Children of Sri Lankan refugees born in India uncertain about future

Sri Lanka’s new president, Maithripala Sirisena, has pledged greater reconciliation with the Tamils from the country’s war-torn northeast. Last month, his administration began talks with the Indian government about a formal plan for repatriating the 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees still in India, who began coming in waves as violence rocked their homeland in 1983. About 64,000 still live in more than 100 camps in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Nearly 70 percent of refugees in a recent survey by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai said they did not want to return to Sri Lanka.

“The concern at the time was that things were not very conducive for them to return back home,” said K.M. Parivelan, an associate professor at the institute and author of the study. “There was no clear picture of the benefits they will get when they get back and how they will restart their lives.” But, he added, “Now that the election has happened and there is a new government, things are more hopeful.”

Many of the children are in their twenties now and have spent their entire lives in refugee camps in southern India. Their parents tried to shield them from the worst stories of their terrifying exodus during Sri Lanka’s civil war. And so they have lived their heritage in fragments: the snatches of slang their elders use. Matches of kilithattu, Sri Lanka’s tag-like game. Breakfasts of steamed rice flour and coconut curry.

“Sri Lanka for me, to be honest, is more than anything else, just a distant island,” said Prasanth Sekar, 21, an engineering student. “My mum and dad say that it was a great place and that it was much better than where we are now. Snake gourd, any vegetable that you can think of, was richer there. But that’s just what they say; I myself don’t really know.”

Sekar’s friend, Loganathan Bala, 20, a computer student, said he was torn, feeling neither Indian nor Sri Lankan.

“I’m mixed. On the one hand, I want to go back there; but on the other, I have no interest,” Bala said. “In my heart, I want to go and see the land, how it is, but the problems there make me wonder why we should go back.”

Sekar says he does not want to return, even though his lack of citizenship will hurt him when he graduates from college, where he is working toward a degree in aeronautical engineering.

“To be honest, I’m scared about my future,” Sekar said. “I suppose I could get a private job, but the fact that I’m a refugee will always be held against me. People won’t believe us. I can’t say I’m Indian even though I feel like this is my place.”

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

Very familiar stories of second generation immigrants in any country. Born and brought up locally with the discrimination and handouts and fed with the glory/gory stories by their parents of their home countries.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:

Very familiar stories of second generation immigrants in any country. Born and brought up locally with the discrimination and handouts and fed with the glory/gory stories by their parents of their home countries.

I hope you're not equating these guys to the kids born in, say, in America.