DUBAI, 22 June 2004 — When Ram Buxani came to Dubai 45 years ago, it was an obscure trading outpost under the thumb of Imperial Britain that he couldn’t even find on the map. Now one of India’s most successful overseas businessmen and a pillar of the Indian community in the United Arab Emirates, he says he is proud to live in a high-tech metropolis whose rags-to-riches story matches his own.
“I don’t think I could have located Dubai on a map,” he says in his best-selling autobiography “Taking The High Road”. “Dubai wasn’t a well-known destination in those days. It was yet to emerge as the El Dorado where you could make money.
“There was no water, no airport, no electricity, no roads, no telephone, and there was no oil. Even flour for bread from the market had ants moving in it, and you had to live in heat of 50 degrees,” adds the jovial Buxani, now in his 60s.
The book has been welcomed in the local media as a contribution to the largely unwritten history of Dubai’s stunning transformation over the last three decades into a hip city of skyscrapers, commerce and tourism.
It also recounts how — like more than a million other Sindhis who fled south Pakistan — Buxani’s family was reduced to penury and refugee status during the partition of the subcontinent, wandering the new India in search of a new beginning.
Then at 18 he made the fateful decision to come to Dubai. Indians were taking advantage of import-export openings in Dubai, a British protectorate that used the Indian rupee as legal tender. One firm, run by Sindhis, offered him a job. After a five-day boat trip from Bombay he arrived in the Gulf.
“Now Dubai is booming, it’s a wonderful place to live — 40 years ago it was not a wonderful place to live,” he said in an interview at the offices of ITL-Cosmos Group where he is executive vice-chairman.
Buxani was one of the first of hundreds of thousands of Indian migrant workers who Dubai’s rulers invited to transform the port town into today’s shining modern city. Indeed, in the rush to modernity the indigenous Arabs have made themselves a minority in their own country — around 15 percent of a population of some four million. Indians and Pakistanis make up the bulk of the expatriate community.
Today, wandering through the sprawling market districts of Deira or Bur Dubai, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in downtown Bombay or Calcutta. Even shop names are written in Urdu or Hindi, which rank alongside Arabic and English as the major tongues of the UAE’s grand multicultural experiment.
But there’s a catch. Even long-term residents have no voting rights in the UAE, a federation of Gulf emirates set up in 1971. “I feel that I belong here, but on the other side, whether the country thinks it too is a different story,” Buxani said.
Alarmed by the rising ratio of expatriates, who are attracted by tax-free salaries, clean living and urban order, the authorities started an “Emiratization” drive to employ UAE nationals and encourage them not to marry foreigners.
“There have been certain compromises, such as that we cannot express many things very openly, but that goes with the policy of the country...It’s give and take,” Buxani said, referring to the desire of long-term foreign residents for nationality.
“The fact they have opened the place to so many expatriates who outnumber the local people - that in itself is showing a lot of tolerance,” he added.
In his book, Buxani says Dubai’s liberal economy gained from India’s failed post-colonial socialism, saying he admires the UAE model of attracting local and foreign private investment.
Dubai’s prosperity today is bringing even more Indians, from an army of construction workers to business executives. But they have less attachment to Dubai than those who grew up with the evolving city, Buxani said.
“I came to make my living. At that time people did not come to share the prosperity because that prosperity was not there,” he said. “Now people who come are attached to the prosperity and if they feel there is a shaky situation they may leave.”
Though Buxani says he’s worried about the future of Indian Sindhi language and culture, Dubai remains the refugee’s home. “We have no place we can say is our own. We are refugees and continue to be refugees,” he said. “I feel I belong here...this country has given everything any country would give.”
