Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India

What is the issue?

The Citizenship Amendment Act was recently passed in India, in regards with offering citizenship to illegal migrants.
In this connection, here is a look at the issue of the Sri Lankan Tamils, as they are excluded from the provisions of the Act.

When did the refugees from Sri Lanka arrive in India?

Tamils who came from Sri Lanka can be separated into those who came before 1983 and those who came after.
The latter was when the separatist movement in Sri Lanka took a violent turn followed by a series of anti-Tamil riots.
Most of the 1 lakh documented Sri Lankan illegal immigrants in India today are those who fled this ethnic conflict.
Those who reached India before 1983 were mostly Indian-origin Tamils whose forefathers migrated to Sri Lanka a century previously.
This was mainly on account of working in the tea plantations there.
In 1964, Prime Ministers Lal Bahadur Shastri (India) and Sirimavo Bandaranaike (SL) signed an agreement.
This was to allow some 9,75,000 people of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, who had citizenship of neither country, to become citizens of the country of their choice.
Many of those who arrived in India until 1982 got legal accommodation.
However, the process was not comprehensive, and was ultimately not completed.
Some 4.6 lakh repatriations from Sri Lanka have been officially recorded so far.
This is besides the thousands of Tamils of Sri Lankan origin who sought asylum in India.

What is the present scenario?

Some of those who arrived from Sri Lanka managed to travel onward to countries of Europe.
Some others married Indians and resolved their identity issues.
At present, about 1 lakh Tamils from Sri Lanka live in India.
These include some 60,000 in camps across Tamil Nadu.
These refugees are mostly Hindu, and are of both Sri Lankan and Indian origin.
Technically, those who arrived by boat and other informal, illegal channels during the war in Sri Lanka are considered illegal immigrants.
They are not considered as refugees.
Most of these “illegal immigrants” reached Tamil Nadu in the 1980s and 1990s.
Thereafter, a few hundreds came over the years.
The arrivals increased rapidly during the last years of the war.
[The war ended with the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009.]
At least 20% of these refugees claim an Indian origin on the basis of Sri Lankan birth certificates that identify them as “Indian Tamil”.
Documents issued by Indian authorities that trace their links to Indian grandparents or other ancestors also provide evidence.

What are the conditions in the Tamil Nadu camps?

About 19,000 Sri Lankan families, comprising 60,000 individuals, live in 107 camps in Tamil Nadu.
Some 10,000 of these inmates are children below the age of 8 years.
Dwellings here are in most cases a single room that was allotted to a family when it reached India in 1983 or later.
They continue to live there ever since. Most of these camps are in a shambles.
No rent is charged from the residents, and they get rice for 57 paise a kilo.
Each member of a family aged eight and older is eligible for 12 kg of rice every month.
The head of the family gets an allowance of Rs 1,000 every month.
The spouse gets Rs 750, and children below the age of 12, Rs 400 each.
Besides the 60,000 in the camps, about 30,000 Sri Lankan Tamils live on their own.
They are required to periodically report to the nearest police station.
However, they have greater freedom of movement than those who live in the camps.
The camps have a system of attendance.
The inmates of camps cannot go outside Tamil Nadu, and require permission to even travel out of the district.
A VIP visit in the vicinity of the camps almost always brings interrogation and inquiries from the Q-Branch of the police and central intelligence agencies.
The relatively free atmosphere in the refugee camps changed permanently after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

What do the refugees expect from the government?

The refugees expect citizenship of India.
Most of those in the camps have nothing left in Sri Lanka, no property or community to go back to.
They fear persecution and violence at the hands of the Colombo government and Sinhala Buddhist majority if they return to Sri Lanka.
They are also unable to go anywhere else (such as to a European country).
Also, most of the Indian-origin Tamils have ancestral roots, relatives, and property in India.
Many could have got Indian citizenship under the Shastri-Bandaranaike Pact if they had chosen to come to India before the ethnic riots broke out in Sri Lanka.

Is there a scope for them to get Indian citizenship?

There is no process in India to give citizenship to the Tamil refugees.
The refugee camps were built only as a temporary arrangement for people in distress.
They were meant to make them feel safe until such time as they could return to Sri Lanka after normalcy was restored.
The European model of giving asylum and citizenship to refugees works on individual cases.
That is impossible in India, as there are thousands of Tamil refugees.

Source: Indian Express