rao v. State of A.P. (1994), the Court read into Article 21 a positive obligation on the State to protect citizens from foreseeable harm. In Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), the right to travel and to consular protection was held to be implicit in personal liberty.

If those holdings mean anything, they mean that an Indian citizen working in a Gulf country under conditions of de facto bondage, exposed to known war risks, with passport confiscated and no diplomatic recourse, is entitled to demand from the Indian State a particular standard of pre-emptive protection. The Indian State currently provides this only as a matter of policy discretion, not as a matter of enforceable right.

The contrast with the e-Migrate platform's regulatory ambition is sharp. The platform tracks emigration clearance for 18 designated countries. It does not track contractual performance, wage payment, or worker safety after departure. A constitutional right with no monitoring infrastructure is a constitutional right in name only.

IV. The numbers behind the legal vacuum

On March 8, 2026, Brent crude crossed $100 per barrel for the first time in four years. By March 19, Dubai crude hit $166 per barrel, the highest on record. India imports 60 percent of its LPG through the Strait of Hormuz. On March 27, the government reduced excise duties by Rs 10 per litre on petrol and diesel.

India is the world's largest recipient of remittances. In 2024, Indians abroad sent home approximately $137 billion. West Asia provides roughly 38 percent. In March 2026, remittance flows from the Gulf surged 20 to 30 percent above normal — a panic transfer, not prosperity. Migration experts have called it the most severe crisis faced by migrant workers in the last fifty years.

Kerala receives approximately Rs 2.1 trillion in remittances annually, roughly 20 percent of its net state domestic product. Bihar receives Rs 275 billion. Uttar Pradesh receives Rs 366 billion. Punjab receives Rs 458 billion. There are approximately 8.5 to 9 million Indians in the Gulf. Women now account for 49 percent of all Indian migrants.

These figures matter for the legal argument. Where the labour relationship of millions of citizens generates 38 percent of national remittances and 20 percent of one state's GDP, the absence of a statutory protection regime is not a regulatory gap — it is a constitutional default.

V. The women who cannot leave — and why

After the October 2023 Hamas attack, 14,000 Indian nurses and caregivers in Israel did not return home. The reason was contractual and legal. If their visas expired while they were in India, re-entry would cost Rs 15 to 20 lakh in agency fees — fees that the Emigration Act does not cap, that recruitment licences do not bind, and that no Indian forum has jurisdiction to refund. They stayed through the bombing because the alternative — a return without re-entry rights — was financially ruinous. That is not a free choice in any meaningful legal sense. It is duress structured into the migration contract itself.

The data on what happens to those who do not return is sparse and selective. The Vital Signs Partnership estimates that approximately 10,000 South and Southeast Asian migrant workers die in the Gulf every year. More than half of those deaths are recorded as "natural causes" or remain unexplained. Indian missions cannot independently audit those classifications. Bilateral labour MoUs that India has signed with Gulf states — with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait — do not contain enforceable provisions on autopsy access, repatriation of mortal remains within fixed timelines, or independent investigation of deaths in custody. They are, in legal terms, declarations of friendship dressed as treaties.

VI. What a legally serious response would look like

India has evacuated its citizens from conflict zones before. The Kuwait airlift of 1990 moved 176,000 people in 59 days. But evacuation is the remedy of last resort. The legally serious response operates on four levels:

First, ratify and domesticate. India should ratify ILO C189 and the 1990 Migrant Workers Convention, and enact implementing legislation that gives domestic workers abroad the same statutory floor as domestic workers in India under the Code on Social Security, 2020.

Second, rewrite the Emigration Act. The Overseas Mobility Bill should create a private right of action for cheated migrants, escrow recruitment fees in regulated accounts, mandate gender-disaggregated grievance cells in every consulate, and impose strict liability on recruitment agencies for placements that breach host-state law.

Third, treaty-grade bilateral protection. Each MoU with a Gulf labour-receiving state should be upgraded to a treaty under Article 73 of the Constitution, ratified, and made enforceable in writ jurisdiction. Mandatory clauses: 24-hour passport-confiscation reporting, automatic transfer of sponsorship in cases of abuse, treaty-grounded autopsy access, and an arbitration mechanism with seat in a neutral jurisdiction.

Fourth, conflict-triggered insurance. A statutory insurance fund, funded by a small levy on remittance transfers and recruitment fees, should activate the moment the host country enters armed conflict — providing immediate cash transfer to families, repatriation flights, and legal aid for contractual disputes. Insurance that pays out only after death is not insurance. It is forensic accounting.

The closing argument

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed a dependency that India has always known about but never fully confronted. Half of India's crude oil comes from the Middle East. Sixty percent of its cooking gas passes through a single chokepoint. Thirty-eight percent of its remittances originate in a region that is now at war. And at every point in this chain, the person absorbing the legal vacuum at the Indian end is a woman.

India counts its remittances in trillions. It counts its oil imports in millions of barrels. It does not count, in any statute, regulation, or treaty, the number of its women whose contractual subordination in another sovereign's territory has become, in effect, a permanent feature of India's foreign-exchange architecture.

The law should count what it values. Until the Emigration Act is rewritten, until C189 is ratified, until each bilateral MoU is upgraded to an enforceable treaty, India will continue to balance its current account on the unenforced rights of women it cannot statutorily protect. That is not foreign policy. That is a deferred constitutional liability.

Adv. Bhavya Razshree is an Advocate practising at the Delhi High Court.