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There is a specific kind of dread that has no clinical category and no government scheme — the dread of a woman in Malappuram or Muzaffarpur who knows her husband is somewhere in the Gulf, knows a war is happening near him, and does not know, for hours or days at a time, whether he is safe.
She cannot leave. She cannot reach him always. She runs the house, manages the children, fields questions from relatives, and carries the uncertainty alone. Indian policy has a framework for almost every other aspect of Gulf migration. It has nothing for her mind.
India has over nine million citizens living and working in Gulf Cooperation Council countries. The vast majority are men. The households they leave behind are, overwhelmingly, managed by women — women who become, in their husbands’ absence, sole decision-makers, sole caregivers, and sole absorbers of every anxiety the migration produces.
This was always a psychologically demanding arrangement. Researchers who study Gulf-migration communities in Kerala and Bihar have documented the pattern consistently: chronic loneliness, the strain of managing family affairs alone, the difficulty of meeting day-to-day demands without a partner are among the most recurring themes in interviews with women in these households. The migration literature has a term for them — “wives of migrants” or “women left behind” — that is accurate and somehow also manages to erase everything they are actually doing.
Now add a war.
The Gulf conflict has introduced a new and specific terror into this already strained arrangement. These women are now managing not just the ordinary anxiety of separation — the delayed calls, the missed milestones, the loneliness that accumulates quietly — but a fear that has a body count. They watch news channels that show airstrikes. They receive WhatsApp forwards they cannot verify. They call and sometimes cannot get through. The uncertainty is not abstract. It is hourly.
Research is unambiguous that armed conflict has among the most negative impacts on mental health of any human experience — not only for those in the conflict zone but for those with emotional ties to it. Fear of traumatic events and fear of their recurrence are primary drivers of anxiety, depression, and PTSD even in people who are geographically distant from the fighting. The woman in Malappuram is not in the Gulf. But she is not safe from the Gulf either.
Depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders are common among those connected to migration and conflict. Many suffer silently due to stigma and a lack of access to care. In rural and semi-urban India, where most Gulf-migration households are located, the stigma around women’s mental health remains severe. A woman who says she is anxious or struggling is more likely to be told to pray, to stay busy, or to think of the children than to be referred to any form of support. The support, in most cases, does not exist anyway.
India has virtually no mental health infrastructure targeted at this population. The government’s District Mental Health Programme reaches only a fraction of those who need it, is concentrated in urban centres, and is not designed for the specific psychological profile of women managing migration-related stress and conflict-related fear simultaneously. There are no counselling services linked to the MADAD migrant welfare portal. There are no crisis helplines publicised in the districts with the highest Gulf-migration rates. There is no acknowledgement, at any level of policy, that the mental health of the woman at home is a migration welfare issue at all.
This is a gap that predates the current conflict. The conflict has made it dangerous.
The National Mental Health Survey of India found that roughly 80 percent of people experiencing mental health distress had not received any treatment in the previous 12 months. That number is almost certainly higher among women in rural Gulf-migration households, where the cultural pressure to appear capable and unburdened is intense, where talking about psychological distress is read as a failure of character, and where the nearest mental health professional may be two hours away.
What the Gulf conflict has done, in these households, is turn a chronic and manageable stress into an acute one. The ordinary loneliness of waiting now has sirens in it. The ordinary uncertainty now has a map of missile strikes attached to it. And the women carrying that fear have no more support than they did before the war began.
India spends enormous institutional energy on getting its workers into the Gulf and, when necessary, getting them out. It has spent almost none on the mental health of the families those workers leave behind. That asymmetry was always a policy failure. Right now, with a war running and millions of Indian women managing the fear of it alone, it is an active one.
The grief that has no name deserves, at minimum, a government that knows it exists.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.