As my driver, John David, was driving me to Uthirakosamangai yesterday, he informed me that he was a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee living in a refugee camp in Madurai. I have heard about these refugees before but this is the first time I actually spoke to one.
Fighting between the Tamils, who are concentrated in the North and East of Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese majority started from the late 1950s initially as a result of the language policy which made Sinhalese the national language and it was compulsory to know Sinhalese for any government job. The Sinhalese majority felt that they had been marginalized by the British in their own country and needed to take over. This was followed by other economic policies marginalizing the Tamils.
Many Tamils, some very capable ones, left the country. They went everywhere. Quite a number went to Canada and others to Europe. Norway, I know, has a large Tamil community. During that time, the more well off and educated ones left.
As the war intensified, a number of Tamils fearing the fighting, fled to Tamil Nadu in India. This started in the early 1980s. MGR was the Chief Minister then provided them with refugee status. MGR was sympathetic to the Tamils from Sri Lanka since he himself was born in Sri Lanka. The refugees in the early 1980s managed to get citizenship when he was still Chief Minister. He died in 1987.
My driver told me that his parents fled to Tamil Nadu in 1990. They were initially housed in a main refugee camp and then transferred to one of the many camps throughout Tamil Nadu. He himself was born here in 1992.
They have to live inside their designated camp. There is a roll call twice a month when the government officers will come into the camp to ensure that they are in the camps. They are given a monthly allowance of 1000 rupees by the Government and are allowed to work. Most of them, he told me, are daily rated workers doing manual jobs. Because of their refugee status, there is a limited number of jobs and opportunities available to them. They are no longer given citizenship by the Indian government. They cannot travel anywhere because they have no passport. My driver has been living in the camp since he was born in 1992. He doesn’t want to go back to Sri Lanka as he has nothing there for him anymore. The only work available there is in either agriculture or fishing and he has no experience or expertise in either. His only wish is that his children will get Indian citizenship.
There are about 132 refugee camps in Tamil Nadu and each camp houses about 300 to 500 families. So there would be about 300,000 to 500,000 Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu.
It is sad that they have had to flee their own country because of war and politics and live in another country. I was however happy to see that they were housed in a proper home, allowed to work and provided a stipend for their meals by another country. It is also good to see that the Tamils in Tamil Nadu did not push back against their presence by arguing that they were being funded with tax payer monies and taking away their jobs. Good for them!
daily musings 
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