India is Asia’s dharamshala – why not learn to love it?

[RISING SUN]

India is Asia’s dharamshala – why not learn to love it?
The benevolence of politicians and bureaucrats is sometimes no benevolence at all. For some time now, there has been a trickle of Hindus from Pakistan coming to India on short-term visas, but their real purpose has never been in doubt: to flee discrimination and violence against Hindus in Pakistan.

Earlier this week, the home ministry granted a one-month visa extension to 480 Pakistani Hindus who have been seeking permanent resident status here. An Indian Express report quoted a ministry official thus: “They will not be deported. Since it takes time to take any decision on their appeals, we have extended their visas for a month.”

Sorry, sir, this is no longer about 480 people. For the last 65 years, India has been facing an influx of people fleeing either religious persecution or ethnic strife or economic conditions in all our neighbouring countries. But we have simply refused to evolve a policy to address all these issues. We want to do everything on a case-by-case basis, or, better still, ignore the problem till it gets resolved illegally: by people acquiring Indian residency by stealth.

Given the numbers of illegal migrants – perhaps running into millions now – we have probably become the world’s biggest dharamshala, but that is something to be proud of. It validates the idea of inclusive India. What we cannot be proud of is that we have allowed this to happen by accident and exception, rather than by a clear-sighted policy.

Our inward immigration policy is a mess. We have separate policies (or default approaches) for Tibetans, for Nepalese, for Sri Lankan Tamils, for Bangladeshis, for Pakistani Hindus and for the rest. Then there are Muslim Rohingyas from Myanmar and Afghans (a motley group comprising Sikhs, Hindus and even Muslims) and what not – and we don’t have a clue what to do with them (read here).

For a country that was artificially partitioned in 1947, it should have been obvious that people will migrate here and there. As a secular alternative to all our less-than-secular neighbours, we have always known that immigration will be more inward and less outward. As a democratic oasis in a largely undemocratic or autocratic south Asian region, we should have had policies to accept refugees fleeing persecution.

As a rapidly globalising country, we have known since 1991 that Indian companies need to recruit foreign professionals to work here just as we expect foreign governments to allow Indians to work in their countries.

But what we have now is a patchwork and illogical system that has been adapted to exigencies of specific situations at specific times.

The Tibetans were allowed in in Nehru’s time. But do we have a policy in case it finally becomes clear that they will never get an autonomous state inside China and can’t return? What if they have to stay here permanently? Will they be given full Indian citizenship?

The Nepalese, under the 1950 India-Nepal Friendship Treaty, are allowed almost free access inside India – almost like Indian citizens. This is the most liberal policy we have with our neighbours, and has remained on the statute book even though our political relationship with Nepal has gone from good to uncertain after the Communists entered government and ended the Hindu monarchy.

When it comes to Bangladesh, we have three policies – or non-policies: one for Assam, another for some north-eastern states, and yet another for the rest.

Under the Assam Accord of 1985, anyone who came to Assam before 1 January 1966 will be allowed to stay and become Indian citizens. Those who came between this date and 24 March 1971 were to be detected but not deported. They would be deleted from electoral rolls, but could get back after 10 years. The rest were to be detected and deported.

The accord has more or less been a dead letter, since politicians in need of immigrant votes refused to implement it. As for the remaining north-eastern states, migration is either fully illegal and politically accepted, or we have restrictions that apply even to Indian citizens.

In Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, Indians need inner line permits to visit those states even as tourists. The Bangladeshis who enter India traipse around tribal Meghalaya, but have found an easy perch in Tripura. Together with pre-1947 migration, they have relegated the locals to minority status. As for Kashmir, Indians can tour the state but can’t buy property or settle there. Even if they marry Kashmiris, they can’t acquire property there.

As for potential workers and immigrants from the rest of the world, we have the most restrictive policy on board, where the intention is to debar foreigners from working here – unless they earn more than $25,000 per annum. This rules out any kind of work visa for foreigners in India beyond highly qualified technical personnel or short-term consultants – so forget about allowing for easy migration.

As a liberal, democratic country, India has an obligation to run a truly liberal and open immigration policy that does not discriminate. This is a country that took in persecuted people from ancient times to the modern era (Zoroastrians, Jews, Tibetans). We have even accepted invaders as our own.

This should be the broad backdrop against which we should frame a unified immigration and work permit policy. The policy should include the following:

First, we must have a clear policy for taking in refugees from persecution. It does not matter which religion or ethnic group the person belongs to. It is ironic that political parties are willing to plead the case of Bangladeshi Muslims, who can only be chasing economic opportunities here, but not Hindu refugees from Pakistan. At a later stage, we should be willing to take in even Muslim refugees from Pakistan – for who knows what will happen if the Taliban takes over Pakistan? Obviously, this policy needs safeguards, but if there is a will, we can put one in place.

Second, we must have a system of regularising long-term migrants who are settled here. The Assam accord specifically provided for that, but we didn’t implement it. We neither put in place an impenetrable fence to keep future immigrants out nor a system of formally recognising the Bangladeshis’ need to find work here – through a system of work permits or guest workers with no citizenship rights.

Third, India needs to work out a free-movement agreement (especially for tourism and work) with all its neighbours barring Pakistan. Setting a high salary limit of $25,000 for work permits may be all right for westerners, but not for our neighbours in South Asia. The threshold needs to be much lower.

Fourth, residency permits and citizenship norms need to be easier. Currently, it takes 12 years for a foreigner to get citizenship by naturalisation, and seven years if they are married to an Indian citizen. One wonders why this waiting period needs to be so long. Seven years is too long a wait for a marriage to be seen as legitimate enough to warrant grant of citizenship to the foreign spouse.

Isn’t it high time we opened our front doors to the world instead of winking at their entry through the back door?
http://www.firstpost.com/india/india-is-asias-dharamshala-why-not-learn-to-love-it-697890.html

 

[RISING SUN]

Why India doesn’t want the Sindhis fleeing Pakistan
Islam Bibi, she was called, and before that she was Ram Kori, the daughter of Mewa Ram and Mansa Devi, a couple living in a village in Pakistan’s Bannu district. She was kidnapped by, or eloped with, depending on who you choose to believe, teenage Noor Ali Shah. Bannu’s deputy commissioner judged she was a minor, “kidnapped without the consent of her lawful guardian”. Noor Ali was sent to jail. Ram Kori, or Ismail Bibi, whatever name she might have preferred, was married to a Hindu man—and was later, some accounts have it, poisoned by her family.

Led by Mir Ali Khan, better known as the Faqir of Ipi, tens of thousands of militia revolted against the judgment—sparking off almost a decade of fighting, involving combat aircraft strafing tribal villages.

It was 1936 — and some things haven’t changed.

Fearing a backlash from the resurgent Islamist movement, Pakistan’s government has chosen to do nothing in the face of relentless attacks on religious minorities—among them, the country’s Hindu minority. Earlier this week, Firstpost reported the case of 480 Sindhi Hindu refugees, who had taken shelter in a Delhi neighbourhood—their visa status, and future, uncertain.

Kidnappings of women and forced conversion; extortion and social exclusion: all are persuading ever-more refugees to leave their homeland for run-down buildings and cloth shacks held up with bamboo poles.

This exodus isn’t new—and has roots in history. The communal tensions that underpin the exodus date back to the late nineteenth century, when religious revivalist movements, There were riots in the 1920s. Then, in 1938, the Manzilgah Masjid issue exploded—sparked off by Muslim demands to turn over a medieval mosque to worshippers. Local Hindus resisted the demand, arguing it would interfere with their rights to use a temple. The issue escalated in violence which affected over a 100 villages, and claimed the lives of between 27 and 37 Hindus.

Politics, like in so much communal violence, lay behind the riots. Historian Hamida Khuhro, among others, has shown how the tensions were leveraged by the Muslim League and the neo-fundamentalist Jami’at-e-Ullema-e-Sindh to destabilise the government of Allahbux Sumroo—the then-chief minister, who ruled the province with united Hindu-Muslim support.

In a bleak assessment of the period between 1920 and 1940, BR Ambedkar described the Sukkur riots as part of “twenty years of civil war between the Hindus and the Muslims in India, interrupted by brief intervals of armed peace”.

Even though Sindh saw no rioting that rivalled the scale of the violence in Punjab or Bengal, there was deep bitterness. In 1949, the historian Rita Kothari records, 21 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre staged an attempt to bomb government offices — a plot in which one biographer has claimed, although without much evidence, that former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani was involved. From before independence, however, most better-off Sindhis had begun moving their assets and families to India—leaving behind the poorest and most vulnerable.

In 1951, Prime Ministers Liaqat Ali Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru signed a pact, intended to ensure equal rights to minorities on both sides of the border, and end population displacement. It didn’t work. Precisely how Hindus left Pakistan in coming decades, it is hard to say. Pakistan’s Hindu population in 1947 was around 22 percent—though that figure can be misleading, because Bangladesh was home to most of it. Pakistan’s census, though, now estimates its Hindu population at just 1.6 percent— suggesting some level of sustained migration.

Part of the reason for that, more likely than not, has been the deeply chauvinist culture that gathered pace after General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s rise. In a thoughtful 2009 article, Issam Ahmad pointed to the vilification of religious minorities in Pakistani school textbooks. A social studies textbook, for example, asks children “make speeches on jihad”. “Muslims are good”, Ahmad records a colleague saying his son had told him “Hindus are evil”. Pakistani scholar Pervez Hoodbhoy calls such books “the blueprint for a religious fascist state”.

Marvi Sirmed, a Pakistani human rights campaigner who has worked to protect Sindhi Hindus from attack by religious chauvinists, says things got worse for them after General Pervez Musharraf came to power.

Last year, the growing crisis was illustrated by the case of Rinkle Kumari—a Sindh resident kidnapped, allegedly converted to Islam and forcibly married. The matter had a deeply controversial journey through the courts, with armed men threatening her. “I think she saw how things were stacked,”says Sushant Sareen, an expert at the Institute for Defence and Strategic Analyses, “And decided to just live with her lot, rather than expose her family to more harm.”

“Minorities are not considered equal citizens in Pakistan,” HRCP chairperson Zohra Yusuf said last year.

From the point of view of India’s government, though, the issue is larger than the 480 Sindhi refugees in Delhi.

In recent months, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Rohingya have arrived in India, displaced by the murderous anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar—each with a story just as heart-wrenching as the Sindhis.

There are perhaps 25,000 Afghan refugees in Delhi alone, mainly Hindu and Sikhs, but also Muslims who sided with President Muhammad Najibullah against the Islamist mujahideen.

There are, over 100,000 ethnic-Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka; perhaps three times as many Tibetans; 1.5 million, or more, mainly-Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. The government argues that citizenship for one group will mean citizenship for all—and, moreover, provide a loophole for economic migrants.

The argument sounds good—but doesn’t make a whole load of sense: hundreds of thousands have, in any case, become de-facto citizens.

India has long refused to sign on to the 1951 international convention on refugees, saying that they place an unfair burden on the hosts—a not unfair argument, given the country isn’t able the legitimate needs of its own citizens.

The United Nation’s Refugee Agency, UNHCR, lists 19,093 refugees and 3,652 asylum-seekers on its rolls in India, the overwhelming majority from Afghanistan and Myanmar. The bulk hope to head west—when the UNHCR can find a government willing to take them.

The government is bound by the 1946 Citizenship Act, which makes no distinction between foreigners who arrive for tourism, for business or in fear of their lives. In 2004, the government also introduced harsher punishments for visa-violators, which mean the Sindhi refugees in Delhi could serve long prison terms.

India has, however, set up special systems to deal with refugees from time to time. Tibetans who arrived in India before 1959, for example, are entitled to extensive benefits, including identification documents that allow them to travel abroad—in effect, passports.

Those who came until 2003 can get special long-term visas. There is a very different system in place for the Sri Lankan Tamils, though. Though refugees get identification, but their freedom of movement is restricted—creating hardship in finding work, and allowing exploitation by unscrupulous employers.

For Sindhi refugees, or those from Myanmar, there are no proper rules at all. In the past, these categories of refugees have simply had to bribe local authorities to obtain identification—and melted into the population.

In 2012, it was reported that over 13,000 Sindhi refugees in Rajasthan had obtained Indian citizenship—though a large part of that, its likely, came after they married Indian nationals from the same castes and tribes on this side of the border. Hundreds of Sindhis who have arrived since 2011 have taken the same route.

It is time for India to move towards some sort of sensible, norm-based system of refugees—if nothing else, an identification system guaranteeing refugees the basic rights of residence, and access to public services. It needs to get state governments, like that in Delhi, to provide emergency aid to refugees until they find their feet.

The current system forces refuge-seekers to lie and obtain false documents, a hideous start to a new life—an inhuman system that sits ill with India’s centuries-old heritage of providing safe haven to persecuted minorities.
http://www.firstpost.com/world/why-india-doesnt-want-sindhis-fleeing-pakistan-694611.html