26 Year-old Mafeeda was born in Kannur District of Kerala, where she lives now. Though she was born in India, she is not a citizen of this country. She was taken to Karachi along with her mother long ago by her father. Mafeeda does not clearly know when her father migrated to Pakistan. She has a vague memory of her childhood spent in Pakistan. Her father was one among the thousands of Indians who migrated to Pakistan in search of work. Mafeeda remembers that the family used to renew their Indian passport and kept coming for short visits home. “By 1997/98, we stayed there for ten/twelve years and took a passport there. My brother and sister were born there. My father migrated due to financial problems, but somehow we got stuck there,” says Mafeeda.
When we met her at home in Kathiroor, she was reluctant to talk initially, but later agreed to talk on the condition of keeping her identity confidential. She does not want to be photographed or video documented. Like many others in this village who have been going through the same plight, Mafeeda too hopes that she will get citizenship one day. She does not want to do anything that may spoil her chances.
Mafeeda has two sisters and two brothers. One sister is getting married soon. None of the siblings have Indian citizenship. Her deepest worry is about her brother, who is one year younger than her. “He is not able to go abroad and work. Having no proper job, he would not get a good match too,” says Mafeeda. The common destination of most young men is the Middle East—the Gulf countries.
Mafeeda wishes her brother would get a passport, though not all others are getting one. She does not mind continuing the same life she lives now, but her brother’s future would be in trouble if he does not get an Indian passport.
52-year-old Shahid from Kathiroor still carries a Pakistani passport. His father migrated to Pakistan in the 1960s. Shahid and his three siblings were born in Karachi. Like Mafeeda, his parents too used to come to Kerala every year in the initial years of migration. Later, they had to take the Pakistani passport. “My father and mother passed away. I came back to Kerala and got married in 2000,” says Shahid. His wife is the only person in the family who is Indian. Both his sons and the younger daughter, who is in the 12th standard, do not have Indian citizenship. Soon after the marriage, Shahid went back to Karachi and stayed there until 2011. The two sons and the daughter were born there. According to Shahid, they (he and his two sons) renew the Pakistani passport every two years. They take necessary documents from the District Superintendent of Police and travel to Delhi for the same. However, this Pakistani passport is a ‘paper and not a computer-generated one,’ according to Shahid.
Shahid is working as a building painter under a contractor. He wants to migrate to the Middle East in search of better jobs. He also wants his sons to go abroad. However, it is impossible. Shahid has no other hassles in his daily life apart from the worry that he and his sons are unable to go to the Gulf for work.
24-year-old Mohammed Ismail, who has completed a Master’s in Business Administration, is fully aware of the consequences of living without nationality. When we met Mohammed Ismail at his house in Kathiroor, Kannur District, he visibly appeared upset, restless, and disillusioned. “Like many of my peers, I too wanted to study abroad after 12th standard, but I couldn’t as I didn’t have a passport. Now I have completed an MBA and most of my friends and classmates went abroad seeking jobs. I am the only one here,” says Mohammed Ismail.
Mohammed Ismail is the youngest son of Rasheeda Banu, the only woman who won a long and tiring legal battle to get citizenship. Rasheeda Banu’s father, Hassan, is one of the first-generation migrants who went to Karachi seeking employment. He was taken by his uncle, who had been there before him. In those times, hundreds of people from northern Kerala traveled to Pakistan, hoping to escape acute poverty.
Hassan married Fathima, Rasheeda Banu’s mother, in 1960 and took her to Pakistan. Though both of them wanted to come back to India after the outbreak of the India-Pak war, they could not. Rasheeda Banu was born in Pakistan in 1972. Hassan also took the three children of his sister, who passed away in Kerala, with him to Pakistan.
Rasheeda Banu was married to Hassan’s sister’s son when she turned 18. The couple had six children, including Mohammed Ismail, all of whom were born in Pakistan. When the elder daughter reached the age of marriage, Rasheeda and her husband wanted to come back to Kerala and settle here. Thus, they came back to their hometown Kannur in 2008. Since then, life has been a long and exhausting journey to achieve nationality. “I traveled to Delhi countless times to meet officials, stayed there for days and weeks, knocked on each and every door possible,” says Rasheeda Banu, who finally cleared all the papers and acquired nationality. Though she got the official confirmation for citizenship in 2018, the document never reached her. “It was lost somewhere; nobody knew where it went. Again, I had to travel back and forth to Delhi as well as the SP office in Kannur,” recalls Rasheeda.
Though she had to fight a tough battle for 16 years, she managed to acquire citizenship for herself and her elder daughter. Her three daughters and two sons are yet to get citizenship. Within the family, two are Indian and the rest are stateless.
Rasheeda has not stopped her struggle to get the documents for all her children cleared. She continues her journey back and forth to Delhi and knocking on doors of officials.
‘In the past, there were thousands of people who were stateless living in the northern districts of Kerala, such as Malappuram and Kannur. They include the first and second generation of people who migrated to Pakistan in search of work. In the 1950s, Karachi was the Gulf,’ says a police officer with State Intelligence. As people migrated to the Arabian countries in the 1970s and 80s, Karachi became a common destination for migrants from Kerala.
According to the District administration (Kannur) the exact data of people who returned from Pakistan and seeking for citizenships is not available. ‘ There are elderly people who have not submitted their applications in digital format. They had tried to do it earlier, but stopped struggling for it, but a large number of them passed away and their second generation is trying to get it done. So far only less than ten individuals are their in the list of people seeking Indian citizenship’ says Shimy, a senior clerk in Kannur collectorate who used to handle the applications.
According to a 2017 data collected by PUCL, there were 180 people across Malabar who returned from Pakistan and waiting for citizenship. However, this number has come down as most of them were old – either passed away or stopped the efforts to gain citizenship tired of the red tapes.
‘Malayali community has a long and rich history of migration. They used to migrate across the globe from very old times’ says Dr Irudayarajan, the founder of International Institute of Migration and Development. “People used to migrate to Srilanka, Malasia and many other countries even before the flood of migration to the Gullf countries started’ he said. Karachi also was such a destination. According to Dr Irudayarajan, people from HIndu fold also used to migrate to Pakistan. He opined that people migrated for combating poverty and they returned to their home land in the best available opportunity and they should be given citizenship without dragging them through the bureaucratic procedures.
According to the police, a large majority of these migrants passed away without accomplishing their dream of achieving nationality. Their second generation has continued the struggle to gain citizenship. As many, like Shahid and Mohammed Ismail, have pointed out, the future is totally uncertain for them. One has to define one’s nationality first. They do not face hassles in their daily life because of the support and empathy expressed by the people around them, but making a single step toward prosperity is an unachievable task—whether it be buying land, acquiring a passport, getting a better job, or even better education.
Originally published here