Public Donations Free Kerala Migrant Worker from Saudi Death Row. Where Was the State?

By Mariya Rajan

June 2, 2026

Abdul Rahim, a Keralite migrant worker who had been on death row in Saudi Arabia, returned home on May 28 after nearly 20 years in prison, freed only after a community fundraising campaign collected 340 million (34 crore) rupees in blood money and the Saudi Supreme Court upheld a 20-year sentence he had by then nearly finished serving. The case exposes how completely a migrant worker’s life can come to depend on a foreign legal system that their family cannot navigate, and how the resilience of Kerala’s diaspora networks, genuine as it is, has come to substitute for protections the state was never equipped to provide.

Rahim, from Kozhikode district, went to Saudi Arabia as a driver for a Saudi family and also cared for the family’s partially paralysed teenage son, who depended on a medical device attached to his neck for breathing and feeding. In 2006, the device was dislodged while Rahim was with the boy, and the boy died. A Saudi court sentenced Rahim to death.

In April 2024, the Abdul Rahim Legal Aid Committee ran a campaign through a mobile application called “Save Abdul Rahim,” raising the money from expatriate workers, daily wage labourers, business people and students. The money was paid as diya, the blood money provision under Saudi law that allows a victim’s family to accept compensation in cases of accidental death in exchange for pardoning the accused. The family accepted and pardoned Rahim, and a Saudi court lifted the death sentence in July 2024.

However, the pardon did not release him. Under Saudi law, a case of this kind carries two tracks of liability, one owed to the victim’s family and resolved through the diya payment, and a second owed to the state under the Public Rights Act, which the prosecution pursued independently. The Riyadh Criminal Court sentenced him to 20 years in May 2025, after roughly 13 hearings.

Because Rahim had already served about 19 years by that point, the sentence effectively left him about one year to complete. The prosecution appealed for a longer term; the Saudi appellate court rejected that in July 2025, and the Supreme Court upheld the 20-year sentence in September 2025. He finally finished his time in May 2026.

Then Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan called the crowdfunding “the real Kerala story.” The scale and speed of the collection were genuinely striking. Kerala sends more workers to the Gulf than almost any other Indian state, and remittances from those workers contribute substantially to the state’s economy. A state that benefits so heavily from its diaspora could reasonably be expected to have institutional mechanisms to assist workers who face criminal charges abroad. However, there is no formal legal defence fund, no state-backed diplomatic mechanism, and no standardised protocol for responding when a migrant worker becomes entangled in a foreign criminal justice system.

That gap became visible in the crowdfunding campaign itself. Because Rahim's family spent years navigating Saudi courts with limited resources and little familiarity with a legal system designed for Arabic speakers and those who understand its procedures, the burden of raising the compensation ultimately fell largely on migrant workers, many of whom earn modest wages themselves.

The fundraising figures point to a larger structural issue. A campaign that can collect 340 million rupees from ordinary wage earners within days reflects a community with substantial financial resources and a strong capacity for collective action. That capacity, currently activated only in emergencies and by people themselves, points to what a more structured response could look like. The Philippines has built a formal state mechanism through the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration that funds legal representation for Filipino workers facing criminal charges abroad.

While Kerala will remember Rahim’s return as a people’s victory, it will also stand as evidence of the policy failure that made such a victory necessary.

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