The police and security forces of Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have few military goals in common. But if there is a thread that binds them together, it is their reliance on a uniform-manufacturing unit across the Arabian Sea, in a Kerala district dubbed the Manchester of South India for its rich traditions in handlooms, powerlooms and, significantly, trade union movements.

Maryan Apparel Private Limited, which is headquartered in Bombay, has run its manufacturing unit out of an industrial park in Koothuparamba in north Kerala with quiet efficiency for the last sixteen years. Then, in late October 2023, a moral dilemma forced it to make an unusual business decision, and thrust it into international headlines. The unit was troubled when the Israel Occupation Forces started indiscriminately bombarding the Gaza Strip, in response to an attack on parts of central and southern Israel carried out on October 7 by militants from Hamas, based in Gaza. 

The Israeli retaliation proved disproportionately brutal. As images of mass casualties and unending misery poured out of Gaza, Maryan Apparel found itself unable to do business as usual. Its managing director suspended cooperation with its largest customer in the security uniform market, the Israeli police force, until the war was over, though existing contracts were to be honoured.

The decision paid unexpected dividends for the company, gaining praise from Kerala’s industries minister who belongs to the state’s ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist). Perhaps more importantly, its own workers rallied behind Maryan. “We felt relieved when the management made this decision by itself,” says Praveena K., a worker at the unit. 

“We were distressed to learn the plight of the people in Gaza, especially women and children. So many children perished; others had their future taken away. An entire generation is being wiped out,” Praveena, who is also the secretary of the dominant workers’ union at Maryan Apparel, told me. 

Maryan’s decision is inseparable from Kerala’s history of communist politics, which has long supported the Palestinian call to decolonise its lands and restore refugees expelled by Israeli aggression. The first thing that meets the eye outside the factory at Koothuparamba is a large flex board put up by a left-leaning trade union congratulating the management on its decision. The Centre of Indian Trade Unions represents about 900 of the 1500 workers in the factory.

The decision to drop a customer who brought in $1 million a year was not easy. Maryan Apparel began life in 2006 as a fabric maker and later a manufacturer of workwear for labourers in factories and oil rigs. After a decade of ups and downs, it tested new markets in 2013-14 when it bagged a contract to manufacture uniforms for the Kuwait National Guard and Fire Force units. The following year, it started supplying military uniforms to Saudi Arabia.   

Then the company received Israeli government representatives who were scouting for a potential manufacturer in India. It was 2015, and while Israeli aggression on Palestinian territory had become a fact of life, the story was more or less absent from Indian headlines, surfacing, if at all, as a matter of tragic status quo. A business association with the Israeli police was a milestone in the company’s path to diversification. Maryan’s MD, Thomas Olickal, hosted the representatives, knowing that Israeli forces were renowned for their high standards. 

“When they visited our unit, they were really impressed by the diligence with which we manufacture garments,” he said. The facility’s critical quality checks proved good enough for the delegation to award the contract to the company. At the time, it was a matter of jubilation: a deal with an Israeli agency meant good business with a reliable client.

“It was not just the quality checks that impressed the delegation, but also the working standards of employees, which were in stark contrast to the cheap labour sweatshops found elsewhere in developing countries,” Olickal told me. “The cost-effectiveness combined with stringent quality assurance and a worker-friendly factory ambience proved effective in getting a large assignment.” 

That was how Maryan began making four kinds of uniforms for the Israeli police—light green and light blue for the state police, light blue again for prison guards, and black for the special police force. The relationship looked like a long-lasting one, until October 7.

MADE IN INDIA

Despite the media spotlight on the Israeli deal, the security uniform segment contributes only about twenty per cent of business at Maryan. Its bread and butter, Olickal explained, is the supply of fire-resistant factory uniforms for workers in West Asian countries, especially those working in oil rigs. Garments like these are mandatory in facilities at risk of fire hazards. In the event of a fire accident, the suits give workers time to escape without sustaining severe burns. 

In this category, the company has orders worth 70 to 75 crore rupees with Saudi Arabia alone, and fulfils them with fabric sourced from Gujarat. Business is good as is evident from the fact that the company can afford to refuse its service to partners it no longer agrees with. 

The route to this enviable position was a tortuous one. 

From 1998 to 2002, Thomas Olickal ran a fabric-making unit in the textile hub of Erode in neighbouring Tamil Nadu. He set up Maryan Apparel—named after his mother, Marya—in 2006, as a fabric manufacturer buying yarn from Erode. In 2007, the company was invited by the state government-run Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation to set up shop in its Thiruvananthapuram facility. Olickal found it difficult to refuse. He saw an opportunity to expand the business, and to gain a foothold in his home state. 

Maryan started as an export-oriented unit in Kerala, but found itself in a fix when a potential long-term deal with an American customer fell through: designated export-oriented units are not permitted to supply to the domestic market. Without other options, the venture was sold to another group. That put all of Maryan’s 400-odd trained workers in no-man’s land. They had to go back, unemployed, to their native Kannur.

That’s when the assembly representative, P. Jayarajan of the ruling CPI(M), brought up the matter of a 75,000-sq-ft facility lying vacant in Koothuparamba, a historic town south-east of Kannur. It belonged to the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation and had been lying abandoned for close to seven years. 

Koothuparamba and its surroundings have been largely absent from national headlines apart from the flare-ups of violence between local workers of the CPI(M) and the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. But worker politics has a long history here, and it is a centre of handlooms and textile cooperatives. Apart from traditional weavers, the region was home to a disciplined workforce belonging to one of India’s pioneering co-operatives, the makers of Dinesh Beedi, which went out of work after a rough decline through the 1990s. 

It was not an ideal place to start a sweatshop that thrived on cheap labour. But Maryan Apparel was not looking to do that. 

Nonetheless, Olickal remembered, “Those initial years were really tough and full of deep crises.” In a labour-oriented unit, it amounts to catastrophe not to be able to offer regular employment. “In the first year itself, we didn’t get a power connection,” he said. “We had employed all the 400 workers in the unit, and suffered a loss of 2 crore rupees.” 

Things got worse, until one year the annual loss amounted to 15 crore rupees. The company was in the red for almost eight years. Yet, it held on by pooling resources and raising funds. Then, in 2012, the uniforms became a business. 

“The initial orders were for a domestic private security agency that needed about 50,000 pieces,” Olickal said. The client went bankrupt, and Maryan Apparel suffered a body blow. This time, though, the setback wasn’t pure disaster. 

“Even though we suffered losses initially, it helped us build a system to make quality security uniforms. That is our major achievement,” he said. As more deals came in for security agency clothing, the factory had already acquired the expertise to make them in a time-bound manner. Less than a year after the initial failed order, Maryan’s first international deal, to make hospital apparel for a client in Saudi Arabia, came through.

GLOBAL YARN

The Israeli uniforms are more than a ‘made-in-India, worn-in-Israel’ kind of global story. Every thread in their tale comes with its own travelogue. Maryan-made uniforms, which bear the insignias of national pride and sovereignty, are made as an international collaboration with multiple partners.

The majority of their fabric is sourced from the United States. Badges for the light-green uniforms are imported from China. The 20L sized buttons, 12 mm in diameter, are procured from Mumbai. Fusing material for the shirt collar comes from Chennai. All of these are shipped to the factory in Kannur where the final assembly and manufacturing takes place, before the uniforms cross the Arabian Sea to their final destination. 

 “Compared to their home country or countries like the United States, we can produce them for half the price in India,” Olickal said. Despite the desire to minimise costs, however, no country can afford to compromise on the quality of the uniforms worn by its police and armed forces. They represent state security, and have to be of the best quality, the better to symbolise national resilience and sturdiness. 

 “There is no room for error,” Saji Kumar, in charge of the cutting department at Maryan Apparel, said. He brings to the company his experience at a private firm that used to manufacture uniforms for the Indian Navy. “Always quality over quantity when it comes to uniforms.” 

 Israel’s uniforms are made of 100 per cent polyester imported from the United States except for those of the Israel Prison Service, the ‘Shabas’, which are sixty per cent polyester and forty per cent cotton sourced locally from Mumbai. The uniforms require a cool-fit finish that allows them to be sweat-absorbent and to dry quickly. 

The adherence to quality begins when yarn is selected to make the fabric, Maryan’s embroidery manager K L Santosh said. Olickal elaborated: the yarn has to go through between ten and fifteen separate testing processes before it is chosen to manufacture the fabric. ‘Light fastness’—ensuring that the colour does not fade under harsh light and rugged working conditions—is critical. So is ‘washing fastness’, for which the manufacturers use high-quality dyes. 

Dyed fabric is washed with white cloth to make sure the colour does not bleed. Imported American polyester, which has already undergone standard quality checks, is tested again at the Koothuparamba factory. The fabric then goes through a bartack stitching machine, which makes the clothes with thread selected for its durability and stretchable quality. The machine sews thirteen to fourteen stitches per inch to ensure the seams don’t tear under stress.  

From this process, the light-blue fabric of the prison guard uniform emerges. The fabric is selected and sent for cutting, then passes through multiple stages of production, starting with the arrival of samples and sketches from the head office in Mumbai. The pattern master at the Kannur factory makes a pattern and sends it for computerised design (CAD). A badge is embroidered before it is stitched on the shirt’s left sleeve. For the light-green police uniforms, the badges come readymade from China. 

“We can embroider about 600 badges a day,” Santosh, the embroidery manager, told me while he loaded up the Wilcom software on his computer. He’s doing a last-minute check before he initiates the embroidery of the Israel Prison Service emblem which goes on the left-hand sleeve. Santosh oversees thirty embroidery machines needling the light-blue shirt fabric. He knows that it takes 16,000 stitches to make the logo, and roughly forty-five minutes to finish one badge.

MARYAN APPAREL’S FIRST state security uniform deal came from Kuwait in 2013-14 when a government representative came down to Kerala after hearing about its uniform supply to Kuwait hospitals. What Olickal described as a “bulk order” then came from the Kuwait Fire Force, followed by one more from the Kuwait National Guard. Together, the business was worth $600,000 to 700,000 a year.  

This was followed by a contract from Saudi Arabia to make military uniforms in 2015.

In that year, Maryan Apparel did business worth $500,000 to 600,000, and made about 110,000 pieces. In 2017, it crossed over to servicing South-East Asia by fulfilling a relatively small order of about 5000 pieces to the Philippine army.  

For the Qatar Police, the firm made fabrics alone. Its client demanded ‘poly-wool suiting,’ a high-end fabric similar to what premium brands like Raymond’s might use. Olickal said a metre costs up to 1000 rupees. Maryan does not stitch these uniforms, which the buyer prefers to get made in Qatar. But an economy of scale makes it worth the while. It buys yarn and makes the fabric in Mumbai, and the business of fabric supply to Qatar comes in at about $500,000-600,000 annually. 

As it has grown, Maryan Apparel has made uniforms for service personnel in Kuwait, Oman and the Philippines, as well as for US soldiers who remain in Iraq to work with local security agencies. 

But for all this activity, until the lapse of its contract, the company’s biggest buyer, which had been with them since 2015, was Israel.

Social capital

“I was prepared for the repercussions,” Olickal said of the contract cancellation. “But I was overwhelmed by the reaction. Journalists from several countries including the UK and France called me. Even the ambassador of Lebanon called up to congratulate me in person.” 

Olickal’s decision is in consonance with the company’s sensitivity to labour issues. Women like Pushpa and Praveena make up ninety percent of Maryan Apparel’s workforce. Growing up in working families with strong bonds to trade union movements, their social conscience is as sharp as their professional diligence. They live in a state with total literacy, and workers and their communities are aware of the value of their work and its impact. War-profiteering has little currency among them. Perhaps the biggest validation of Olickal’s stand came from Israel itself. While the workers concurred, his critics warned him that his move was suicidal. But, he said, the Israeli government has taken a softer stance.

“They are still trying to convince us to continue to make uniforms for them,” he claimed. “It

is not easy for a country to shift vendors and make sure that they meet the quality with which we make the uniforms.” He said the Israeli officials had been respectful of Maryan Apparel’s position that until the war was over, it would not be taking any new orders. (I was unable to confirm this independently.)

The last uniforms rolling off the lines are part of the existing orders Maryan will honour. It has about 50,000 prison police uniforms to deliver by the end of 2023. Nor does its stance cut all ties with the Israeli military establishment. Since it does not apply to contracts signed before 7 October, it is due to begin making uniforms for conscripts to Israel’s mandatory military training. 

“Production is yet to begin,” Olickal told me. The fabric will be olive green, a colour similar to an Indian army uniform. The shirt is hundred per cent cotton, the trousers seventy-three per cent, mixed with polyester.

Maryan’s stance on violence in Gaza is unequivocal, but Olickal feels that its association with Israel is too long for ties to be snapped forever. As with many others in the global community, his business concerns are in line with his humanitarian views. He would like the present crisis to be temporary, and for peace to resume. He said he had promised the authorities that the business talks might resume once the war was over. 

“We know them well,” he said. “They know us well.”