Refugee Dilemma

For most Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils, who are victims of ethnic conflict and civil war, proving that they are not illegal migrants is a nearly impossible task

- Shahina K K

IN January 2017, 49-year-old Shiva Ganesh from Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, working as an IT administrator in Singapore, received a notice from the Indian passport authority asking him to explain why his passport should not be cancelled and instructing him to visit the Indian embassy in Singapore. At the embassy, officials informed him that he was the third individual from Tamil Nadu facing a similar situation. They offered him some time to settle the matter if possible.

Shiva Ganesh wrote numerous letters to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), but he received no response. "I didn't know what else to do," he said. Left with no options, he resigned from his job, returned to India and surrendered his passport. Since then, Shiva Ganesh has been not only unemployed but also stateless, with no country to call his own.

Shiva Ganesh is one among thousands of people born in Sri Lanka who sought refuge in India during the civil war of the 1980s. As a Tamilian of Indian origin who fled Sri Lanka during childhood, he grew up, educated, worked and started a family in India. Yet, he remains stateless, with no citizenship. His father was among the labourers taken from Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka in the 1940s to work on tea plantations. “During the civil war, we were in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Our house and my father’s shop were burned down. We were rescued by some local people, and that’s how we reached Tamil Nadu in 1984,” he recalls.