When the final draft of the National Register of Citizens was released in July 2018, around four million people were left out in Assam. By December 2019, the Narendra Modi government had brought in the Citizenship Amendment Act to grant citizenship to religious minorities of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh facing persecution.
Indian Muslims saw it as a threat of disenfranchisement, as the government, wanting ostensibly to address the issue of migrants, excluded people on the basis of their faith. Protests swelled in the streets across the country against the CAA and a possible National Register of Citizens for all of India, and if people have moved indoors it’s largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown.
In this context, The Deoliwallahs is a sad reminder of what happens to people who are trapped by decisions made by governments, and how it forces them to become victims of suspicion and hate.
Prisoners at home
In the aftermath of the 1962 Indo-China war, 3,000 Chinese-Indians, practitioners of small trade in leather, running restaurants, and other family businesses, who had made India their home, suddenly faced the prospect of being interred in a disused World War II prisoner-of-war camp at Deoli, Rajasthan. The Defence of India Act, 1962 defined the ‘enemy’ as ‘any person or country committing external aggression against India; any person belonging to a country committing such aggression.’
As authors Joy Ma and Dilip D’Souza write, there was more to come. “The Indian Government amended the Foreigners Act which essentially said that any person whose parents or grandparents were subjects/citizens of any country that India was at war with would be subject to certain consequences.” And the Foreigners (Restricted Areas) Order was passed — declaring that foreigners could not enter restricted areas. All these executive and parliamentary actions together laid the ground for the incarceration of the Chinese Indians.
This is a moving account of how people were picked up from far-flung places in Shillong, Darjeeling, Tinsukia, and Kalimpong, forced to carry only the essentials with them, and made to undertake a week-long rail journey to Deoli which was to mark the beginning of a five-year internment.
Along the way, many of them realised that the place they had called home no longer wanted them. They had been singled out as persons of hostile origin by virtue of their physical features. It did not matter to the police authorities that Hindi and English were the two languages spoken by the Chinese Indians. The camp was ill-prepared to meet the new detainees. Most of all, the camp officials were shocked to learn that the detainees could speak Hindi fluently. With just the bare minimum afforded to the Chinese, the lives they had known changed forever. After they were released, many left India for Canada.
The book’s authors remind us that much like the Foreigners Act, the omission of Muslim refugees from the protection of the CAA will offer a legal structure to the government to target people who profess Islam.
The Deoliwallahs remind us that in a democratic India, often hailed as an exemplar of unity in diversity, this is a road best not taken. The most difficult hurdle for the detainees was the stigma of being in jail. They haven’t been able to forget it.
The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment ; Joy Ma, Dilip D’Souza, Pan Macmillan India, ₹650.
