Farzana Versey April 18, 2005

Tags: refugee , bangladesh

How does it feel to be a refugee?

href="/tag/refugee">refugee in a Delhi slum

* * *

One can send a fax to the home minister of India and later to Sonia Gandhi and openly seek citizenship; for the other, home is a distant memory and a daily struggle. One can talk about persecution; the other does not know whether poverty qualifies as persecution. Everyone knows Taslima. No one wants to know Jaffer.

Who is he? Who are these people bequeathed to find their board in remnants, a salve in forsaken hurts?

Why do you pity them? I am asked, and the query has enough legitimacy to be heard.

How many more people can this country accommodate for wayfarers who squander their ill-gotten dreams on other people’s lands? Did we not get freedom for them, so what more do they want?

They are illegal entrants, become voters and then a vote bank; they fatten the corruption chicken.

Why can I not listen to all these sane voices? Why do I persist in standing transfixed, watching Amna, the little girl with big hands and big eyes, scrape a vessel of its shine? Why don’t I tell her to get out across the border and rot there instead of being an eyesore here?

Yet, there is something tragic about a temporary roof that is not your own, the soil beneath your feet alien, the smells, the tastes foreign. Does all this mean a sense of belonging?

Amna’s father, Jaffer, plies a cycle-rickshaw, a decrepit old thing that sways through the streets of Old Delhi in the morning rush and in the early winter dusk finds its way back home.

“Home?” he asks. There is no sarcasm in the tone; he cannot afford it. Just sorrow, like the plaintive cry of the sarangi that plays its tune and unknowingly conveys the pathos inherent in its strings.

Yes, home, I persist. What does he miss about home? It has been a long time since somebody asked him. They all tell you to go back, but no one wonders what you must go back to.

Jaffer looks older than his 43 years. He wears a checked lungi and a loose shirt, and his legs ache with the constant pedalling. Back in Chittagong too it was hard work in the fields, but there was a dream.

His relatives had left years ago, fled during the war of independence. The family had elected to stay on, hoping that things would improve.

“But god is against us,” he says. One does not know about god, but nature has devastated the country with cyclones and floods, the water rising upto 20 feet and drowning whole villages. Houses in the rural areas, where 90 per cent of the population lived, were built on mud platforms or on wooden stilts.

But his life in the slums of Nizamuddin has been no better. “In some ways, it is worse. I miss the river, the fresh-water fish, the smell of sugarcane, but I could not see my future there.”

What future does he see in the drains outside his hovel? “We may be thrown out, we may fall ill, but at least we will not drown.”

A few blocks away is another family, another huddled bundle of hope meshed with confusion.

Hakim Rahman was a boatman and since it was the most popular form of transportation he did quite well for himself. Until one day, there was no boat. He met the flood directly and while he swam ashore the poor little dinghy sank without a trace and left Rahman bereft of a large part of his earnings that he had kept under the plank.

His wife and five children went without food for a few days till the burning ache in the belly pushed them towards India, where they may not get milk and honey but find comfort in the fact that at least some people can speak the language they so love.

In fact, the war of 1971 fructified because the rulers in Pakistan were trying to impose Urdu in place of the beloved Bengali in East Pakistan. Sonar Bangla was willing to sell its glitter but not its intrinsic worth. So, more than a million lives were lost and the cries of “Joi Bangla” rent the air. The pride remained tact.

It is this sense of oneness that you will find at Chittranjan Park in the capital, where again a number of Bangladeshi refugees have made their homes.

Zuleikhabi works as a domestic help in four houses to make ends meet. She does not dwell on home and sees no difference. She has not heard about Taslima Nasreen, although she does remember Runa Laila. And Tagore.

The Bard of Bengal brooks no territorial boundaries, his golden boat is laden for all who clutch at the stray straws of a life untrammelled, yet pregnant with possibility.

Zuleikha knows she is not wanted by the political parties, she hears about it at street corners where the menfolk congregate in groups, their common destinies binding them together for a few minutes of respite. She displays a rare pragmatism when she says, “Political parties everywhere do not want the poor. We were not wanted back home, too. But the people here do not seem to mind our presence. My memsaabs like my work and since they are Bengalis there is a common culture.”

Isn’t there resentment against them in the already overpopulated slums? “Here also people understand. We share our poverty. And many of them are refugees too – they have come from Bihar, UP…everyone is seeking shelter.”

A. Bhattacharya is a middle-class resident of the area and supports these refugees n humanitarian grounds. “Many of them are staying here for years, and if we start shunting people out, then there are the Tibetans too. We fought the Bangladesh war for political reasons but now these people have come to look upon us as saviours. If the government is so concerned then they must try and stop the influx instead of letting Opposition parties make political capital out of it.”

Apparently, when the BJP was campaigning against them, the bhalo Bongs got out in strength to protect the outsiders. As one Bengali academic put it, “With us, secularism and parochialism are one and the same thing. We will support each other in any part the globe.”

A project called ‘Citizenship, Identity and Residence of Immigrants in Delhi Slums’ by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties had revealed that workers of the BJP and Shiv Sena had been active in identifying Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants in selected slums. “The police conducted frequent late night raids in some bastis where many people suspected of being Bangladeshi nationals were taken to the police station…The active role of selected political parties in the identification and deportation of Bangladeshi immigrants, recognised for their bias against religious minorities, is very disturbing.”

Jaffer is oblivious to these wheels within wheels. He only knows that occasionally an inexplicable fear overtakes him. “Though there is nothing to be afraid of. What do we have that we must fear losing? Clothes? Vessels? Belongings? Nothing. But there is something...that feeling of not having anything to call our own. I came here in 1975 as a child and even today after 30 years I know that we can be thrown out.”

According to Reena Bhadhuri, an expert on Islam at Calcutta University in West Bengal, “These are starving people trying to make a meagre living. How can they be connected to Al Qaeda and the Pakistani intelligence agencies?” On the other hand, there is acceptance of Hindu infiltrators in the North East. The deputy minister for national security in the previous government, I. D. Swami, had agreed to give them special treatment. “If they have come here illegally, it may be justified because of the hostility they face in Bangladesh. Some distinction will have to be kept in mind.”

* * * * *

Wasn’t there a similar reason why in the country of the chutnification of Mary, the Queen of England was prompted to issue a high court writ to get a band of gypsies illegally occupying Crown land to vacate?

You see them in foreign lands, hair matted, begging, stealing and looking thoroughly out of place. They are the stowaways, excess baggage.

Who are these people that try to find comfort in places where they might get nothing in return, no identity, and strangely no invisibility? They could well have done the things they are doing in their home countries.

You see a Sri Lankan carrying luggage in a Zurich hotel, a Pakistani guide in Salzburg, a Turk at a kebab corner in Frankfurt, an Indian wiping windshields in a London street. And you, clutching your RBI-approved forex, avert your eyes because suddenly your own are not your own.

You’re told they are spongers. A German who was otherwise quite sympathetic to asylum seekers did point out that some of them were a nuisance. Many local gangs were formed to rid the county of the menace because these kids, even if unqualified, felt cheated by their own system which was providing for outsiders whereas they themselves were treated like vagrants.

In fact, neo-Nazis, dot-busters and Enoch Powellians get agitated because they feel insecure in their own lands. This is different from the Shiv Sena raving and ranting in Mumbai. It is not the same as migrant labourers from Bihar and UP being sold at auctions in Amritsar and Ludhiana. It’s not the same as prostitution rackets in most parts of the Third World.

For, legitimate labour has found acceptance internationally. From “awful Indian food smells”, the curry has become cuisine king. A little less than a decade ago, over 30,000 people sought political asylum in Britain. One can understand those from the Communist countries, but Indians? How could an Indian concoct a story of persecution? It is a racket that British law firms initiated and their motto was: “make up a story”.

Under the United Nations’ 1951 Convention, an asylum-seeker must have a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, for instance homosexuals.

A person who went to a lawyer’s firm that advertised “legal help for political refugees” had no such grouse in his home country. So, he was told, “But do you not understand that you make up a story? You must have your own legend that you can’t live at home because it is dangerous for your life.”

A person from a poor country wanting to emigrate is understandable, but what about the host countries? They may have respect for private enterprise, but why would they be kind to strangers who contribute nothing? Or is there a silent conspiracy to demoralise Third World countries by throwing asylum-seeker figures and talking about human rights’ abuses?

Most floaters one sees at railway stations and other public places in the West do not look like they were persecuted for beliefs; they were probably poor, that’s all.

Some people then decided to make money from this poverty. Legal fees for asylum-seekers are paid for by tax payers. The amount? Approximately 150 million pounds a year. To keep these asylum-seekers in fine fettle – housing, health care, education – costs 2 billion pounds. Law firms were wonderfully organised. They inserted advertisements in foreign-language newspapers in countries and areas they felt had a good strike rate – Russia, Asia, Turkey. One ad was a real come-on: “Are you planning to come to England? Is your entry purely left to the immigration officer’s sense of humanity? If your income is low, all your applications and procedures will be free. We can meet you at the airport and help you with whatever problems you have.”

No legal firm can help you deal with emotional baggage.

How does it feel to be called a refugee?

Rahman waits a long time before the words form, disjointed, strung together with an intensity that tends to thwart its very flow. “Like a boat mid-stream…or being lost in the forest…or a chulha without fire...”

Metaphors eat into the fabric of thought. Embellishments dry up and like blandishments lose their weight once uttered. But this is the moment to pause and wonder: Are roots embedded deep beneath the soil or can they be found in every seed that one carries on the journeys? Isn’t home for the refugee where the head weighs heavy and the hearth makes you shudder through a cold night?

Isn’t home a place that was…and one that just might be?