How long can you stand living in limbo?
For Suhirveer, it was eight years. For Jogdas Ram, it was 21 years.
Technically, Suhirveer — who goes only by a single name — is still in limbo, as he and his family of nine have been stuck at the Wagah-Attari border, 32 kms from Amritsar, for more than two months now. For Ram, nature decided things for him; he died at 82 last April in Jodhpur, still without Indian citizenship.
Suhirveer and Ram came from Pakistan hoping to settle in India. Both Hindus in a predominantly Muslim country, the two men had thought that crossing the border and being among people with the same faith would guarantee a better life for them and their families. But first, they had to become Indian citizens — which is how their long wait came to be.
Thousands more Pakistani Hindu migrants like them are in settlement camps in Rajasthan in northern India and Gujarat on the western coast of India, as well as in smaller communities in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. Rajasthan alone has some 25,000 of these migrants. But according to the data maintained by Seemant Lok Sangathan, an NGO working for the migrants’ rehabilitation and rights, around 10,000 Pakistani Hindus living in Rajasthan have yet to receive Indian citizenship. Some 3,000 to 4,000 refugees from Pakistan, meanwhile, have not even gotten registered; most of them are Bhil and Koli community members from Pakistan’s southeastern province, Sindh.
Pakistani Hindu migrants live in makeshift homes in a settlement in Jodhpur expecting a temporary stay. But many wait for decades to be granted Indian citizenship, never to receive it. (Photo by Tabeenah Anjum)
Without citizenship, the migrants are not allowed to move from the city or town where the settlement camps are. Their means of livelihood are also limited to daily-wage work, which often means manual labor. The camps where they live usually lack water and electricity, and they need to walk a long distance to get drinking water. Should they have to travel elsewhere within India, they need to seek permission first from authorities.
This is obviously not the life in India that the migrants had envisioned for themselves. The lack of proper documents even led to the delay in the migrants’ vaccination as the COVID-19 pandemic raged through India and the rest of the world. And with the health crisis also dealing a blow to livelihoods, the migrants’ situation has only worsened, leading to some of them opting to just return to Pakistan.
Suhirveer and his family, in fact, are among the 90 Pakistani Hindu migrants who are waiting to cross back into their country at the Wagah-Attari border. An August 2021 report run by the online publication The Wire also says that according to the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi, there are over 600 Pakistanis in India waiting to go back home. Just when they can do that, the report says, depends on the National Command and Operation Center in Pakistan, which has yet to announce the next border-crossing date.
The endless wait
“I thought after coming to India, my and my family’s life would improve,” says Suhirveer, who was a farmhand in Pakistan and who ended up as a mining laborer in Rajasthan. “But I was wrong. I feel equally a second-grade citizen in India. While we are treated badly (as) a minority community in Pakistan, in India there is a constant feeling of othering.”
“We have to struggle for even basic amenities,” says the 48-year-old, explaining some more why he and his family are now waiting to cross back into Pakistan. “Plus there is no hope of getting citizenship either, as people who are already living here for the last decade are in a queue. My parents, brothers, and their families are in Sindh and waiting for us to return.”
Before World War II, there had been only India, which had Hindu and Muslim communities, along with peoples of other religions. But then came the 1947 Partition that tore India apart and created Pakistan — and had Hindu and Muslim families finding themselves on the “wrong” side of the border.
Since then, the relations between Pakistan and India have been tense, and the movement of peoples across the border is often restricted. After an attack in Kashmir valley left scores of Indian police personnel dead in February 2019, India changed its visa rules, making them even more stringent.
”The migrants who relocate to India apply either for a tourist visa or a pilgrim visa,” says Hindu Singh Sodha of Seemant Lok Sangathan. “And in the present situation, securing a visa to India is difficult. One needs a guarantor on the Indian side willing to sponsor a tourist and who must be endorsed by a gazetted officer.… Since this tourist visa route is difficult, most end up taking a pilgrim visa.”
Suhirveer himself came on a pilgrim visa in 2013 and later procured a long-term visa while waiting for his citizenship application to be processed. Karamshi Koli and his family also had pilgrim visas when they came to India in 2015; they have since stayed in Jodhpur, but have yet to be even registered officially as migrants.
“As per the rules, the collector and Foreigners Regional Registration Office of the district where we are presently living have to register us,” says Koli. “But nothing has happened so far. We are deprived of basic amenities.”
New rules or more complications?
Red tape and bureaucratic bungling are among the main factors why there have been many delays in citizenship cases. Sodha also says that the government should just revert to “camp mode” in the granting of citizenship, meaning this should be done by camp instead of on an individual basis. He says that when the camp approach was applied in the early 2000s, thousands of migrants from Pakistan became Indian citizens at one blow.
“Under citizenship rules, a district collector forwards the application to the state government within 60 days and the latter is required to forward the application to the Home Ministry within 30 days,” says Sodha, explaining the present set-up. “But they take decades to clear a single case.” In the meantime, he says, the migrants trying to put their documents in order or have them renewed often get harassed by Indian government officials.
Last May, though, the Indian government invited non-Muslims like Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and residing in 13 districts of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, and Punjab to apply for Indian citizenship.
The Union home ministry issued a notification in this effect for immediate implementation of the order under the Citizenship Act 1955 and Rules framed under the law in 2009 — even though the rules under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) enacted in 2019 are yet to be framed by the government.
According to the CAA, Indian citizenship will be given to non-Muslim persecuted minorities from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, and Christian — who had come to India till December 31, 2014.
Muslim groups as well as those from the political opposition had criticized the CAA, prompting Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar to retort in its defense: “Everybody, when they look at citizenship, has a context and a criterion. Show me a country in the world that says everybody in the world is welcome. Nobody says that.”
“We have tried to reduce the number of stateless people through this legislation,” he also said in a speech in March 2020. “We have done it in a way that we do not create a bigger problem for ourselves.”
The migrants improvise a schoolroom (left) in an attempt to get some semblance of normalcy for the children, but the lockdown shut down even that. Children then turned to gathering construction materials to build their homes. (Photos by Tabeenah Anjum)
Many Pakistani Hindu migrants, for their part, have hailed the latest “invitation” from the Indian government, as have welfare agencies. But there are those who are skeptical of this development and think it will not amount to much as far as their getting citizenship is concerned.
“When [the ruling] Bhartiya Janta Party wants support in the elections, they will come to our settlements in Jodhpur,” comments Harji Ram, the eldest son of Jogdas Ram, who passed away earlier this year while waiting for his Indian citizenship. “Many of us participated in the pro-CAA rally held in the capital city Jaipur. But when it comes to actually doing something to benefit our community, the government fails to do so.”
Harji was just in his 30s when he and his family of nine — including his wife and child, his parents, two brothers, and their respective wives — arrived in India in 2000. He is now 50.
“At present, we are a family of 19 members,” says Harji, who works as a laborer and is now a father of four. “Our father died waiting for Indian citizenship even after living for two decades in Rajasthan.”
“We have been regularly going to all the camps but every time our citizenship is rejected,” he says. Unfortunately, he rues, their visas and passports have expired. ●
Tabeenah Anjum is a journalist based in India, reporting on politics, gender, human rights, migrant rights, and issues affecting marginalized communities. She tweets @tabeenahanjum.
