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It has the feel of a small town but is actually a part of Delhi. There are houses in the midst of shops that sell hardware and automobile components. A primary school overlooks the shops. It is morning and a whole army of rickshaws and Omni vans has brought children from near and far to its gate. This has choked the arterial road of Bodella, a village in west Delhi. Beyond the school, in a maze of lanes and bylanes, stands the Refugee Assistance Centre. The yellow building is where men and women, young and old, from Myanmar are learning skills that will help them eke out a living in India. Youngsters sell dim-sums and curries in makeshift kiosks outside. Inside, women are busy working on looms and men are hunched over computers. These skills, they hope, will find them jobs — somewhere, someday.
The skill gap is evident. Lal Rin Sawn, 54, has been in India since May 2008 along with his family of nine: daughters, sons, sons-in-law and grandchildren. In Myanmar, he was a farmer. Fearing persecution, he fled to Mizoram and a month later made his way to Bodella. He has obviously found little use for his farming skills. He finally found work in a factory but left it when he was diagnosed with diabetes. He sometimes sells mutton curry but, he says, that’s barely enough to feed the family, pay the rent and take care of his and his wife’s medical expenses. Respite comes in the form of Rs 8,900 that his son MK earns every month as a translator, while his daughter takes up sewing work with the help of a machine donated by social work institution Don Bosco Ashalayam. Sawn is even contemplating relocating to Australia where he has relatives.
The lack of jobs for Chin refugees in India is evident. “Most of them come from an agricultural background with limited education. It is a challenge for them to find a job in cities,” says an officer of the United National High Commission for Refugees, or UNHCR. Many of them complete the 2,500-kilometre journey from Myanmar to Delhi on foot. Political and armed conflicts between ethnic groups as well as the military regime that has ruled Myanmar since 1962, have resulted in the displacement of minorities like the Chins from Burma in the past two decades. Political experts believe that the outflow of the Chins escalated especially after the 1988 uprising following persistent human rights violations by the army. The widespread famine in the Chin state in 2007 also led the locals to seek asylum elsewhere, many entering India through Mizoram.
Often, the only document they carry is a UNHCR card. So, the only jobs they get are in the informal sector: casual workers, waiters, beauticians and security guards. And even these jobs are tough to get these days. Many a time they are not even paid the statutory minimum wages. This shows in the bylanes of Bodella which is home to 400 Chin refugees out of the 7,000 living across the country. They are the largest ethnic group of Burmese refugees in India. Rohingyas and Kachins add up to another 3,000 or so.
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This situation might change soon, with India agreeing to give long-term visas to eligible refugees and specific asylum seekers. “It has been three or four months since the Chins started benefitting from this directive. This allows them to enlist for academic courses and seek work in the formal sector,” says the UNHCR officer. The Chins are greeted with strange looks in public places, their children get teased in school and grocers fleece them all the time; yet most of them know that the long-term visas could brighten their prospects in India.
Haungur, 43, has heard of the long-term visas but wants to see their effect on “others in the refugee community” before he can decide on its benefits. Working in a chickenfeed company, he earns Rs 4,000 per month — barely enough to keep body and soul together in Delhi. Even that income might soon stop. “I am not going to work as my wife is getting a colposcopy procedure done. You see, she is cancer-ridden,” says Haungur who has been in India with his family of four since October 2010. “I used to be a porter in my village. But I couldn’t work properly as military drunkards would beat me up. I had to flee, but then they came and raped my wife. She ran away too. We happened to meet at one place and came to Delhi.” With room rent of Rs 3,500 and electricity bill of Rs 1,350, he barely manages to scrape through the month. The good thing is that he gets a sustenance allowance of Rs 3,100 from the Refugee Assistance Centre. He has also received financial assistance from the Burmese church which is housed in the top floor of a commercial complex in Bodella.
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John cannot afford to go to big hospitals for treatments. Like others, he goes to Tint Swe’s clinic — a ten-minute walk from the Refugee Assistance Centre — for minor ailments and routine checkups. Locals call it the “Burmese Clinic”. Swe strides into the threadbare clinic with a backpack, looking remarkably fit for a 63-year-old. A photograph of Aung San Suu Kyi adorns the wall behind his chair. “Back home, I was a physician as well as a member of parliament. I belonged to Suu Kyi’s party. One day the authorities came to arrest me, but I escaped,” says Swe who has been in India for the past 23 years. His clinic in Bodella, equipped with an examination room and a labour room, receives 500 to 700 patients a month — mostly Chins, a few Karens and the rare Rohingya. He treats all free of cost. “It is impossible for me to get a medical licence here as my documents are back home. But in the 11 years that the clinic has been in Delhi, I haven’t had any problem with the authorities,” he says. Swe was a part of the Burmese government in exile and that entitled him to an honorarium. But that stopped in 2008. Since then he has been supported by friends, with some paying the clinic rent and others sponsoring the equipment. “The rent is Rs 11,000. But an American lady paid the clinic rent for four years,” says Swe who is from the ethnic Burmese community.
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While the older generation seems to be stuck in the past, with a slight reluctance to embrace change, the younger ones are all about moving ahead. It is they who are excited about the benefits that the long-term visa will bring. Lal Kulh, Lal Rin Sawn’s 20-year-old son, shoots a barrage of questions at me: “So will this ensure payment on time if we work in call centres, even for overtime? Will this visa also ensure stability of job?” What also gets their interest is the opportunity to enlist in an accredited academic institution, which was denied to them earlier. Already, a majority of the younger refugees has added to their skills, picked up the local language and found work with the Refugee Assistance Centre. Lal Lin Sang, a translator, not only speaks English but bits of Hindi as well. “I had studied till Class X in Myanmar. When I came to Delhi in 2004, I decided that I had to improve my language and other skills,” says this 30-year-old who also works as an animator at the centre and earns Rs 9,000 a month. Having come to India alone, he shares a room with three other young men. “My family is back there. I don’t speak to them very often.”
Like with all refugees, it is the Chin youth that is actively involved in community activities. Henry Karngzar, 31, who was a student activist in Myanmar, is now the youth leader at the Refugee Assistance Centre. An NGO helped him learn English and basic computing skills. “I even met my wife here,” he says. They are a close-knit community. “Helping one another is in-born. We know where every family stays,” says Sang. This is in stark contrast to the Rohingyas who don’t share the Chin’s clannish sensibilities. “The Rohingyas are still fairly new to Delhi, having come here only two years ago. They are scattered, with handful of them in Delhi, Jammu and Meerut. Unlike the Chins, the Rohingyas don’t have a settlement in Delhi where they can flock to,” says Hitesh Sethi, business grants coordinator at the Refugee Assistance Centre. Rohingyas started coming to India especially after the sectarian violence that erupted in the Arakan state in 2012. According to reports, more than a lakh were rendered homeless after clashes between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and the Rohingyas.
Sang elaborates on this: “We are not much in touch with the Rohingyas in Delhi. They have different traditions — we practise Christianity, while they practise Islam. In Myanmar too, the various tribes don’t interact much. There is the Chin state, the region for the ethnic people; and then there are the Buddhists.”
With Aung San Suu Kyi back in active politics, do they ever think of going back? “In Myanmar I couldn’t write articles; my sense of expression was restricted. I am waiting for the next general elections in 2015. If the ethnic tension is reduced, then I would think of going back,” says Karngzar. Also, there is a great deal of mistrust in the current regime as some refugees who went back were killed. “Chin refugees have lived in cities for so long that to go back to the rural agrarian life will be difficult,” says Sethi.
A SLICE OF THE WORLD IN DELHI
Delhi is slowly becoming a melting pot of international cultures with various communities from across the globe making the city their home. For instance, Delhi is host to a sizeable Afghan community, with 10,200 refugees, students, asylum seekers and thousands of medical tourists adding to this burgeoning international populace. In 2011, the Indian embassy in Kabul issued 65,000 visas. Come winter, the weather becomes more tolerable for the Afghans and the rush of patients coming to India increases. As soon as an Afghan lands at the airport, his fate in the city is in the hands of the tarjuman or a Dari-English-Hindi translator. He also happens to be guide, confidant and facilitator. The cost of hiring a tarjuman is Rs 500 a day, and the tips at the end of the assignment can be as high as Rs 10,000.
There is a huge African community in the city as well (According to the 2011 UNHCR numbers, there were 750 Somalis in the country, while 40,000 Nigerians obtained Indian visas in 2012. According to a recent Business Standard report, there are 5,000 Congolese in India as well). They too visit India for education, business, medical treatment and asylum. Various vocational programmes are popular with the African students as it is easier for them to find jobs back home on the basis of the Indian degree. In various pockets of south Delhi, one can find small establishments by members of the African community — salons, eateries and boutiques — that they run for their compatriots.
