For more than a decade, Ajmal Singh has been trying to get Indian citizenship. He fled Pakistan 14 years ago and continues to live in a refugee camp, with ten children, on the outskirts of Jodhpur.
He worked as a driver before crossing over but doesn’t know farming or mining, the only two jobs readily available to Pakistani Hindus who have fled to India. His citizenship application is caught, as is often the case in India, in a bureaucratic maze fuelled by political apathy.
The 39-year-old is one of the more than 100,000 Pakistani Hindus who have taken refuge in India since 1965, citing religious persecution. Of these, 55,000 have settled in Rajasthan but continue to be ‘nowhere people’.
Every week, the Thar Express brings more families who come with visas that don’t allow them to leave Jodhpur. Many of them are illiterate, poor farmers, who join thousands of others living without basic amenities of electricity, running water and proper toilets.
Hope flickered in 2014 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders held out the promise of citizenship for these refugees during poll campaigns. But two years have passed since the BJP came to power and little has been done to improve the lives of thousands like Singh.
At a citizenship drive in July, over 1,200 applications were received by Jodhpur’s district magistrate BC Malick, who says “only some’’ were processed. The NDA government says more than 4,200 people have got citizenship between 2014 and 2015 but a Right To Information application revealed the number to be a mere 289.
Hurdles vs Hope
The biggest hurdle for the Pakistani refugees who want to be Indian is lack of paperwork, Malick says. The government wants proof that the grandparents or parents of refugees were born in undivided India. But the absence of documents is only a small slice of the plight of these displaced people.
Singh attended the citizenship drive, filled out the papers and then found he had to pay Rs 15,000 to be given for Indian citizenship. This was an impossible sum for the impoverished man who earns Rs 100 or Rs 200 a day if he’s lucky. “It’s a choice — do I feed my children or do I get citizenship?” he asks