Wednesday, January 02, 2013

J U S T I C E


Will India's Chinese finally get justice ?


Maseeh Rahman


Forty-eight years after China declared a unilateral ceasefire to end the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict, an extraordinary event took place this month in India's northeastern state of Assam.

A group of ethnic Chinese were felicitated as 'fellow Indians' by the people of Makum, a small town nestling amid Assam's famed tea gardens, and much regret was expressed for their inhuman treatment by the government after the border war.

In 1962, Assam was part of a larger administrative zone that lay at the intersection of three countries - India, China and Myanmar. Befitting its geographical location, Makum was a unique town - it had a large and thriving Chinese community.

The community dated back to the 1830s, when the British smuggled some workers along with tea saplings out of China to establish Assam's premier plantation business.

Over the next century, the booming tea industry became a magnet for migrants from China, and many eventually started successful businesses of their own. 'My grandfather set up a timber sawmill and our family became very prosperous manufacturing railway sleepers,' Wang Shing Tung, 52, recalls.

'We owned cars, trucks and even elephants, and top district officials would salute my father, addressing him as 'Cheena Sahib' [Chinese boss].'

But calamity struck just as the ceasefire was declared on November 20, 1962. Overnight, 'Cheena Sahib' became 'Dirty Cheena'. At least two-thirds of Assam's more than 1,500 Chinese were indiscriminately rounded up under a draconian law, forced to abandon their possessions, and transported thousands of kilometres to an internment camp at Deoli in the northwestern state of Rajasthan.

'Though the ethnic Chinese were settled in Assam for long, the border conflict provoked a general fear that they could become a fifth column for the People's Liberation Army,' says Mohan Guruswamy, an expert on Sino-India ties.

Hundreds more were arrested in other parts of India. The Association of India Deoli Camp Internees says altogether 3,000 Chinese were confined behind barbed wire in Rajasthan. Some had Chinese passports, some were illegal immigrants, but many, like Wang, were from families that had become fully assimilated - they had married locally, spoke the local language and were Indian citizens.

First the internment and persecution and then the deportation of a majority of inmates to southern China devastated and divided hundreds of Chinese families.

'How could the government treat us like spies?' Wang asks. 'We ate the bread and salt of this land. How could we become traitors?

'My younger sister died of fever as the camp had only a basic dispensary. There was no school, so I couldn't study. It was total misery, and my mother still doesn't want to talk about it, though my father, who died this year, would say, 'Why be afraid? Talk about what happened'.'

His family was released in 1966, but further trauma awaited them on their return to Assam. They had been reduced to paupers. Their house and sawmill had been stripped bare, and everything they possessed, including the trucks, elephants and a safe containing money and gold, was missing. It had either been looted or auctioned as 'enemy property'.

A similar fate befell all the other returnees. Ho Kok Meng, 70, whose grandfather was a tea garden mechanic and whose father set up a car workshop, found everything stolen or destroyed. The family of Paul Leong, 54, part of the last batch to be released from Deoli, in 1968, returned to Shillong (now in Meghalaya state) to find their house and restaurant had been auctioned. They were given 60 rupees as the sales proceeds. 'My father had organised donations for India's war effort, yet he was interned,' Leong says.

Ho Wailai's engineer father was taken away at night shortly before he was to marry a Chinese girl from Calcutta. He returned to Makum five years later to find his business gone. But his fianc?e had remained faithful. 'My father had to start again from scratch making diesel generators,' the 40-year-old says. 'There used to be a lot of hostility, and my parents had a very difficult life.'

The trauma suffered by India's Chinese people is comparable to the experience of the Japanese interned in the US after the Pearl Harbour attack. In 1988 Washington apologised and disbursed US$1.6 billion in reparations to the victims. In India, however, Deoli and its aftermath has remained a dark secret for nearly 50 years.

A public drive has started now to get New Delhi to make amends. A novel in the Assamese language published in April first highlighted the persecution of the Chinese (see accompanying story). The Canada-based association of Deoli internees wrote to Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in August appealing for a monument at Deoli to honour the Chinese who lost their lives and their freedom. And the meeting at Makum this month generated extensive media coverage of a buried chapter of India's recent history.

Since 1962, a majority of India's Chinese have dispersed abroad. But about 500 still live in Assam and Meghalaya. Through enterprise and diligence, many have rebuilt their lives and businesses - Ho Wailai manufactures machines for processing teak; Wang and his siblings run a restaurant and three beauty parlours where the sawmill once stood; Ho Kok Meng's son owns a small tea garden; and Leong, who married an Indian, is among the wealthy of Shillong - he owns a sports shop, a restaurant, a Hyundai car dealership and a large tract of land.

'There's less hostility today, but the insider-outsider feeling remains,' Ho Wailai says. 'There's an underlying sense of anxiety and fear, especially among the older generation.'

'Many of us are doing well, and we're happy again,' Leong adds. 'But some families in Assam are still in a pathetic condition. The government should try to help them, give them a decent livelihood.'

There has been no response from New Delhi as yet.



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