The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
At North Delhi camp, a Nehru from Pakistan awaits tryst with citizenship
NO CONCRETE roads, no piped water supply, no sewage system and no concrete houses — stepping inside Adarsh Nagar Hindu Migrants relief camp in North Delhi feels like a leap back in time. And yet, for the nearly 250 Hindu refugee families from Pakistan occupying this land for over a decade, the camp symbolises hope — of Indian citizenship under the recently notified Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019.
On April 5, nearly four weeks after the BJP government at the Centre notified the Act on March 11, 180 of the camp’s 1,500 refugees applied for citizenship under ca a at a small office in their local school. under the act, undocumented non- muslim mi grants — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians — from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who came to India before December 31, 2014, are eligible for Indian citizenship.
One such application was submitted by the camp’s pradhan, Nehru Lal, 48. He says he was asked for a copy of his passport, visa application and the residential permit he got when he left for India in 2013. Named after independent India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, he says, “It was quite common for people in my locality in Sindh (in Pakistan) to name their children after popular Indian politicians.”
Dressed in a white pathani suit, he told the indian express that he fled from Pakistan’s Sindh due to increasing violence against minorities. Today, his 65-member family, including his wife, eight of his 10 children, six brothers and their respective families, reside at the camp, which is located at the Delhi Jal Board Maidan. “We survive on the salaries of my sons, who work at a mobile phone repair shop. While six of my daughters got married in Delhi after we moved here, two are settled in Sindh,” he says.
Sitting on a khaat (cot) in his make shift house, nehru recalls his first trip to India with his family. “We arrived here on a tourist visa along with nearly 500 others on a pilgrimage to Haridwar in 2013 and decided to stay back. we were issued a 25-day visa in 2013, which we have been getting renewed online every two-three months. We are not required to specify areas on for seeking an extension, but we have to submit an affidavit each time stating that we want to renew our visa,” he says.
Given his refugee status, he cannot move around in India without permission or buy property. “All those restrictions will go away after I get citizenship. Delhi has nothing to offer a farmer like me. I would like to buy land in Uttar Pradesh or Uttarakhand to grow wheat and sugarcane — just like I did in Sindh,” he says, adding that he has been saving money to buy land.
Besides Adarsh Nagar, there are four more camps in Delhi for Hindu refugees from Pakistan — in Rohini, Shahbad Dairy and two in Majnu Ka Tila. Nehru says, “Only around 1,000 people in these five camps are eligible for citizenship under CAA.”
Sisters Rajnandini, 16, and Jamna, 15, who came to India in 2013 with their parents, also applied for Indian citizenship at the camp’s school on April 5. “Sindh was our home, but India will be our new home soon. Our father used to grow onions in his field in Pakistan. He works at a mobile phone repair shop here, while our mother makes mattresses,” says Jamna, adding that her sister and she are two of three girls from Sindh’s Bauri community who attend the local school.
While the girls agree that india has given them the freedom to go to school, jam na com plains about the conditions in the camp, “It needs to be developed. When it rains, the area gets submerged.”
However, pr ad han nehru does not have much hope when it comes to improvement in the camp’s conditions. “Around 25 families lived here when I came here. Today, there are 250. Conditions are so bad that we got electricity only in december 2022, that too after the delhi high court issued directions to the Centre.”
The Centre had in October 2021 objected to providing electricity to the camp on grounds that the refugees were “illegally encroaching upon defence land”.
Nehru claims the camp began as a small tent that his uncle pitched at the spot in 2011.“police troubled him initially and even threw his belongings on the road. However, he got in touch with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), who requested the police to let him be. Gradually, more refugees turned up to live here.”
A recent visit to the camp by The Indian Express revealed that it was surrounded by a garbage dump, with pigs and cows scrounging for food. Boundary walls of the kuchcha houses there were made of bamboo and dried leaves that were tried together.
Down the path from Nehru’s house, sits Dhalu Ram, 58, and his wifed harm a de vi ,50. the couple and their two sons arrived in india from Sindh on April 5 to “visit” their family members at the camp. “I was a farmer back in Pakistan,” says Dhalu, as his two sons fashion bamboo pillars over which a thatched roof will be laid to shelter the family.
For sindh resident moolc hand, 37, who came to India with his wife, three daughters and a son just before the pandemic in 2020, this camp is his “only hope” even though he is not eligible for citizenship under CAA due to its December 31, 2014 cut-off date.
“We came to Haridwar on a pilgrimage. I stayed back here for the sake of my daughters. It was getting tough to raise them in Sindh, since we were discouraged from teaching girls,” says Moolc hand, who earns around rs 10,000 per month by tutoring children in the camp.
But life at the camp has hardly been easy .“since the camp is close to the Yamuna, the whole area floods during mon soon and there are snakes too. But where will we go?” he says.