ONE of the most positive outcomes of the thaw in relations between once-estranged nuclear neighbours India and China is the reopening of the Chinese consulate in Calcutta after 45 long years. The diplomatic mission in the West Bengal capital was re-launched a few months ago without much fanfare. But recently the consulate threw a lavish party in the Hyatt ballroom and lawns to usher in the Chinese new year.
The evening had a distinct flavour as there were over 300 inmates of Calcutta’s crumbling Chinatown among the 400 invitees. But as the wine flowed and ethnic Chinese rubbed shoulders with Bengali and Marwari guests and gave the ‘dragon’ dancers and other performers a big hand, I looked at the inscrutable faces of elderly Chinese men and women and wondered if they still nursed bitter memories of their shameful persecution after the 1962 war or had forgiven and forgotten.
Beaten hollow by the People’s Liberation Army in the Himalayas, the government unleashed a reign of terror against the Chinese diaspora settled in India since 1780. Calcutta witnessed the biggest crackdown as it had the largest Chinatown with about 50,000 residents in those days. Now there are barely 4,000 left!
The victimisation of the ethnic Chinese in Calcutta and other parts of India is reminiscent of the nightmarish experience of ethnic Japanese on the US west coast after the Pearl Harbour attack. Throwing principles of pluralism and rule of law to the wind, the political and security establishment hounded the community, one of the tiniest in India, so mercilessly that it never recovered.
Labelled China’s spies — a charge never proved — the community paid a heavy price for its ethnicity. There were midnight arrests, assets seized and bank accounts frozen. Auction of Chinese-owned properties and businesses by the government created a fear psychosis.
Restrictions were clamped; residential permits had to be compulsorily renewed. Work permits surfaced which had the effect of squeezing the Chinese out of jobs. Countless Chinese dock workers in Calcutta Port were sacked. Thousands were pushed into China at the border. An estimated 3,000 Calcutta Chinese were packed off to Rajasthan to live in police-run camps for alleged anti-Indian activities.
Mumbai too had a Chinatown, albeit small compared to Calcutta’s. In the words of a Mumbai film-maker, “one morning in 1962, my Chinese classmates stopped coming to school, a Chinese school and a newspaper were shut down, Chinese hawkers on bicycles were thrashed by angry crowds and the little Chinatown never celebrated the new year again”.
Nearer Calcutta, in Jamshedpur there were 75 Chinese families. The men, employed in the Tata steel plant, lost their jobs because the local administration, obviously acting on New Delhi’s orders, refused to issue work permits after the war. Loss of livelihood forced them to sell their properties and quit India. Now only four families are left. The smiles painted on their doors are no index of their joy. They are merely a pointer to their profession — dentistry.
Tangra, or Calcutta’s Chinatown, was the worst hit though. State-sponsored persecution triggered waves of immigration to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Austria and United Kingdom. By 1981, population shrunk to 10,500. Now it has dwindled to 4000 and is falling.
I asked Paul Chung, president of Indian Chinese Association, if wounds had healed with the passage of time. He bluntly replied that they had not. “Unless India acknowledges that the Chinese were unnecessarily targeted and tortured, how can there be healing? Nobody has owned up responsibility for our suffering. It’s necessary to admit the guilt so that the victims feel reassured”, the 66-year-old former Don Bosco school teacher said.
What should be done today? India and its leaders should on their own say sorry to the Chinese who suffered as they are not strong or vocal enough like the Koreans who have sought and won an apology, however guarded, from the Japanese for their war record. But the residents of Calcutta need to go one step further to live up to their self-perception. They consider themselves cosmopolitan and tolerant, without bigotry or jingoism. What better way to end a sorry chapter than for the mayor of Calcutta to host a reception and honour leading members of the Chinese community still in the city.
To lend the event a unique flavour, among those honouring the Chinese can be Jyoti Basu, who was jailed during the 1962 war under the Defence of India Rules. I don’t know if the government of India formally said sorry to him. It didn’t really matter as he went on to become India’s longest serving chief minister and would have become prime minister too if his party allowed it.
I would also request Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, who tries to live up to his famous surname, to invite the Chinese to the Independence Day high tea in Raj Bhawan as a confidence-building measure.
What can Calcutta do to ensure that this sort of thing never happens again? It has to be vigilant about civil liberties. The good news is that there is now a strong civil society movement which is unlikely to allow such state perpetrated atrocities unopposed. It made a loud noise over Rizwanur Rahman’s death and Singur-Nandigram. More recently it won a notable victory by forcing the book fair to shift venue on environmental grounds. The city has to remember that eternal vigilance is the price of cosmopolitan civility.
SNM Abdi is a senior Indian journalist and political commentator. He can be contacted at snmabdi@yahoo.com
courtesy: Khaleej Times
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