Aliens
Everywhere
By K A Shaji/ Udhagamandalam
28 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Kanthasamy has reasons to believe
that his gods have stopped smiling. A plantation worker by profession
and a repatriate Tamil from Sri Lanka by destiny, he has to walk on
barefoot for about 16 km each day in search of daily wage work in any
of the small scale tea plantations of Nambiarkunnu, a tiny village across
Tamil Nadu-Kerala border near Gudalur. His house is in fact located
at Kolappally, virtually a plantation country of Nilgiris. Almost all
the major tea plantations of Kolappaly are facing severe crisis for
quite a long time due to shortage in production and plummeting prices.
The crisis in the sector coupled with excess number of permanent workers
has forced plantation owners not to assign even temporary jobs to people
like Kanthasamy, who otherwise have to walk kilometers everyday in search
of plantation jobs.
``Jobs are available in
small scale tea plantations of Kerala's Wayanad district. But we have
to walk many a kilometer each day through difficult terrains to reach
there. The small scale cultivators there are paying very less citing
our refugee status,'' lamented Kanthasamy's wife Pappathi.
Kanthasamy's neighbour Nhanaseelan
is more articulate about the plight of repatriate Tamils from Sri Lanka,
who have settled in Nilgiri. ``The public sector tea company Tantea
was established years back to rehabilitate the repatriates from Sri
Lanka. Though it has emerged the largest plantation company in South
India, most of the repatriates still remain wanderers in search of jobs
from one village to another village and one district to another district,''
he said.
S.Jayachandran of Tamil
Nadu Green Movement shows another aspect of the flawed rehabilitation
project for repatriates, which wasted a lot of natural resources and
huge amounts of public money. `` In order to accommodate most of the
repatriates from Sri Lanka, the government had opened 3,000 hectares
of virgin forest land in the highly sensitive Nilgiri region for the
much hyped Rehabilitation Tea Plantation alias Tantea. However, Tantea
was able to provide employment to only 6,000 people. The majority are
still living in abject penury and neither the repatriates nor the environment
benefited from the trumpeted scheme,'' he pointed out.
According to S. Manivasakan
of Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at University of Madras,
Tamil repatriates from Sri Lanka constitute a section of humanity who
have been twice displaced. Their forefathers had been uprooted from
Tamil Nadu circa 1823 because the British wanted them to clear Sri Lankan
forests in the upcountry and set up tea estates. Their children and
grandchildren were forced to look for a new home after the Sri Lankan
Government stripped them off their citizenship once it gained independence
in 1948. Most of them had no option other than returning to the mother
land ever since the ethnic divide in Sri Lanka started affecting their
survival in the island nation. They had to face the brutality of both
majority Simhala might and minority Tamils of Sri Lankan origin.
The tragic events in their
lives had took a major turn in 1964 when Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur
Shastri signed a pact with his Sri Lankan counter part Sirimavo Bandaranayake
to take back a huge chunk of Tamils of Indian origin. The only concession
the Lankan government made was that, of the 8.25 lakh Tamils identified
to be of Indian origin, it agreed to absorb three lakh as its own. In
1974, another bilateral agreement was signed under which Indian would
absorb another 75,000 people and Lanka an additional 75,000 as its nationals
so that the ratio would be read: for every seven tamil reptraited to
India, Sri Lanka would grant citizenship to four. As per the agreement,
the entire process was expected to be completed by October 1981. According
to Kanthasamy, the repatriation, which began in 1968, continued till
1983, when the ferry service between Talaimannar in Sri Lanka and Rameswaram
in India was suspended due to the militancy in northern Sri Lanka.
According to data available
with the Union Government, as many as 4, 61,630 Tamil repatriates are
living in India now. They belong to 1,116,152 families. Of these, 3,
33,843 were repatriated under the cover of different agreements. The
balance represents a natural increase. Among them, 4,639 families were
moved to Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and were rehabilitated
in projects started by the respective governments. Though the rubber
plantations started by Kerala government in Kollam district and Karnataka
government in Uttara Kannada district had ensured better living condition
for those repatriates who reached these states, the tea plantations
and spinning mills started in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh with the
same purpose turned abject failures. Though the Tamil Nadu government
had splurged crores for their welfare, most of the repatriates still
remain poor wanderers from one village to the other due to corruption,
mismanagement and shortsightedness by officials.
The travails of V.Kulanthai
Velu, a repatriate now settled in Uppatti near Gudalur, are representative
of the half a million people, who have been described across Tamil Nadu
as `Thayagam Thirumbi Vandha Tamil Makkal (Tamils who returned to their
motherland). ``My return to India was more gruesome than my grandfather's
trip a century ago to Sri Lanka to work in tea estates. He was not given
any promise of a decent life. It was sheer poverty and caste discriminations
that forced him to move out of Tamil Nadu and to cross the sea. But
in my case, the Indian High Commission told me that I am an Indian and
that I should come back as a good rehabilitation scheme awaits me,''
he recalls. Kulanthai Velu reached Rameswaram in 1981after obtaining
and Indian passport and promised travel concessions. ``At Rameswaram,
the Indian official greeted me with abuse for not knowing clearly about
what I wanted to do in India. I said I want to work in plantation as
that is the only job I know. He retorted, `Then you should have stayed
in Ceylon.''
E.V.Ilamparuthi has another
version of the flawed rehabilitation drive. Soon after his landing in
Rameswaram in 1979, he was directed to reach Pudupalayam near Salem.
There he became owner of a one-cent plot and was provided with a loan
of Rs 10,000 to construct a house. After the house construction, Ilamparuthi
became pauper and he left the village to Nilgiri in the absence of any
job opportunity there. Now he is a manual worker with a house construction
firm. According to him, the government had provide one-cent plots and
small housing loans to many a repatriates, who reached villages of Agraharam
Vazhapady, Pudupalayam, Mannaickenpatti, Thukkiampalayam, S.Vazahappady
and Singapuram. All of them had abandoned the houses in the plains in
the absence any plantation work and went to Nilgiri.
As per information available
with Nilgiri unit of People's Union of Civil Liberties, the number of
Tamil repatriates in India would come around half a million as the official
statistics exclude another 60,000 people who come through the air route
on different occasions. ``The situation of Thayamagam Thirumbi Vantha
Tamil Makkal is really pathetic. In India they are being treated as
Sri Lankans and in Sri Lanka they are being referred as Indians. India
has spent around Rs 2,000 crore so far on their rehabilitation. But
most of the repatriates still remain unsettled due to the failure of
the grandiose schemes,'' according to N.Vasu, Nilgiri district secretary
of CPI (M). He blames the bureaucratic negligence and unimaginative
ways adopted by the state machinery for the failure of the schemes.
``In fact, nobody is interested
in the welfare of these people. As far as the ruling elites in New Delhi
and Colombo are concerned, they represent a statistic. To the tea plantation
owners in Nilgiris and surroundings, they constitute docile cheap labour
to be exploited to the hilt. To the Sri Lankan Tamils, a group readily
available for communal propaganda and to the fanatics among the Simhalese
the easiest and defenseless victims in times of communal conflict,''
points out V.Suryanarayan , former director of Centre for South and
South East Asian Studies.
In the beginning, the rehabilitation
was planned on a family basis. As soon as the Indian government recognizes
them as Indians and issue passports, the repatriates are required to
apply to the Indian high commission for a family card, which gives details
of the family, the type of occupation which they are assigned, the grants
to which they are entitled, their place of employment etc.
``The repatriates' trail
of misery begins right at the stage they get their family card because
they hardly realize that their fate in India would be determined only
by the entries in the card. They fail to identify the right job, the
right place and further, as there is no caste-based reservation in Sri
Lanka, they fail to mention that they are all Dalits from Tamil Nadu.
They are deprived of the benefits meant for SCs and STs because their
card does not contain this information,'' according to a study by National
Conference of Repatriates (NCR).
According to Vasu, the main
hurdle faced by the repatriates was the shift from mono-occupational
structure in Sri Lanka to the diversified occupation in Tamil Nadu.
The post-globalisation crisis in tea plantation sector has intensified
their problems, he argues. The NCR study has also confirmed that more
than 70 per cent of the repatriates were reduced to wandering from village
to village, district to district and office to office soon after their
landing in the mother land in search of jobs. Though they finally abandoned
the plains and trekked their ways to the hills like Nilgiris, Kodaikanal
and Yercaud, the crisis in the plantation sector had made their survival
more tuff. ``In the hills, we were thrilled to see plantations of tea
and coffee. But the fall in prices of tea and coffee had dampened our
spirits.Now, most of our people are searching jobs in construction sites
of neighbouring Kerala districts of Kozhikode and Malappuram,'' informed
Shanmughan, another repatriate.
``The situation is not different
even in the case of those who working in cooperative spinning and weaving
mills across the state. Weaving is also turning unprofitable now a days,''
points out Manivasakan.
According to Vasu, more
than 83 per cent of the repatriates were given Rs 5,000 to start a business
of their own. In the new country, they squandered the money in less
than five months and became paupers. Since they have opted for a rehabilitation
programme, they are not entitled to any other scheme. So most of these
people are working as casual labourers and earning a pittance.
In the opinion of NCR, the
Tamil repatriates lag way behind in the scale of priorities of the Union
Government. ``The maximum subsidies and the more tolerable rehabilitation
schemes are earmarked for Tibetan refugees followed by Bangladesh refugees.
This despite the fact that only the repatriation of Tamils was precipitated
by the Indian government,'' it argues.
(This story is part of a media fellowship awarded by New Delhi-based
National Foundation for India)
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