In January 2017, 49-year-old Shiva Ganesh from Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, working as an IT administrator in Singapore, received a notice from the Indian passport authority asking him to explain why his passport should not be cancelled and instructing him to visit the Indian embassy in Singapore. At the embassy, officials informed him that he was the third individual from Tamil Nadu facing a similar situation. They offered him some time to settle the matter if possible. Shiva Ganesh wrote numerous letters to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), but he received no response. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he said. Left with no options,ꩲ he resigned from his job, returned to India and suღrrendered his passport. Since then, Shiva Ganesh has been not only unemployed but also stateless, with no country to call his own.
Shiva Ganesh is one among thousands of people born in Sri Lanka who sought refuge in India during the civil war of the 198🌜0s. As a Tamilianꦅ of Indian origin who fled Sri Lanka during childhood, he grew up, educated, worked and started a family in India. Yet, he remains stateless, with no citizenship. His father was among the labourers taken from Tamil Nadu to Sri Lanka in the 1940s to work on tea plantations. “During the civil war, we were in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Our house and my father’s shop were burned down. We were rescued by some local people, and that’s how we reached Tamil Nadu in 1984,” he recalls.
Since his father was of Indian origin, Shiva Ganesh managed to obtain a passport in 1996. He initially went to Malaysia and later moved to Singapore for work, living a peaceful life much like any other ordinary Indian citizen. However, his life took a drastic turn following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Most of the Tamil people, who migrated from Sri Lanka to India before and during the civil war, came under intense scrutiny, and thousands of them had to surrender their passports. Shiva Ganesh was no exception. His life has been a long a🌄nd exhausting struggle since 2017 when he was forced to surrender his passport. “No company will hire me. My nationality has always been a question. I used to work as an IT professional specialising in security systems. Who would employ a stateless person in such a field?” hꦡe asks.
The name Shiva Ganesh is a pseudonym, as revealing his real identity could worsen his situation. Like him, most Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils prefer to keep a low profile, living as inconspicuously as possible. They would not agree ♛to being tagged as refugees, identifying instead as repatriates because their ancestors were originally from India. Sri Lanka was merely a stopover for one or two generations, brought there by British rulers to work on tea plantation꧃s.
“His 15-year-old son may also face the same predicament,” says Romeo Roy Alfred, a lawyer at the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court who has been providing legal aid to people like Shiva Ganesh. “The boy’s citizenship status is in question since one parent must be an Indian citizen and the other cannot be an illegal migrant. Although his wife is an Indian citizen, Shiva Ganesh’s status complicates th🔯e situation. Proving he isn💟’t an illegal migrant is challenging.”
Despꦿite coming to India from Sri Lanka with proper documentation, Shiva Ganesh’s current status remains uncertain.
🐼For 57-year-old Nandakumar, born in Sri Lanka in 1967 and forced to flee to India with his parents in 1985, the civil war is etched in memories—of the acrid smell of burning, the sounds of shelling and gunfire and the trauma of a violent mob pelting stones at his home. He recalls his once-picturesque village surrounded by lush green tea estates. His grandfather was among 𓂃the thousands of Tamils recruited by the British in the early 1940s.
Statelessness: The Enactment of the Ceylon Citizenship Act, 1948 (CCA)
Nandakumar’s statelessness did not begin with his arrival in India. His father, despite living in Sri Lanka, was never granted citizenship. Like him, many Indian-💙origin Tamils in Tamil Nadu have endured generations of statelessness. This plight dates back to 1948, when the CCA was enacted by the Sri Lankan government. This law, introduced shortly after Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) gained independence from British rule, effectively s🍃tripped nearly a million Indian-origin Tamils of their citizenship, leaving them marginalised and without a nation to call their own. The CCA was a landmark law in Sri Lanka that had profound consequences for the Indian Tamil community.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, British colonial rulers brought significant numbers of Indian Tamils to work on Ceylon’s plantations. By 1946, the🧸ir population had grown to approximately 975,000, representing about 11 per cent of the total population. However♔, their increasing presence was perceived as a threat by the Sinhalese majority, which made up around 69.4 per cent of the population. This perception sowed the early seeds of ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka.
The Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils, who fled to India during the civil war, represent the second or third generation of individuals who had already been denied citizenship. For most of them, their parents and grandparents were stateless, having been stripped of their citizenship under the CCA. This s𝕴tatelessness persists now among the fourth generation—children born and raised in India, like the sons of Shiva Ganesh and Nandakumar, who have no ties to Sri Lanka. Citizenship laws, in both India and Sri Lanka, have left four generations of these families without a nationality.
At present, an estimated 50,000 repatriates live in refugee camps, and 34,000 reside in individual houses across Tamil Nadu. While the Tamil Nadu government has adopted a lenient approach towards the Tamil population from Sri Lanka—granting them Aadhaar cards, ration cards, PAN cards and driving licences—these documents have not resolved their statelessness. Refugees living in camps are issued identity cards tied to their camp addresses, but obtaining a passport—the ultimate proof of citizenship—remai♏ns an unattainable dream for them.
Citizenship and Statelessness Within One Family
Even within families, citizenship statuses can vary. Take the case of Nalini Kripalan, who is considered the only “success story” among Sri Lankan Tamils in the Mandapam camp in Ramanathapuram district, one of the largest refugee camps. After years of legal battle, Kripalan’s citizenship application was approved, and she obtained a passport. Her parents fled to India during the civil war, and she was born in the Mandapam camp in 1986. Initially, her application was rejected because her parents were considered Sri Lankan nationals. However, her parents, too, were stateless, victims of the 🐷CCA that denied citizenship to Indian-origin Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Kripalan’s breakthrough came under the provisions of the India’s Citizenship Act, 1955. The Madras High Court ruled that she was eligible for citizenship based on Sectioℱn 3(1)(a) of the Act, which grants citizenship to anyone born in India between January 25, 1950 and July 1, 1987. Since Kripalan was born in 1986, she qualified. However, her younger brother, born in 1988, remains stateless, as he falls outside the specified cut-off date. Kripalan is the only person with citizenship in her family. Others, includ𒁏ing her husband, continue to be stateless.
Seventy-five-year-old Marimuthu, born in Sri Lanka, is another victim of the civil war who migrated to India in 1985. He travelled with a ‘red passport’—a temporary, one-time travel document issued by the Sri Lankan government to Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils. Upon arriving, he settled in Tiruchirappa🦩lli, where his family had ancestral roots. At the time, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees were required to register at the nearest police station and renew their registration periodically.
A few years after his arrival, officials informed Marimuthu that his registration was no longer necessary—he was made to believe that he was like any other Indian. Having an Aadhaar card and ration card, Marimuthu believed he was an Indian citizen. For this elderly and uneducated man, understanding the difference between being a citizen an๊d being stateless✅ remains a complex and confusing matter.
Marimuthu has four daughters and a son, but only two of his daughters, born in India, hold Indian citizenship. The other three, including his son, were forced to surrender their passports after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. While the two India-born daughters possess passports, the rest of the family—three sibling🔥s and the elderly parents—remain stateless.
Impact of Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassination
The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 had a lasting impact on the lives of Sri Lankan Tamils living in Tamil Nadu, as they came under intense scrutiny. “Eꦬvery individual with ties to Sri Lanka became a suspect,” says Shanmuganathan, a local journalist who has extensively covered the issue. Until then, these people were in the process of integrating into Indian society and were conꦉsidered Indian citizens, with many even obtaining passports. However, after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the authorities launched a massive operation, and many were asked to surrender their passports. For example, in Tiruchirappalli alone, 3,000 people were summoned to surrender their passports on a single day and were stripped of their citizenship status.
According to Alfred, successive governments in India, even during Jawaharla﷽l Nehru’s time, failed to effectively address the issue of Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils. “The repatriation of nearly six lakh Indian-origin Tamils from Sri Lanka was an obligation under the 1964 and 1974 agreements between the two countries, but this obligation was never fulfilled. When the civil war broke out, there was a mass exodus of people to India, including Sri Lankan Tamils who fled to escape the ethnic violence. These people were placed in refugee camps, but no effort was made to distinguish between Sri Lankan-origin Tamils and Indian-origin Tamils. Those who arrived in India with legal documents were wrongly categorised as refugees,” says Alfred.
The amendments to the Citizenship Act of 1955 further worsened the situation of these people. Even fourth-generation individuals like Shiva Ganesh’s 15-year-old son are excluded from citizenship due to these changes, which narrowed the eligibility criteria. Under the 2003 amendment, one parent must be an Indian citizen, and the other must not be an illegal migrant. For most Indian-origin Sri Lankan Tamils, who are victims of ethnic conflict and civil war, proving that t🌊hey are not illegal migrants ꦺis a nearly impossible task.
