Crisis, what crisis? India stays calm as refugees keep coming

MATT WADE
November 9, 2009

NEW DELHI: THERE is a country where leaky boats full of Sri Lankan Tamil
asylum seekers are turning up without triggering a political crisis.

In India more than 24,000 have arrived in the past three years, many by sea.
Despite heavy naval patrolling of the narrow ocean channel that divides the
countries, at least 1075 Sri Lankan Tamils have made it to India this year.
Some put this year's arrivals at more than 3700.

The public reaction is in stark contrast to the recent frenzy over boat
people in Australia. The media have taken little notice of the boat arrivals
and national politicians have been allowed to concentrate on other
challenges.

Some in Australia have asked why Tamils fleeing Sri Lanka don't just go the
south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, home to 60 million Tamil speakers. The
answer is that more than 100,000 have done just that. About 73,000 of them
live in special refugee camps funded and run by the Indian Government.
Another 31,000 live in the community, mostly in cities such as Chennai.

India - where 800 million people live on less than $2 a day - does not
encourage the flow of refugees from its small island neighbour. Even so they
have been arriving in waves since the Tamil Tigers took up arms to fight for
a separate homeland in north and east of Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. The
war ended in May but refugees continue to arrive.

"It's often older people and the unskilled who come here," said a strategic
analyst in Chennai, R. Hariharan, a retired colonel. "People who can't
afford to pay the huge sums its takes to get to Australia or Canada."

There is sympathy for the refugees. In September the ruling party in Tamil
Nadu passed a resolution calling on the national government to grant
citizenship to all Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India. So far, New Delhi has
shown no interest in the idea.

Not only Tamils seek sanctuary in India. The World Refugee Survey 2009,
published by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, found 456,000
refugees and asylum seekers in India. That includes about 110,000 Tibetans
including the spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. India also tolerates a huge
number of Bangladeshis within its borders - many millions, by some
estimates - although they are officially deemed illegal immigrants.

In neighbouring Pakistan, the numbers are even more confronting. Despite
battling insurgency and economic collapse, Pakistan hosts nearly 2 million
Afghan refugees. Tens of thousands of them have been allowed to set up
businesses and make their home in Pakistan's cities and towns while they
wait for the United Nations to find them a new home.