[What followed was a reverse journey in social
mobility. Mr. Sasitharan, who is fluent in English, got a job as a bank
salesman in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. His employers fired him after
they discovered he was not an Indian citizen. “The moment I spoke in Tamil,
they realized I had a Sri Lankan accent,” he said.]
By Viabhav Vats
 |
Priyadarshini Ravichandran
Sasitharan, a Sri Lankan refugee who came to
|
PUZHAL,
India — As Tamil civilians were increasingly caught in the crossfire
between the Indian Peace Keeping Force and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
in the 1980s, Sasitharan and his parents followed the exodus from the
Tamil-majority northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka.
As a 9-year-old in 1990, Mr. Sasitharan, who
uses only one name, was taken by his parents across the Palk Strait by boat,
the mode of transport favored by thousands of refugees before them. Mr.
Sasitharan, who grew up in the sunny and windswept harbor city of Trincomalee,
has few memories of his early years in Sri Lanka.
In India, his family settled near Bengaluru,
where Mr. Sasitharan studied at a school for Sri Lankan refugees. Unlike most
of the refugees who arrived in India, Mr. Sasitharan attended college, but a
lack of money forced him to drop out before he could graduate.
What followed was a reverse journey in social
mobility. Mr. Sasitharan, who is fluent in English, got a job as a bank
salesman in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. His employers fired him after
they discovered he was not an Indian citizen. “The moment I spoke in Tamil,
they realized I had a Sri Lankan accent,” he said.
News and analysis on the world’s largest election
Despite being skilled and fluent in the
English language, a valuable asset in India’s modern economy, Mr. Sasitharan,
now 32, works as a petty laborer in the country’s informal sector, lifting
heavy loads for a subsistence wage.
For the past decade, Mr. Sasitharan has been
living at the Kangaravai camp in Puzhal, an hour north of Chennai and one of
110 such camps for Sri Lankan refugees across the state of Tamil Nadu.
According to 2013 figures by the Organization for Eelam Refugees
Rehabilitation, Mr. Sasitharan is one of 66,286 Sri Lankan refugees who
currently reside in India.
For the most part, political leaders in Tamil
Nadu, and the rest of India, pay little attention to the refugees’ dire living
conditions. But every time an election season approaches in Tamil Nadu, parties
frantically compete to portray themselves as champions of the Sri Lankan
Tamils, an issue that still has some emotional resonance in the state.
In February, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, the chief
minister of Tamil Nadu, declared that her government would release the
convicted assassins of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Mr. Gandhi’s
assassination in 1991 was plotted and executed by the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam.
Ms. Jayaram’s decision to free Mr. Gandhi’s
assassins was announced shortly after an emergency cabinet meeting that
followed the Supreme Court’s commuting of the death sentences of Mr. Gandhi’s
assassins to life imprisonment, leaving their fate in the hands of the state
government.
Ms. Jayaram’s move was seen by political
observers as an attempt to position herself as the leader most sympathetic to
the cause of Sri Lankan Tamils, who share ethnicity and language with the
Tamils of India. With this move, Ms. Jayaram, previously a bitter critic of the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also inaugurated the election-season
chest-beating over the issue.
M. Karunanidhi, the 89-year-old leader of the
opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, accused Ms. Jayaram of hypocrisy and
opportunism. At an election rally in Chennai in April, Mr. Karunanidhi, who has
devoted a large portion of his speeches to the Sri Lankan Tamil issue
throughout the campaign, said “Jayalalithaa is shedding crocodile tears for Sri
Lankan Tamils.”
Yet this periodic frenzy has achieved little
for thousands of refugees like Mr. Sasitharan, who exist in limbo in Tamil
Nadu’s squalid camps. “It’s a lot of gimmicks and fake posturing,” said Rohini
Mohan, an Indian journalist whose book on the Sri Lankan civil war will appear
this year. “It’s an emotive issue, but there is nothing to be gained from the
betterment of Sri Lankan refugees, especially as the refugees themselves can’t
vote.”
In Puzhal, where Mr. Sasitharan has lived for
the past decade, conditions of perilous sanitation prevail. Amid the open
sewage, tiny, unventilated brick houses covered by tin roofs bake in Tamil
Nadu’s scorching summer, creating living conditions that are anything but
hospitable.
Most refugees are given a meager allowance by
the Tamil Nadu government. The eldest male of the family receives $16 a month,
while other members of the family above the age of 12 get $13. Children below
12 are given $7 a month each. Families of refugees supplement this income with
menial jobs, as house painters and day laborers in areas neighboring the camps.
Sri Lankan refugees in India live under
constant surveillance by state intelligence and are restricted in their
movement. Deepak, 27, who lives at the Kangavarai camp in Puzhal, said
residents could not even buy SIM cards for their mobile phones. “We need to
sign every time we enter or leave,” he said. “And if the prime minister ever
visits Tamil Nadu, we are all locked up inside the camp.”
There is evidence to suggest that the heated
political discourse generated in Tamil Nadu over the Sri Lankan Tamil issue may
be exacerbating the situation. Smaller parties like the Marumalarchi Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam, which wants an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka, make
it harder for refugees in India who would like to return home.
“Extreme positions in Tamil Nadu make
reconciliation difficult,” said S.C. Chandrahasan, founder and head of the
Organization for Eelam Refugees Rehabilitation. “We would like all parties to
take moderate positions and not put emphasis on the breaking up of Sri Lanka.
Hate speeches do us a lot of harm.”
Mr. Chandrahasan believes the repatriation of
Sri Lankan refugees in India remains the only permanent solution to the
problem.
That may not be an option for refugees like
Mr. Sasitharan, too scarred by the past to ever return. Mr. Sasitharan had
hoped to get Indian citizenship, but since India is not a signatory to the 1951
Refugee Convention, there is no structured route to citizenship for those who
seek asylum.
Despite the promise of a less uncertain legal
existence in Sri Lanka, Mr. Sasitharan said he would stay in India. “We are safe
here,” he said. “We are not safe in Sri Lanka.”
Yet the odds remain stacked against refugees
like Mr. Sasitharan. Since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009,
international attention has mostly drifted away from the refugees in India,
focusing instead on the plight of Tamils within Sri Lanka.
And Tamil parties across the spectrum, having
whipped up the refugees’ cause during election season, which ended in Tamil
Nadu on April 24, have once again moved on.
