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    Government's flip-flop leaves Chakma and Hajong refugees on wings of hope

    Synopsis

    Government’s flip-flop on granting citizenship to Chakma and Hajong refugees in Arunachal means the SC order backing the tribes may not be implemented anytime soon:

    ET Bureau
    The government’s flip-flop on granting citizenship to Chakma and Hajong refugees in Arunachal Pradesh means the Supreme Court’s order backing the tribes may not be implemented anytime soon:

    His walk may be laboured, but Kripadhan Karbari, a reedy 83-year-old with an arresting smile, does not have any trouble recounting how he came here, to Diyun in eastern Arunachal Pradesh, over half a century ago. He even corrects his younger friends when they get the facts of his journey wrong.

    He, his wife and their three daughters left their home in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in March 1964, after it was inundated by the Kaptai dam on the Karnaphuli river, built for a hydel power project. The Chakma, a Buddhist tribe to which he belongs and which had wanted to be with India during the 1947 Partition, had been facing discrimination in Pakistan. He crossed the border into the Lushai Hills in undivided Assam, which is in present-day Mizoram. He and his family went from camp to camp, spread 8-10 kilometres apart, spending a few nights at each, travelling mostly on foot.

    Image article boday

    Members of Chakma tribe

    They were among the first group of Chakma and Hajong tribals to have come to India in 1964. The Hajong, who are Hindus, fled East Pakistan’s Mymensingh district because of threats of conversion to Islam and harassment by government authorities. Some of the refugees also entered India through Tripura. The Indian government had to find a place to settle them.

    Image article boday


    Owing to concerns over finding a place for them in Assam and Tripura, the Indian government decided to move them to three districts in the sparsely populated North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), which became the Union territory of Arunachal Pradesh in 1972 and a state 15 years later.

    India had just lost a war to China in 1962 and it made strategic sense to populate the vacant lands in NEFA, which bordered China.

    The Karbaris were taken by truck, along with 200 other people, from their camp in Ledo in Assam to Miao in NEFA, a 60-km drive. They were finally moved to a village in the Diyun administrative division across a tributary of the Brahmaputra. Diyun and Miao are both in Changlang district, which accounts for nearly 90% of the Chakma and Hajong population in the state. “We were given three acres (by the government) and we built our house ourselves with bamboo. There was no shortage of building materials as this area was a jungle,” says Karbari, who was among the 14,888 Chakma and Hajong refugees settled in NEFA between 1964 and 1969.

    Image article boday


    Adesh Chandra Hajong, born to Hajong refugees in India, says the land may not amount to much when divided up among the next generation. Some say more than a third of the refugees did not get land and there are lease deeds only in a tenth of the Chakma-Hajong villages.

    The refugees were supported by the government in education and jobs, and were given rations under the public distribution system. “We never even thought of the question of citizenship. We did not feel the need for it till the 1980s,” says Karbari.

    The decade saw the All Arunachal Pradesh Students’ Union (AAPSU) following the lead of its counterpart in Assam, the All Assam Students Union (AASU), which had in 1979 launched an agitation to evict Bangladeshi immigrants from the state. Santosh Chakma, general secretary of the Committee for Citizenship Rights of the Chakmas and Hajongs of Arunachal Pradesh (CCRC), says the political leaders of Arunachal were influenced by the Assam movement while they were studying in Guwahati and Shillong. AAPSU sought the removal of the Chakma and Hajong from Arunachal and the movement led to an end to the perks they enjoyed like government jobs and rations.

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    Court Intervenes
    Claiming persecution in the state, the two tribes approached the National Human Rights Commission, which took the matter to the Supreme Court. The apex court, in its judgment in 1996, said the Chakma and Hajong cannot be evicted from Arunachal and their citizenship applications should be processed if they satisfy the conditions of Section 5 of the Citizenship Act of 1955, which requires that a person of Indian origin stay here for seven years before applying for registration as a citizen.

    After the verdict, 4,637 people applied for citizenship and the Centre has still not acted on it. A committee of the Rajya Sabha, first headed by the current external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, in 1997 said the Chakma who came from East Pakistan before March 25, 1971, which was the start of the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, should be given citizenship as per an agreement between India and Bangladesh in 1972. It also recommended citizenship to Chakma born in India.

    Image article boday


    In 2004, 1,497 Chakma and Hajong were included on the electoral rolls for the first time. In September 2015, the SC, while responding to a writ petition by the CCRC, asked the Union Home Ministry to confer citizenship on eligible Chakma and Hajong refugees within three months, giving hopes to the likes of Karbari.

    But it took the Narendra Modi government two years and last week Kiren Rijiju, junior home minister and a lawmaker from Arunachal, said the government would grant citizenship to the Chakma and Hajong while keeping the interests of Arunachal’s indigenous communities in mind. (The BJP is in power both at the Centre and in Arunachal, where Pema Khandu is CM.) This led to AAPSU’s calling a statewide bandh on September 19, which saw sporadic incidents of violence. The day after, we are advised to proceed to Diyun with caution. But Subimal Bikash Chakma, president of the CCRC, says it was business as usual in Diyun on the day of the bandh. While the absence of miscreants makes the drive uneventful, the last 30 km of rain-battered road to Diyun takes over an hour-and-a-half. Driving past stilt houses, we arrive at Subimal’s residence in Diyun, where the old and the young have gathered with their own or their fathers’ refugee documents as they give reasons for why they deserve to be citizens. Pradeep Chakma, a contemporary of Karbari’s, laughs when asked if thinks they will live to become Indian citizens. “Our generation ignored this issue for long,” he adds.

    According to the Asian Centre for Human Rights, the Chakma and Hajong population in the 2011 Census stood at nearly 47,500. A year later, a survey by the CCRC put the figure at around 54,500 (including 3,000 Hajong), of whom only around 6,000 came from East Pakistan. (Those born to the refugees in India between 1964 and 1987 are Indian citizens.) A 2016 survey by the Arunachal government pegged their population at around 65,850. Pasang Dorjee Sona, a spokesperson of the Arunachal government, says the growth of the population has been “alarming”. But census figures quoted by the Asian Centre suggest otherwise.

    Image article boday


    The decadal growth in the Chakma-Hajong population since 1981 has mostly trailed both the state’s and its indigenous tribes’, of which there are 26 major ones. Tobom Dai, general secretary of AAPSU, says the Chakma are already the third largest group in Arunachal after the Nishi and Adi tribes.

    “Too Many”
    Those opposed to the citizenship, including Rijiju and Dai, say there are over 1 lakh Chakma and Hajong in the state. Criticised for not protecting the interests of his voters, Rijiju did a volte-face earlier this week and said the SC order was not implementable and the government would seek a modification. “How can we grant citizenship to so many illegal immigrants?” Rijiju told the Times of India in an interview. Dai says the Chakma and Hajong have portrayed the state’s indigenous tribes as oppressors.

    “If they are given citizenship, they will ask for ST status and land rights. If the government wants to give them citizenship, they should first be removed from Arunachal.” Sona shares his view.

    Given that the government’s announcement came just a week after it decided to deport 40,000 Rohingya from Myanmar, whom it has termed illegal immigrants and a security threat, the Chakma are at pains to point out the difference. “We are not infiltrators. The Indian government settled us in NEFA for their needs,” says Santosh, who was among the 1,497 who voted in 2004. There are large numbers of Chakma still living in Bangladesh, and there are around 1.8 lakh in Mizoram, Tripura, Assam, Meghalaya and West Bengal, where they have ST status; the Hajong enjoy the same in Mizoram, Meghalaya and Assam.

    While India is not party to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 or its 1967 Protocol, it is home to over two lakh refugees, asylum-seekers and “others of concern”, including Tibetans and Sri Lankan Tamils. The Modi government in 2016 proposed to grant citizenship to illegal immigrants who are religious minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

    Arunachal is a protected state under a law dating back to 1873, which requires anyone visiting Arunachal, including Indians from other states, get an inner line permit (ILP), and which prohibits outsiders from buying land.

    Tobom Dai says if the Chakma and Hajong have to remain in Arunachal, they should live only in areas “designated for them” and have to be made to get the ILP. “What kind of citizenship would it be without land rights and with lLP? Citizenship cannot have any riders,” says Subimal.

    Nani Bath, who teaches political science at the Rajiv Gandhi University in capital Itanagar, says the apprehensions of indigenous tribes are valid. “If they (Chakma and Hajong) are to be given land rights, then the Nepalis and Adivasis (in Arunachal) should get them too.” Suhas Chakma, editor of aPolitical, a news website, says some have made careers out of politicising Arunachal’s Chakma issue, and that the local tribes that Chakma and Hajong live with, like the Singpho and Khamti, do not have any problems with them.

    While it is clear the government wants to make the Chakma and Hajong refugees Indian citizens, the opposition to it in Arunachal, where the assembly polls will be held with the general election in 2019, makes it tricky. Since retaining Arunachal is key to the BJP’s Northeast plan, the government could take its time in fulfilling the long-standing demand of the Chakma and Hajong.


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