By Abheek Barman
From October 20 to November 21, 1962, India fought a bitter war against the Chinese on two fronts: Aksai Chin in the west and the Nefa region, now called Arunachal Pradesh, in the east. Among its many victims were thousands of Chinese-Indians in east India, who were either deported forcibly or locked up in a concentration camp far from their homes and held for years. This story is little known.
The first Chinese settler in India, Young Atchew, came to Calcutta around 1780. The East India Co gave him land south of the city, to grow sugarcane and make sugar. His business floundered and Atchew died a broken man. From the late 1800s, many more Chinese arrived in India, and successive waves of migration occurred during World War II, China's civil war and after the communists seized power in 1949.
Disciplined and skilled, they found work in the tea gardens and oil towns of east and northeast India, started tanneries, shoemaking and woodworking establishments and restaurants in Calcutta and other cities. But the war of 1962 turned many of their worlds upside down.
As a young girl studying in a Chinese school in Calcutta in 1962, Kwai-Yun Li witnessed how people turned hostile overnight. Kids threw stones at Chinese children, some folks were beaten up, shops were vandalised. Li and her friends changed the route they used to take to school. Extra-curricular activities were suspended: children had to be home before dark.
As media went into a patriotic overdrive, Indian secret service started singling out Chinese families that they suspected of having any connection with the local Chinese consulate. There were midnight knocks on doors, people were taken away, issued deportation orders and shipped off to China against their wishes. By comparing the size of her class in 1962 and 1963, Li reckons that around half the population of Calcutta's Chinatown was forcibly deported by India.
Further east, closer to the fighting, it was a different story altogether. In early November, the police and paramilitary started rounding up all Chinese-Indians working in places like Digboi and Makum in Assam, studying in schools in Shillong and Darjeeling in Bengal. A few Tibetans were also rounded up. They were told they were being taken for their own protection and would be back soon.
After a week or so in jail, all Chinese-Indians were loaded on a train, running from Assam in the east, towards the west. The train had a few doctors and many soldiers as guards. It travelled seven days and nights till it reached Deoli, Rajasthan. There, over 2,000 Chinese-Indians were imprisoned in a concentration camp, which one former inmate said resembled something straight out of The Bridge Over River Kwai: high barbed wire fences, floodlights, guards.
There, they would stay for anything between two and five years. The last Chinese left Deoli in 1967, five years after being imprisoned.
From oral accounts collected by Li, in her paper Deoli Camp: An Oral History of the Chinese Indians from 1962 to 1966, life in the camp was not terribly arduous, judged by the gold standard of Nazi camps or Stalin's gulag. After a while, the guards allowed prisoners to do their own cooking, food was not scarce, sanitation was basic, the heat was terrible.
One day, a riot broke out in the camps. One of Li's sources attributes this to divisions between Chinese who supported Mao and those in favour of Chiang Kai-shek's Republic; another to an argument between ethnic Chinese and the few Tibetans who were also interned. In any case, the guards intervened and many young men were thrown into solitary for around a week.
A visiting Red Cross team informed the Chinese government about the conditions in Deoli. Sometime later, the Chinese government sent gifts, like toothpaste and towels, and blank forms to migrate to China for those who wished to. Some did and were sent by train to Madras, to take boats to China.
Chen, who was 17 when he was incarcerated, was released after two years. His father died of an illness in the camp. Liu, who was 16 when arrested, was let off after three years. Ming, a nine-year old girl, and Hua, her 18-year old brother, were released only in 1966, after four years in Deoli.
After their release, the Chinese-Indians went back to their homes and businesses to discover another form of cruelty. In their absence, the government had seized all their assets as 'enemy property' and sold them off to Indians. Penniless and with their lives destroyed, most had to start from scratch again. Unsurprisingly, many chose to settle abroad when they got a chance to do so.
In 1990, Jawhar Sircar, then a young IAS officer, wrote an essay on Calcutta's Chinese community, arguing that it was "the only one to remain and prosper as much as before". He reckoned their number to be around 20,000, then. Writing in 2011, Li reckons the population of Chinese in Calcutta to be not more than 5,000. Sircar, now the head of Prasar Bharati, does not mention the events of 1962 in his essay.
In 2010, the government proposed amendments to the enemy property law. These could have allowed Chinese-Indians to claim their property or get compensated. But the Bill with these amendments was soon withdrawn from Parliament.
Deoli, started by the British as a military camp in the 1800s, has been used to hold Japanese prisoners from WWI, Indian political prisoners and the Chinese in 1962. It is now a paramilitary base.
AFTERTHOUGHT
"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." - Henry David Thoreau, American author and naturalist