The Deoliwallahs

By Joy Ma and Dilip D'Souza

Humanly compelling, beautifully told ... brings to light a forgotten chapter of Indian history, one we need to remember in these troubled times' PRATAP BHANU MEHTA

'[Joy Ma and Dilip D'Souza] have seamlessly woven together historical facts with personal stories about how the Chinese- Indians lost the country of their birth' YIN MARSH

The untold account of the internment of 3,000 Chinese-Indians after the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Just after the Sino-Indian War of 1962, about 3,000 Chinese-Indians were sent to languish in a disused World War II POW camp in Deoli, Rajasthan, marking the beginning of a painful five-year-long internment without resolution. At a time of war with China, these ‘Chinese-looking’ people had fallen prey to government suspicion and paranoia which soon seeped into the public consciousness. This is a page of Indian history that comes wrapped in prejudice and fear, and is today largely forgotten. But over five decades on, survivors of the internment are finally starting to tell their stories.

As several Indian communities are once again faced with discrimination, The Deoliwallahs records these untold stories through extensive interviews with seven survivors of the Deoli internment. Through these accounts, the book recovers a crucial chapter in our history, also documenting for the first time how the Chinese came to be in India, how they made this country their home and became a significant community, until the war of 1962 brought on a terrible incarceration, displacement and tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jan 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781529048865

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Note

PREFACE

The Strange Story of an Incarceration

In the bus on the way back, the group asked seventy-something Ying Sheng Wong to sing. Looking at him, looking around at the others in the bus, I assumed idly that he would break into a Chinese song. After all, these folks ‘looked’ Chinese.

Then Ying Sheng sang, and he sang ‘Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh’ (This is a strange story), the lyrical song from the 1960 Bollywood hit film Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (My Heart is Mine but My Love Belongs to Someone Else). It nearly brought tears to my eyes – for two reasons. One, here was this Chinese-Indian man who left India several decades ago, sitting in a bus speeding along – of all places – the highway from Ottawa to Toronto, singing this old Hindi song. Charming, but the knot in my gut told me how inexpressibly sad this scene it was. Two, to my chagrin, I realized that my assumption about their ‘looks’ was the same one that once sent Wong and a few thousand others to a detention camp in Rajasthan. Truly, their only fault then was that they ‘looked’ Chinese.

Early on the morning of 24 August 2017, Ying Sheng and fifty other Chinese-Indians had gathered in the parking lot of the Splendid China Mall in Toronto. They had planned something rather remarkable for the day: an expedition by bus to the Indian High Commission in Ottawa, where they intended to hold a peaceful demonstration and hand over a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking for an apology. This tiny community had finally drummed up the wherewithal to speak out and ask for some measure of redress for what had once happened to them fifty-five years ago.

For what had happened to them was unjust indeed.

In 1962, India and China fought a war over their border. In India, people of Chinese ancestry – Chinese-Indians – were immediately viewed with suspicion. It might have remained at that, but the suspicions turned instead into official policy, and starting in November 1962, the Indian government incarcerated nearly 3,000 Chinese-Indians in a prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. These were people, in many cases, whose families had lived in India for generations, who spoke only Indian languages, who had no connection to China. Their sudden incarceration left them bewildered and disillusioned with India.

Why this happened and why so few Indians know about this episode are questions this book will explore.

The parallel, of course, is the American incarceration of 100,000 Japanese-Americans in prison camps, two decades earlier. The reason ran in parallel as well – war – World War II in 1942; the India–China border war in November 1962. The respective conflicts spurred the world’s two largest democracies to suspect the loyalties of thousands of their own citizens, solely because they ‘looked’ the way they did – a suspicion that soon led to their incarceration.

Like the Japanese in the US, the Chinese have had a long history in India. Starting in the late eighteenth century, they came over as traders, tea-plantation workers, cobblers, dentists and other professionals, settling mostly in small towns across India’s Northeast. As the generations slipped past, several families became Indian enough that they spoke only local languages. They were so much a part of the local fabric that in some of these towns, you can still find reminders of their presence. Like Hong Kong Restaurant in Tinsukia, Assam, started by a man who did his time in the Camp – it is in Chinapatty, Makum Road. (The best translation of ‘Chinapatty’ might be ‘Chinese ’hood’ or even ‘Chinatown’.) Makum, the small town seven kilometres east of Tinsukia along that road, has a neighbourhood also called Chinapatty, bounded by what is still called Chinapatty Road and the Makum railway station. Back in 1962, given the people who lived there, these names must have made demographic and geographic sense, unlike today, when there are so few ethnic Chinese in these towns.

If I could turn the clock back, I would try to get a sense of the mood in these neighbourhoods in late 1962, when war broke out with China. For with the war, India’s President S. Radhakrishnan signed the Defence of India Act, allowing authorities to arrest people suspected ‘of being of hostile origin’.¹ Across Northeast India, and despite the years of familiarity, this is just what plenty of angry Indians had begun thinking anyway – that their neighbours from Chinapatty who ‘looked Chinese’ were of ‘hostile origin’. The police machinery then swung into action, knocking on Chinese-Indian doors in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, Tinsukia and Makum, and elsewhere, giving bewildered families short warning to pack a few essentials and report to the police station. Sometimes, they simply took away the head of the family. Often, it was the men. It must have seemed disconcertingly random. Eventually, all these prisoners were bundled onto a train that actually started from the Makum railway station that marked out Chinapatty, and it trundled west across the country for a week. Along the way, wherever the train halted for food or fuel, fellow Indians threw stones and screamed at the hapless captives, ‘Go back, Chinese!’ When the journey finally came to an end, they were in a dusty town on the edge of the desert in Rajasthan – Deoli. They were hustled into an old British camp there – among other things, it had been used for German and Japanese prisoners of war during World War II – and were given numbers, identity cards and assigned to barracks.

Many Chinese-Indians spent up to five years in Deoli Camp. Some died there. Some were deported to China on ships – a strange and cruel fate to visit on people whose families had been Indian for generations, who spoke only Indian languages and for whom China was a country as foreign as, say, Rwanda might have been. Others who made their way home after the internment were reduced to poverty, lacking even the taxi fare home from the train station, their property stolen or vandalized. Effa Ma, for example, was pregnant when she went to the Camp. She gave birth there. Years later, the family was released and sent to Calcutta. In a recent short film² and in Chapter 12, she recalls her return to Calcutta: ‘It was July the 1st. It was raining ... Where [could] I go with these three kids and not a pie in my pocket? ... I had nobody to come to receive me!’

From these dire straits, the community had to rebuild. Some people managed as best they could, running restaurants and beauty parlours that did moderately well. But it was hard work winning back even a degree of acceptance from the neighbours. Over the years, many chose to leave the country that had so profoundly betrayed them, emigrating to Canada, the US and elsewhere. In particular, Toronto has a substantial community of these émigrés and their families. They meet regularly, go on picnics and have even formed the Association of India Deoli Camp Internees (AIDCI).

Social gatherings are fine, but the AIDCI knows there’s an elephant in the room.

For over a half-century, members of the Chinese-Indian community, those who left and those who remained in India, have been silent – terrified of speaking out, of drawing attention to themselves. What if there is a repeat of those sinister knocks on the door? What if they are again rounded up and sent away to a prison camp? Besides, many in India are still stateless residents, forced to renew residence permits every year, paying thousands of rupees each time. What repercussions might they face if some of their compatriots speak of this episode?

It is easy to say that such an incarceration can’t happen in twenty-first century India. (Then again, in 2019, the National Register of Citizens raised just this spectre.) But then nobody had imagined it could happen in India in 1962 either. Because nobody wants to provoke a repeat, there’s been a conspiracy of silence around the 1962 incarceration – Chinese-Indians haven’t said anything about it, nor has anyone else. That whole painful episode is today an entirely forgotten page of Indian history. It’s not just that it isn’t taught in schools, the Indian state has remained silent too. A brief online history of the Camp has one enigmatic mention: ‘This camp was converted into a detention camp to accommodate about 3,000 prisoners and was known as Chinese camp.’³ The Wikipedia mention is as enigmatic: ‘In 1962 it was established as detention camp for people of Chinese heritage living in India.’⁴

No wonder most Indians don’t speak of, learn about or even know of this incarceration. Until early 2012, I was one such Indian.

After more than half a century, some Chinese-Indians are wearying of the ignorance and silence. Four travelled from North America to India in 2015 to hold a series of public meetings to tell their stories. And, in early 2017, when the AIDCI floated the idea of a demonstration outside the Indian High Commission and a demand for an apology from the Indian government, plenty of members across Canada and the US approved. About fifty said they would join the trip.

Not that there weren’t any concerns. Indian and Chinese troops spent much of the summer of 2017 in a ‘standoff’ in the Doklam region of Bhutan, which adjoins the territory of both countries. On both sides, the press and officials traded accusations of territorial incursions and demands for the other side to back down. With the rhetoric ratcheting up like this, the 1962 fear settled like an unwelcome but familiar straitjacket on Chinese-Indians, especially in India. As one wrote to the AIDCI in Toronto:

We want you to know that this recent India-China stand-off over Doklam has again rattled the community in India and we are still on tenterhooks. We have been trying our best to remain as invisible as possible so as not to attract unwanted attention to the community. [We] have had to assuage our elders that 1962 will not happen to us. We are ... not sure what the demo in Ottawa would mean to us here – if it would have any effect at all – but [this is] just a sincere request from [us] to be careful about what is said and what is demanded. The last thing we would want here is to provoke the Indian Government ... Since they can’t get back at China directly, [I] am concerned they might take it back on us. Already, many of us are on the radar of the Indian intelligence agencies and I know because I get frequent visits from them.

The AIDCI spent weeks deliberating such worries and eventually decided to go ahead with its plans. After all, tensions are a fact of life between the two giant Asian nations, which haven’t ever managed to satisfactorily resolve the disagreements over their borders. Waiting for them to do so would be futile, especially as the youngest survivors of Deoli Camp – like Effa Ma’s daughter Joy, the co-author of this book – enter their mid-fifties. While there is room for caution, the time to speak is right now.

This is why the bus was waiting that early August morning in the parking lot. Pumped up to travel in it to Ottawa were AIDCI members from Vancouver, Berkeley, North Carolina and all over the Toronto metropolitan area. The mood was optimistic, even cathartic. Years of silence had grown oppressive and the chance to finally speak about 1962, finally ask for answers and a measure of closure, was almost visibly liberating.

The group was not without its share of naysayers. One explained his stance as the bus swung onto the Ottawa highway. He fully supported the day’s effort, he said. Only, even half a century on, the wound of the incarceration remained raw, and he had no patience for rosy illusions about the state that had inflicted it. So persuasion and polite requests would not cut it. An apology, he believed, would be forthcoming only when India was publicly shamed into one.

This set off plenty of discussions among the passengers about the Japanese-American experience. A couple of AIDCI members had made some initial, informal contact with members of that community to get a sense of how they had worked towards getting the US to officially apologize for the 1942 incarceration. The overwhelming sense was of how long it had taken, of the enormous effort involved. After several years of a similar silence, it was only in the 1970s, and following substantial internal debate, that the Japanese American Citizens League decided to work for reparations. Another ten years of persistent lobbying later, a US Congressional commission started holding a number of public hearings at which several hundred once-internees told their stories. The Commission’s 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, recommended that those who were incarcerated be paid reparations, though plenty of lawmakers still did not agree. It was only in 1988 that President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, acknowledging the injustice of what had happened, apologizing for it and providing funds for reparations.

All this might suggest what lies ahead for Chinese-Indians who seek something similar for the 1962 incarceration. They face the challenges of getting organized, telling their stories, finding the right elected representatives to make their case in circles of power. There is the need to make the case soon, before the already small number of internees begins dwindling. There is the non-existent public memory of the Deoli episode. There is the pervasive fear of repercussions that the community will have to overcome.

The people on the bus knew that that day’s demonstration in Ottawa was a purely symbolic act, no more. But they saw it as a necessary first step, showing that it was possible to face their fears. So they gathered on the pavement opposite the Indian High Commission, carrying placards and banners. They wore identical white T-shirts with a photograph of the Camp screen-printed on the front. They chanted slogans. They stopped curious passers-by to tell them about 1962. (Among them was a hijab-clad Somali immigrant who had spent thirteen years in India, spoke fluent Hindi and believed she knew a lot about the country but was astonished that she had never heard of the Deoli episode.)

Across the street, the High Commission’s gate was firmly shut. Two Indian men in suits stood inside, filming the demonstration. Staffers trickled in and out. Several stepped through the demonstrators to lunch in the restaurant behind and then went back to work, but not one stopped to ask what the demonstration was all about. When two AIDCI members approached the gate with their letter addressed to Prime Minister Modi, the men inside politely refused to take it. ‘We have no orders to accept any letters’, one said. So the AIDCI folks carefully taped the letter to the gate and got back on the bus.

And on the way home to Toronto, Ying Sheng Wong sang ‘Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh’.

Over a drink one evening in March 2012, and apropos of nothing, my good friend J suddenly asked, ‘Did you know that India once sent a few thousand people to a prison camp?’ Thinking she meant some prisoners of war (POW) from one of our several wars with Pakistan, or indeed the 1962 war with China, I shook my head, but only because I didn’t know what, specifically, she was getting at. My mother even asked, ‘POWs?’

‘No!’ J shot back. ‘Not POWs! I’m talking of ordinary Indian people. Indian people! Kind of like concentration camps in Nazi Germany.’

Now she had my attention. A parallel to the Nazis will do that. ‘You’re joking, right?’ I asked. ‘No? You’re seriously telling me we sent people to concentration camps? When? Where?’

‘Well, not quite a concentration camp, no gas chambers, but there was a camp and many people were sent there starting in 1962’, said J. ‘Totally innocent people.’ She went on to tell us, to our increasing amazement, about Deoli. ‘And you know why it happened?’ She pointed at her face. ‘Because they looked like me’, she said simply. For her last name is identifiably Chinese, she is Chinese-Indian and she ‘looks Chinese’ in the same way that Ying Sheng Wong does. And that’s when it all hit home.

My mind was in turmoil. Only the Nazis ‘did’ concentration camps, I had thought till then. Only the Americans ‘did’ this internment based purely on the way Japanese-Americans ‘looked’, during World War II. But in India? Why is it no one knew? And yet I could hardly doubt J. All she had done was turn over yet another Indian stone, let me in on yet another Indian story I had never heard. How was it possible that I had never heard it?

And this is indeed, as Ying Sheng Wong sang, a strange story. What makes it stranger is that most Indians don’t seem to know about it. Admittedly, the episode happened over half a century ago, and public memory does not typically wander that far into the past. So it should not be a surprise that most Indians don’t know about the incarceration of several thousand of their fellow citizens.

Yet, this is not an explanation that really satisfies. For one thing, we do know about many other events from that many years ago, or more. The war with China itself being one. But here is a grab bag of other well-known memories that are about that old: Nehru’s death, 1964; the mass conversion of lower castes from Hinduism to Buddhism, led by B. R. Ambedkar, 1956; the assassination of JFK, 1963; Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, 1959; the split of the erstwhile Bombay Presidency and the birth of the state of Maharashtra, 1960. I could go on. Some are better known than others, but to some degree or the other, plenty of Indians know about each of these events.

In the several years since I first heard about the Deoli incarceration, I have written and spoken about it publicly a few times and brought it up at parties or other gatherings. Only occasionally has someone I mentioned it to nodded their head to indicate they knew exactly what I was talking about. One of those was an erudite Member of Parliament (MP) and erstwhile minister in the central government. Another was an equally erudite former soldier who, after a long career in the Indian Army, had served with United Nations peacekeeping forces in Rwanda and the Congo. A third was a well-known Test cricketer.

The MP astonished me by his views about it, a story I shall come to soon. The soldier had a pragmatic view of this yearning for an apology – the Deoli survivors and their families should make their moves ‘now’, he said, under the Modi regime (this was mid-2018). After all, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had nothing to do with the 1962 war and would be happy to score political points against the Congress. He seemed nonplussed by my recounting of the events in Ottawa only a few months earlier, by the High Commission’s refusal to accept the letter.

But those two apart, almost everyone else I’ve mentioned Deoli to – students, actors, corporate heads, journalists, engineers and headhunters – has been stunned to hear the tale. It mirrored my own experience. I consider myself a relatively aware Indian citizen, perhaps even more aware of some Indian realities than many others around me, if only as part of my job’s requirements. But I also know of that other Indian reality, a meta-reality, that this is a country where you can turn over a stone on any given day and come across something about India that you have never ever heard of, despite