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Society
Exiles in their Homeland
by
K.A. Shaji
Illiterate
migrant workers from north Kerala who were stuck in Pakistan after
Partition have waged a fruitless lifelong struggle to regain their
Indian citizenship.
Thoombil Ahammed is 76 now. When he was in his twenties, he worked in a
restaurant in Mumbai on daily wages. In 1953, a travel operator promised
to take him to Dubai in a wooden vessel for Rs 50. Ahammed agreed, but
was offloaded at Karachi instead. He started working in a restaurant
there. Some years later, when he got the news from home — Pattar
Nadakkavu village, near Thirunavaya in Malappuram district — that his
mother was unwell and he wanted to come and see her, his bosses advised
him to apply for a Pakistani passport. Ahammed, who is illiterate, did
as he was told. He spent three months in India during the first visit
and used the same passport to come to Malappuram on five other occasions
during his 22-year stay in Pakistan. It was during his visits that he
married Kunhimariam and fathered three children. His wife and children
never went to Pakistan and are Indian citizens.
Ahammed
shifted to Dubai from Pakistan where, eight years ago, he was
diagnosed with diabetes and both his legs amputated. He decided to
return home to India and that is when his troubles began. After he
returned, the police and security agencies labelled him an
"infiltrator" and, since then, have been trying to put him in prison
or deport him to Pakistan. Ahammed has won temporary reprieve as the
Kerala High Court has issued a stay-order in his favour. But he is
not very hopeful, as he knows that the stay could be vacated any
time and the police would then try to deport him to Pakistan. "Give
me at least a chance to die as an Indian," he pleads.
Ahammed is not alone in his predicament. There are over 700 men like
him in Kerala who went looking for jobs to Lahore and Karachi in
Pakistan just before and after Partition. They were seeking a better
source of livelihood to support their large joint families back
home, and did not see much difference between Mumbai and Karachi at
the time.
For many, disillusionment was swift. Unlike Ahammed who managed to
stay on, barely had they reached newly created Pakistan, they were
labelled infiltrators and deported. They returned to their homes,
mostly along the Malabar coast in north Kerala, and since then have
lived in limbo, belonging to neither India nor Pakistan. Now
concentrated in Kannur, Kasargod, Kozhikode and Malappuram
districts, in the autumn of their lives, they are still under the
constant threat of deportation.
Eighty-four-year-old Hassan Koya who hails from Pandikkad lived in
Mumbai at the time of Partition. He joined a caravan headed for
Karachi, where he set up a stationary store and married a Pakistani
girl. In 1953, Koya came to India for a month on a Pakistani
passport, and when he went back he found that his shop had a new
owner and his wife, a new husband. He was arrested by the police
there and imprisoned for two years before being deported to India.
Since then, Koya has been reduced to a political shuttlecock. "I was
deported four times by Pakistani authorities and twice by their
Indian counterparts. During my stay in Pakistan, they branded me as
an Indian spy and treated me shabbily. When I landed in India, it
was the same — except that I was now a Pakistani spy," he said.
Vattassery Mohammed of Malappuram, now 83, went to Pakistan after
Partition. He was disillusioned within three years and returned to
India on a Pakistani passport. He surrendered his passport at
Parappanangadi police station in Malappuram and was instantly
deported. He was forced to cross the border near Barmer in
Rajasthan, where Pakistani soldiers opened fire and he sustained
bullet injuries.
Eranhikkal Kammu of Munnivoor is a veteran of four deportations and
as many returns. Pakistani authorities dubbed him an infiltrator
because he could not speak Urdu and demolished his teashop in
Karachi. He says that there were direct trains from Parappanangadi
to Karachi and Lahore before partition. He boarded one and has
regretted it ever since.
Kundoor village situated near Thanoor in Malappuram has about 17
elders with Pakistani passports. Once every month they sign on the
register at Thanoor police station. (At District Police
Superintendent Office in Malappuram, about 270 aged men sign on the
register each month .)
"All political parties, except for some hardcore elements in the bjp
and the rss, agree that these men should be granted citizenship. mps
MP Veerendrakumar and A.Vijayaraghavan have raised the issue several
times in Parliament and have made representations to the home
ministry, but to no avail," says Thoppil Shajahan, a Tirur-based
social worker.
"I went to Baluchistan before Partition without anticipating that
India would be bifurcated. Soon after Independence, I returned to
India to join my family. But even at the age of 80, I am facing
deportation," says Kuthirodathu Mohammed alias Baluchi Mohammed, who
now suffers from respiratory ailments. He was saved from deportation
twice at the intervention of the Kerala High Court. "I have never
indulged in any kind of anti-national activities. Poor people like
me never wanted the creation of two states," Mohammed said.
Ninety-two-year-old Perumal Parambil Syed Alavi is bedridden and
can't even recall the place in Pakistan where he used to live before
Partition. He is unable to acknowledge friends and relatives. But
his name is still on the list of "Pakistani citizens" facing
deportation. Policemen pay him a visit regularly. ("Are you the same
official who came to my home last month to delete my name from the
ration card?" he shouted at this correspondent.) A kindly supply
officer had entered his name in the ration card but his successor
deleted it, saying that there could be no ration without
citizenship.
While authorities dismiss the matter as a minor issue involving a
few families in north Malabar, problems of Indians with Pakistani
passport also became an issue in Pondicherry last year when
74-year-old V. Ibrahim, a heart-patient for last several years, was
forcibly deported to Pakistan through the Wagah border in Punjab
under the orders of the Union home ministry. The expulsion order,
which was invoked under the 1946 Foreigners' Act, reached Ibrahim
during Ramzan.
Ibrahim hails from Nedumbram near Chalakkara in Mahe district, and
his deportation raised numerous questions, especially the divergent
attitude being adopted, both by the government and the society at
large, towards these so-called foreign citizens. Mahe was a former
French colony and is home to a number of French citizens who receive
monthly pension from the French government. For them foreign
(French) citizenship is a boon, while his foreign (Pakistani)
citizenship has haunted Ibrahim all these years. Eleven months after
he was deported, Ibrahim is now back in Mahe knocking at every door
to avoid another round of humiliating deportation drama.
The unfortunate elderly men have to live with temporary visa
extensions and regular visits to local police stations or courts to
avoid the constant threat of deportation. All that they want is
permission to remain with their dear and near ones at the fag end of
their lives. They keep stressing that they have no criminal records.
Their problems began with Pakistan's decision after Partition not to
allow migrants who wanted to visit their families back home to leave
the country without a Pakistani passport. They unsuspectingly
accepted the Pakistani passport, making them permanently suspect in
the eyes of Indian authorities. While "Pakistani nationals" are
usually unthinkingly associated with fundamentalist Muslim
organisations, police authorities are clear that these elderly men
have no extremist or criminal links.
Today, the Centre is reluctant to grant them Indian citizenship. The
Kerala government forwards their applications to New Delhi as a
matter of routine and there is no further action from the home
ministry in Delhi which just sits on the files. Many cases are
pending in the courts in Kerala, which gives authorities an excuse
to delay any decision. Officials in the home ministry in Delhi
refuse to comment on the subject. "The matter is confidential and
cannot be discussed with the press," said an official dealing with
the matter.
"The issue needs a political solution," says a home ministry
official. Those who tried to go through the official route to get
citizenship failed. Sixty-eight-year-old Masood, for instance, was
asked by the Indian authorities to establish his Pakistani
nationality first. They also asked him for a renunciation
certificate from Pakistan. "For the last 11 years, I have shuttled
between Kerala and Delhi trying to become an Indian citizen. The
Pakistani embassy in Delhi wants me to cite three witnesses in
Karachi to issue the certificate. I left Karachi around 35 years
ago. How can I find witnesses?" he asks.
As Vijayaraghavan points out, there have been other cases where
Pakistani migrants of Indian origin were granted citizenship — 1,469
migrants to Pakistan from Gujarat and 11,298 from Rajasthan got
their citizenship upon their return to India two years ago. That is
all that the long suffering men of Malabar want, so that they can
spend the last few years of their lives in their country in peace.
July 8, 2007
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