PROMISED LAND

CAA is hope and despair, depending on which part of the subcontinent the refugees are from. As the country goes to the polls, the citizenship issue has come to haunt those living without the tag of 'citizen' on the peripheries of the Capital. Ujwal Jalali & Prabhat Shukla look at the enduring anxieties and fleeting hopes among these refugees

- Ujwal Jalali & Prabhat Shukla

NOT a sound in the classroom except the fervent scribbling of pens. Little heads have bent over their answer scripts, writing intently. 14-year old Pooja was well-prepared; confident that she’ll score well. But 30 minutes into the test, the ink in her pen is going dry. Anxious, she thinks she’ll borrow a pen from her classmates. Sheepishly, she whispers to a girl sitting adjacent to her. “Rashmi, do you have an extra pen.” Rashmi looks at her for a while; her otherwise gentle face contorting in some inexplicable disgust. “Yeh le, Pakistani (Here, Pakistani).”

Pooja is not surprised. She quietly accepts the pen and returns to her test paper. Racial slurs didn’t sting anymore; they were mundane, like hunger, the cold, or the stench crawling across her colony. “Many of my classmates taunted me, called me a ‘Pakistani’. Now, I ignore them, it doesn’t affect me anymore. Now I can proudly say that I am an Indian,” Pooja, who lives in a settlement of Hindu refugees from Pakistan at Majnu Ka Tila in central Delhi, told us.

Pooja was just a toddler when her family migrated to India from Hyderabad in Pakistan’s Sindh province. She says she does not have any memory of Pakistan. “India has always been my home,” she asserts.

The refugee camp at Majnu Ka Tila is home to roughly 900 refugees, many of whom have been awaiting citizenship for over a decade now. With the issue of refugees once again on the headlines after the Government of India notified the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, announcing the rules of implementation, those living in these colonies are once again hopeful.