Longing to return to a free land
Rahul Chandran ,
rahul.c@livemint.com
New Delhi, 7th April 2012
Ask Tenzin Chemi what her
favourite Indian food is and she will say rava idli. Which is not unusual.
After all, a lot of people in this part of the world like the steamed cakes
made of broken wheat.
Except that Chemi is a
22-year-old Tibetan whose grandfather Tashi Phuntsok and his family trekked
more than 1,000km and sought refuge in India in 1959, a few months after
Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled to this country.
Chemi lives with her parents,
grandfather and two brothers in Bylakuppe, a small, largely agricultural
settlement, about 9km from the nearest town Kushalnagar, a wayside stop for
tourists on their way to Coorg. For a Tibetan colony, the campsites are in an
entirely incongruous setting, far from the mountains of the Himalayan range.
There isn’t a hill in sight.
Following a failed 1959 uprising
against China, the Dalai Lama sought refuge in India and has since lived in
exile in Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh. According to the Central Tibetan
Administration, Tibet’s government-in-exile based in India, 94,203 Tibetans
live in India, of the total 127,435 who live outside Tibet.
Chemi’s grandfather, 77-year-old
Phuntsok, left his village in south-eastern Tibet in 1959. He was 25 at the time.
He chose to come to India because the Dalai Lama had already been given refuge
in the country, he says.
By many accounts, India gave
refuge to the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader and his compatriots for a mix
of reasons. For one, India was the birthplace of Buddhism.
“It is not clear what the Indian
consideration was (in allowing Tibetans into India), but India (in 1959) had
about two million Pakistani refugees, so accepting Tibetans was not an abrupt
policy change,” said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese Studies at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Nehru shared the dais with the Dalai Lama at
Sarnath (in Uttar Pradesh), so one of the reasons was religious, but there were
other reasons too, including strategic ones.”
Phuntsok walked through Bhutan
into Assam to take refuge in a small town called Missamari, where he stayed in
tents with other Tibetan exiles. The Indian government, he says, provided them
free food.
The Tibetans did not want
anything for free, Phuntsok says, which is how he found himself as part of a
road construction team for the Central Public Works Department in Dalhousie,
Himachal Pradesh. After six months there, he was taken on a special train to
Bylakuppe, then a little-known area about 230km from Bangalore, where then Karnataka
chief minister S. Nijalingappa offered about 3,000 acres for the Tibetans to
settle on.
Bylakuppe is now a bustling town
with about 16,000 Tibetans living in four camps, the local resettlement office
estimates. The settlement has four major monasteries housing about 11,000
Tibetan monks and those studying to be monks. Bylakuppe is, in fact, the oldest
and among the largest Tibetan settlements in India—larger even than the one in
Dharamsala.
The Tibetans run most local shops
in the area. The land, according to Dolma Yangchen of the Tibetan resettlement
office, was signed over in a lease to the Dalai Lama.
Phuntsok runs a sweater business
out of Amravati in Maharashtra, which he started in 1977 after trying—and
failing—to set up businesses in Chikmagalur, Mysore and Bangalore in Karnataka.
He buys the woollens from Ludhiana in Punjab.
In Camp 4, where the main
monastery called the Golden Temple stands, Savithri, who goes by one name and
is a local resident, has been selling samosas for the past two years, mainly to
the monks who live in the nearby hostels. For eight years before that, she
would wander around the camp selling snacks cooked at home. Before that, she
used to be a construction worker, like her father.
She has no qualms about the
settlers who have moved into her neighbourhood. It’s not because the Tibetans
moved to Bylakuppe that she makes the living she does. But yes, admits
Savithri, if not for their presence, she would perhaps still be toiling as a construction
worker.
There were originally about 100
houses in each of the Tibetan camps, although that number has increased along
with the population. Most families have some land on which they farm, growing
mainly maize. Almost all agriculture is rain-fed, with land lying fallow after
the monsoon harvest. The families supplement their income by selling sweaters
or running restaurants and carpet-weaving centres.
Of his forced migration, Phuntsok
says India “accepted us and gave us almost all rights a regular citizen would
have”, except he can’t vote in Indian elections or sell the property where his
house stands in Camp 1 in Bylakuppe.
The Tibetans hold fast to their
identity and still consider themselves guests, which may be the reason for the
repeated expressions of gratitude towards their host. There have been few
instances of protests in Bylakuppe, camp residents say, except when local
autorickshaw drivers had tried to increase fares. The Tibetans responded by
boycotting the autorickshaws until an agreement was reached. Most autorickshaws
in the area now have a rate card.
There are the inevitable issues
over identity, such as when it comes to explaining where they are from.
“Not Indian, yaar—we always have
that problem. And then I always say ki, you know, Tibetan settled in Mysore,
refugees. Easiest way, you know,” says Penpa Lhamo, 32, who was born in India
to Tibetan parents. Lhamo studied journalism at the Madras Christian College in
Chennai and worked at The New Indian Express for a while before taking a job as
a teacher in a local Tibetan school.
But would Tenzin Chemi, who was
born in this country, want to go back to Tibet, which she has never seen? “Yeah
definitely, I would like to go back. If it is still ruled out of China, then I
can’t stay for long, but if it becomes an independent country, then the feeling
is entirely different, and I would like to stick with my country if it becomes
independent. Though India has been very generous and provided me with equal
rights as a citizen, except the voting thing,” she says.
“I would definitely love to go
back to Lhasa because I have grown up listening to stories, and my
grandparents...they passed away dreaming and thinking that one day they would
definitely go back to Tibet,” says Lhamo. “I would definitely like to settle
there if we had the liberty, if we did not have the political restrictions.”
Elizabeth Roche in New Delhi
contributed to this story.
This is the fifth of a 10-part
series that profiles foreign communities that are contributing to India’s
cosmopolitan culture.
Looking for a safe haven
Medical tourism is providing a
new source of livelihood to Afghan nationals in New Delhi; But an old problem
still remains for these refugees—getting Indian citizenship
05th April 2012
His long beard and meticulously
tied turban make it hard to distinguish Balwan Singh from any other Sikh in the
country—until you get to peek into his living room or know that his mother
tongue is Pashto, spoken predominantly in southern Afghanistan.
Balwan Singh was 25 when he fled
from Afghanistan following the December 1979 Soviet invasion of his country.
More than 30 years since, he continues to live in New Delhi as a refugee.
Military service was mandatory
for every citizen in Afghanistan at the time. But Sikhs and Hindus, he says,
were given jobs only as security guards in the predominantly Muslim country.
This meant “you didn’t know if you will return home that day” as chaos reigned
in the region following the invasion. “After the invasion it was no longer safe
to stay back. We came with what we could bring.”
More Afghan nationals in India
moved to the country in the 1990s with the emergence of the extremist group
Taliban as a political force in their country. This reached a flashpoint in
2001, when the US began military attacks on the Taliban in retaliation for
their support to the militant group Al Qaeda that had masterminded the 11
September attacks on the US that year, killing thousands of Americans.
According to the Delhi Police, in
the Capital there are around 9,000 Afghans, many of whom stayed back illegally
beyond the permitted period. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
had 16,400 refugees and some 5,300 asylum-seekers in India registered with it
as of 31 August 2011, comprising mainly Afghan, Myanmar and Somali nationals.
“It has been more than 30 years
and we have not been given citizenship,” says Singh. “We are fighting a (legal)
case to get Indian citizenship.”
Singh’s residence, about 10km
from Tilak Nagar in West Delhi, is surrounded by about 50 families, all
refugees from Afghanistan living in slum-like conditions. The first noticeable
feature of his house is the absence of any furniture. Instead, a carpet
stretches to the corners of the room. Guests are invited to sit and dine on the
floor. Singh says his family still remains influenced by Afghan traditions such
as this. And unlike the fun-loving Punjabi community in India, the Afghan Sikhs
are restrained and their women stay inside the confines of their homes.
There are other similar Afghan
ghettos in the Capital—in Bhogal, Lajpat Nagar and Malviya Nagar. Many of the
families in these settlements run grocery shops or Afghan restaurants or work
as cooks and auto rickshaw drivers.
Singh did these jobs until early
2000. Today, he has a better job, ironically because of the instability in his
homeland. Singh works as a translator with Apollo Hospital, which is receiving
an increasing flow of patients from Afghanistan.
Among the patients for whom Singh
works as a translator is Mohammed Omar Khayani, a director at the ministry of
rural rehabilitation in Afghanistan. “Healthcare in Afghanistan is very poor.
80% of laboratories and medicines are fake. So I come here every six months,”
says Khayani.
Apollo Hospital, like many other
speciality hospitals in the Capital, receives nearly one-third of its overseas
patients from Afghanistan, according to a hospital spokesperson. In the past
year, the hospital treated around 1,250 Afghan patients.
The thriving medical tourism is supporting
Afghan immigrants in New Delhi. Four airlines—Air India, Kam Air, Safi Airways
and Ariana Afghan Airlines—fly daily between Afghanistan and India, bringing
about 800 people daily. As the flights land at the Indira Gandhi International
Airport in New Delhi, between 1pm and 5pm, a large number of Afghans take
position outside the exit gates in the hope of finding a customer.
“Every day some 100 Afghans come
here and they start talking to some of the passengers and become their guides
in town,” said an employee of a prepaid taxi service, who declined to be named
citing his company’s rules. “Most of them are regulars and they have tied up
with hotels, mostly budget hotels in Lajpat Nagar or Malviya Nagar (in south
Delhi). At least 30-40 cars are booked from my service, mostly to hospitals or
to their hotels.”
Like Khayani, most of the
visiting Afghans are not familiar with any language other than their own. Singh
assists Khayani with his daily needs in India, from explaining his medical
condition to the doctors to taking him to the foreigner’s regional registration
office in Delhi.
At the airport exit gates are
also policemen in plain clothes watching the Afghan immigrants. Afghans are
under the constant watch of various law enforcement agencies that see them as a
potential security threat.
The police visit hotels and
hospitals across the Capital seeking information on Afghan immigrants and their
whereabouts. At the airport, these undercover policemen randomly pick Afghan
nationals on suspicion of them being touts or unauthorized guides.
Sayed Basher Kazemi is president
of the Kazemi Construction and Road Building Co., which builds roads in
Kandahar, one of the most turbulent regions in Afghanistan. In Kabul, he says,
he lives in a palatial house with his family of 60. But he comes to India every
once in a while to escape the frequent bombings and militancy in his country.
“We have Taliban. We have
Pakistani Taliban and also Irani Taliban, American Taliban and UK Taliban... UK
Taliban killing American people, American Taliban killing English Taliban, ISI
Taliban killing police. We have a lot of Taliban,” says Kazemi, explaining his
frequent trips to the “very liberal” India, where he also comes to meet his
Russian girlfriend.
tarun.s@livemint.com
When Mowgli met the Lepchas
How a forest officer’s idea on
rainwater harvesting helped rejuvenate the dying Himalayan springs in Sikkim
Ananda Banerjee,
ananda.b@livemint.com
22nd March 2012
In the upper reaches of Sikkim,
there can’t be too many government servants who can actually keep up with and
even outrun the sturdy Lepchas, also known as the Rong. Indian Forest Service
(IFS) officer Sandeep Tambe is one such rarity. But his recent contribution to
the region has been much more vital in nature.
Four years ago, Tambe met a
delegation of Lepcha elders who were troubled as the usually bountiful
Himalayan mountain springs—locally known as Mohaan, Kuaan and Dhara—were fast
drying up because of the usual reasons: increasing population, burgeoning
livestock, soil erosion, erratic rainfall, deforestation, forest fires, road
construction.
The solution that Tambe hit upon
was spring-shed development, which is based on the principles of rainwater
harvesting.
“The scientific principle of
spring-shed development is to conserve every drop of rainwater where it falls,
the ‘running’ water needs to be trained to ‘walk’, and the ‘walking’ water
needs to be trained to ‘rest’ for a while,” explained Tambe.
The novelty lies in sustainably
developing the spring-shed to increase the percolation of rainwater and thus
recharging the ground water. The concept of water harvesting was a completely
alien one to the people of the region as scarcity was new to them.
Today, the mountain springs once
again gurgle with water—testimony to the success of an initiative that has won
the Ground Water Augmentation Award from the ministry of water resources. Tambe
credits teamwork for the success of the water conservation effort.
Tambe, 41, had an unorthodox
route to the IFS. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the Indian
Institute of Technology, Bombay, and worked for software services firm Infosys
Ltd in the US. After spending three years in the corporate world, he came back
to India, heeding the call of the wild.
“Happiness lies in the forests
and the secrets that it shares with me,” he said. “If I can do anything to
protect natural history, that would be my ultimate satisfaction in life.”
After a PhD from the Wildlife
Institute of India, he joined the IFS. Hailing from Mandla district in Madhya
Pradesh— home to the Kanha National Park and Tiger Reserve, which inspired
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book—the young Tambe always thought of himself as
Mowgli. Some of that spirit is still in him—as evident by him being able to
hold his own on the steep mountain slopes of Sikkim.
To help reverse the scarcity,
Tanbe sought the expertise of WWF-India, the People’s Science Institute (PSI)
in Dehradun and the State Institute of Rural Development in Jorethang, Sikkim,
to start the spring-shed conservation programme, better known as Dhara Vikas,
to rejuvenate the dying springs.
The once well-forested spaces
that used to act as water catchment areas had been reduced to a few trees,
limiting the percolation of rainwater and creating the hydrological imbalance.
It was estimated that less than
15% of the rainwater was percolating down to recharge the underground springs,
while the rest was flowing down as run-off, often causing floods. Global
warming and erratic weather patterns had also hurt the spring water resources
of Sikkim. The situation was worsened by rain falling in short bursts and
extreme weather events becoming more frequent.
The main challenges Tambe and his
team faced initially were identifying recharge areas accurately, developing
local capacity, encouraging rainwater harvesting in farmers’ fields, and
sourcing public financing.
“Water supply programmes have
traditionally received priority in public financing, but with the drying up of
spring water sources, water supply schemes have taken a beating,” said Tambe.
It was found that the farming
practice most amenable to spring recharge was paddy cultivation and in
locations where farmers had discontinued agriculture, water sources located
downstream had started drying up.
Civil structures such as check
dams were unstable and not sustainable on such steep terrain, given the weak
geology prone to frequent cloud bursts and heavy rainfall. The non-governmental
organizations involved put together a number of engineering measures to harvest
rainwater such as conserving soil and moisture with contour trenches and pits,
gully plugs and bunds on terraces.
The desilting of dried-up ponds
and lakes was among the many interventions that were central to the success of
Dhara Vikas.
Further greening measures included
brushwood check dams, the planting of shallow-rooted grass that doesn’t need
much water, shrubs, hedgerows and trees.
Restrictions were imposed on
livestock grazing, fuel-wood gathering and fodder cutting. The recharge area
was fenced off.
Work is now under way to revive
five springs in the south, east and west districts. Information on nearly 200
springs has been collected and a “web atlas” application that shows village
springs being developed to make the information accessible to all users.
Weather stations are being set up to record atmospheric changes. The next step
is to artificially recharge the Nagi Lake in Namthang by harvesting spring
water.
“The existing national rural
drinking water programmes need to explore spring-shed development as a means to
ensure sustainability of the spring water sources, especially in the
mountains,” said Tambe. “A positive step in this direction is a nationwide
aquifer-mapping exercise that is being planned along with mountain spring
conservation for effective groundwater management.”
