W*******a
发帖数: 1769 | 1 民主大国果然是不一样
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?268044
The China Link
•Chinese labourers brought to northeastern India by the British in
early 19th century to work in tea gardens
•They were concentrated in Makum, Shillong and Tezpur
•Over 2,000 arrested after the ’62 Chinese aggression, ostensibly “
to be protected”, but actually to be monitored, at Deoli, Rajasthan
•More than half of them sent to China; some families split up. No
apology ever rendered.
***
It’s a chilly November morning in Makum, a small town in upper Assam that
takes its name from the Chinese word for ‘meeting point’. At a little
roadside shanty, a gaunt, unkempt man with distinctly Mongoloid features,
reeking of stale alcohol, is making coffee for customers. When we ask him
his name, he darts a dagger glance at us, before going back to tossing hot
brew into glass cups. “Why do you want to know my name?” he asks
suspiciously. “He doesn’t want to reveal his name,” whispers a customer,
“because he’s afraid someone will come and arrest him for being Chinese”.
As it happens, Michael Shang—yes, that’s his name—is not Chinese. He is
an Indian; a descendant of Chinese settlers in Assam, hailing from a family
once among the wealthiest landowners in Makum. That was before the Indo-
China War broke out in 1962. As the family was caught up in the war and its
aftermath, it lost everything. The shop is all that Michael now owns. So,
like many other Chinese-Assamese living in this region, he fears undue
attention—a fear rooted in the fact that over 2,000 men, women and children
of Chinese origin were rounded up from the Northeast in Nehru’s India and
placed in what were, if not concentration camps, miserable places for
innocent people to be in—some for as long as six years. More than half of
them were sent to China, leaving family members behind.
In ruins An abandoned Chinese restaurant in Makum. (Photograph by Sandipan
Chatterjee)
For close to fifty years, the story of the travails of this community has
largely remained buried, but a novel by Assamese novelist Rita Chowdhury,
Makam, who stumbled upon it on during a chance visit to Makum four years ago
, has brought attention to its forgotten plight. Much needed attention,
because this is not just a grim but a salutary tale. Echoing the story of
how the United States—when it was at war with Japan during World War II—
rounded up and quarantined Japanese Americans, it is a tale of how a liberal
democracy got away, without a murmur of protest, with racial segregation of
a community and the severe infringement of its personal liberty, thanks to
a war.
The tale begins, properly, in the 19th century, when the earliest Chinese
settlers in the region were brought to India by the British to work as
labourers in tea gardens. Explains Mankhee Ho, a researcher on Chinese
Indians at Guwahati University, and himself half-Chinese, “Tea originated
in China so when the British started cultivating tea in India, they wanted
to bring in labourers with the expertise of working in tea gardens. They
recruited labourers from Hong Kong, another British colony, many of them
from among the poor across China who had come there in search of work.”
While Chinese settlers were employed across northeastern India, it was Makum
which came to record the highest concentration, followed by Shillong and
Tezpur. Over time, many of the early immigrants married local Assamese and
tribal women, and by the time of the Chinese aggression of 1962, were
already third or fourth generation immigrants. However, there was a steady
influx of Chinese immigrants, and many of the newer arrivals got their
children married within the community, or to brides and grooms from China.
So, while the majority of the Chinese population had become Indian by then,
some of the new immigrants did have Chinese passports.
By 1962, Makum had come to be known as a ‘China colony’ with a thriving
Chinese population of close to 2,000 people, and when war broke out, all
these people, both ‘pure’ Chinese and all those of mixed blood, whether
with Chinese passports or Indian, were tarred with one brush, and became
objects of deep suspicion for the Indian authorities. Unlike people of
Chinese origin in other parts of India, they lived close to the Chinese
border, from where infiltration was suspected.
Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee
Francis Chiang
He escaped arrest only because he was not at home when the rest of his
family was picked up from their Shillong home and sent to Deoli. The family
later went to China and he lost touch with them. All he had to remember them
by was this photograph with his father. He recently reconnected with his
family, but forced separation, at 16, has left deep scars.
Most of the first arrests took place in Makum—in the dead of the night,
with police and army officers, polite but very firm, knocking on the doors
of houses, and asking those who were Chinese, half-Chinese or with Chinese
blood, to go with them. As witnesses, still to be found in Makum and
Shillong, recall, they were told it was for their protection, that they
would only be gone for a few days, and should leave their belongings behind.
In reality, they became prisoners of war.
The arrested were first taken to a cowshed in Makum—in Shillong it was the
district jail—where they were kept for a night before being taken by train
—goods trains, in fact—to a camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. Some still remember
the horrors of that long, arduous, cramped journey, lasting a week. Says
Wong Ye Hoi, now 88, who was picked up by the police while he was working in
the tea garden on a winter morning in 1962: “The word ‘Enemy’ was
painted across the train and local people were pelting stones at us. Many of
us were injured.”
Others remember the Deoli camp. “It was near the Pakistan border and
perhaps meant for Pakistani prisoners of war,” recalls 78-year-old Lee Lan
Yun, the oldest surviving person among the Shillong Chinese taken to Deoli.
“It was a huge area fenced in by barbed wires. I used to feel
claustrophobic.” Some families got a barrack, and some semblance of privacy
, but many were herded together in dormitories. The searing heat got to the
northeasterners, they tried to cool their habitation by covering windows
with cloth and pouring scarce water on them.
For some it was even worse—their families were split irrevocably by the
forced migration to the camp. Sixty-year-old Francis Chiang, now a Shillong-
based shop owner, lost touch with his family at the young age of 16. His
father, a Chinese settler in India, was hauled off to live in Rajasthan’s
Deoli camp, as were his brothers and sisters. “My mother was not Chinese so
she was not arrested but she chose to go with them because she didn’t want
to be separated from the family.” Francis, not at home at the time of the
arrest, was spared confinement but spent, as he puts it, his entire youth in
“loneliness and longing” for his family; with only a photograph of
himself with his father for consolation. China was too far to travel to and
he was too poor to afford it. Looked after by “sympathetic neighbours”
until he could fend for himself, he recently reconnected with his family
when he made a trip to China. But as he says, sadly, “Can anyone give me
back the years with my family that I lost?”
None of those housed in the camps report torture or sexual harassment, but
there were other miseries to deal with. There were, for instance, swirling
rumours about who would be deported to China; one was that the menfolk would
be deported, and women left behind. There were mini-rebellions in response;
finally, entire families were given a choice: would they want to stay in
India, or go to China. Willie Ho remembers being told by his father, C.M. Ho
, “They made it sound like a choice, but they were actually asking us to go
back to where we belonged.” The Ho family were among the very few who
returned to Makum, to reclaim their property; about 1,500-odd Chinese-
Assamese are said to have been deported to China, leaving their property
behind, and losing it forever. Much of it was apparently auctioned, and
snapped up by locals.
Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee
Pan Shiu Lien
Her fiance C.M. Ho was arrested and taken away to Deoli camp just a few days
before their marriage. She waited five years for him to return, after which
they finally got married. In her 70s and bedridden, she says: “Some of my
friends advised me to forget him and marry another man. But I had set my
heart on him, so I waited.” Seen here with son Willie and daughter-in-law
Mary.
“The word ‘Enemy’ was painted across the train and the locals were
pelting stones at us,” recalls Wong Ye Hoi, 88.
According to the Chinese-Assamese accounts, the Deoli camp ran for six long
years—from 1962 to 1968, even though the Indo-Chinese war barely lasted a
month. Some residents remember a visit to the camp by Lal Bahadur Shastri
after he became PM, but there was still no positive outcome for the inmates.
Says Paul Liang Pyu An, of Shillong, “People began to get released in
phases, mostly for China, and some back to the Northeast. A few, like us,
were left behind, forgotten, at the camp. We never knew why. We wrote
letters to Delhi, pleading for our cases to be reviewed, and finally were
able to leave for Shillong in 1968.”
With the majority of detainees from Makum gone to China, the town has the
look of a ghost China town. A crumbling building stands where the grandiose
Chinese Club once stood. What was once a Chinese restaurant has the look of
a haunted house. In Shillong, there are also a few Chinese-Assamese; and
what they have in common with their Makum counterparts, apart from tales of
sorrow and separation—a woman whose groom was arrested and taken to camp,
children born in the confines of the camp, a man who saw his father dying in
the camp as a nine-year-old boy—is a lingering sense of fear. “My mission
is to have that fear removed,” says Chowdhury. Pointing out that the
Chinese-Assamese have never seen a human rights organisation taking up their
cause, or received an apology—or even an explanation—from the government
for what they went through, she says: “Only a statement from the government
that the Chinese-Assamese are their own people, as Indian as anyone else,
will remove that fear.” | y****e
发帖数: 23939 | 2 只有TG才在抗日战争结束前后都善待日本侨民
民主国都是对自己人好，对外人狠
只有独裁政权才是外残内忍啊 | W*******a
发帖数: 1769 | 3 无耻到阁下这种程度，这个版上也只有好蛋跟你能比一比了。在印度生活了3，4代的
华人在阁下嘴里还是外人，
【在 y****e 的大作中提到】
: 只有TG才在抗日战争结束前后都善待日本侨民
: 民主国都是对自己人好，对外人狠
: 只有独裁政权才是外残内忍啊
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