Joy Ma cleared her throat in a slightly hesitant manner, and said, “Today is my birthday.” It was an unexpected revelation, and the group of us who had gathered at the office of the National Foundation of India, paused just a moment before breaking out in congratulations. Although it is not a gentleman’s job to question a lady about her age, I knew instantly that Joy had just turned 52. She was one of five children born in Deoli, Rajasthan, in the old World War II prisoner of war camp that the Indian government had converted, after the 1962, into an internment camp for Indian citizens of Chinese origin.

At one time, scholars calculate, that there were upto 30,000 people of Chinese origin living in Calcutta’s Chinatown itself, but by the fall of 1962 that population had dwindled to about three thousand. Many had been only transient residents anyway, remnants of General Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army that had lost the civil war against Mao Tse-Tung’s Communists. They had made their way to Taiwan. Others had been traders and businessmen, and as the relations soured between India and China, they too found ways to leave for Hong Kong, Taiwan, or other lands that would have them. It was the misfortune of the 3,000 or so left that they were largely born in India, often of parents who themselves were born in India, that they had lived nowhere else except in their homes in Calcutta, Darjeeling, Kalimpong and the surrounding areas.

As I have written in an earlier column, the round up of Indians of Chinese origin made no sense. It was after India had already lost the war, and whole families were swept up, merely because of their ethnicity. Yin Marsh was a teenager, only thirteen, when the police arrived for her family. First her father was taken for questioning, and disappeared for a month without his family being told of where he was. Then they took the rest of the family. Yin’s grandmother was one of the last of the Chinese generation of women that had their feet bound as children to keep them small, and supposedly attractive. Her feet were the size of fists, but the Indian state took her too, hobbling along, to be held at a camp for enemies of the state.

Many of the people were taken just after the Chinese New Year, an occasion meant to be auspicious, to give hope of good in the coming days. What Yin recalls instead are the expressions on the faces of the crowd that gathered around her family as they were being taken away by the police. These were their neighbours, families that they had known for generations. Now they looked upon Yin’s families as if they were strangers, foreigners.

In Joy’s mother’s case, she did not know she was pregnant at the time of detention. When she found out, she begged the doctors for an abortion. She was denied permission. But they took care of her well, the nurse went out of her way to be kind, and Joy’s mother received extra rations. In the documentary be Rafeeq Ellias, “Beyond Barbed Wires”, on the internees who lived through the horrifying experience, Joy’s mother says she cannot regret the fact that her permission for an abortion was denied, at least she has Joy.

It is staggering that an India born to freedom, with the promise of freedom for its citizens, would treat some of its own so brutally, and so callously that children, grandparents and pregnant would be dragged off to spend years behind barbed wires for the crime of their ancestry. It boggles the mind that sixteen years after Independence, after our tryst with destiny, children were born into captivity, five of them. One of them, living in Canada now, is named Deoli, after the place of her birth, carrying the name of that jail through the rest of her life.

Most of the people were held in Deoli for three years, and then released back to their hometowns. By the time they returned home, their belongings had disappeared from their homes and warehouses. They had to beg for loans to start over. Young children, who had spent three years in prison, lost their education, and had to make do with stunted careers. Maybe the saddest part is that most of us do not even know of this, or care to know, of this history. Joy is the youngest of those former prisoners, most of those wrongly held under the scorching Rajasthan sun for no fault of theirs’ are much older, of they are still alive. In another decade or so, they may no longer be with us.

It behooves us to consider what we can do to apologise to these fellow-citizens of ours, to mark their tragedy, so that such a crime is never repeated. But how does a state apologise? It is something for us to think about, before the people we have sinned against so grievously are no longer around to forgive us.

Omair Ahmad is the South Asia Editor for The Third Pole, reporting on water

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