26-year-old Mafeeda was born in K♒annur district of Kerala, where she lives now. Though she was born in India, she is not a citizen of this country. She🌸 was taken to Karachi along with her mother by her father long ago; she has only a vague memory of her childhood spent there. Her father was one among the thousands of Indians who migrated to Pakistan in search of work. Mafeeda remembers that the family used to renew their Indian passport and keep coming for short visits home. “By 1997/98, we had stayed there for 10/12 years and took a passport there. My brother and sister were born there. My father migrated due to financial problems, but somehow we got stuck there,” says Mafeeda.
When we met her at home in Kathiroor, she was reluctant to talk, but later a𝓀greed on the condition of her identity being kept confidential. Like many others in this village who have been going through the same plight, Mafeeda too hopes that she will get citizenship one day and does not want to do anything that may spoil her chances.
Mafeeda has two sisters and two brothers, none of whom have Indian citizenship. While one of the sisters is getting married soon, Mafeeda's deepest worry is about her brothe🧜r, who is one year younger than her. “He is not able to go abroad and work. Having no proper job, he would not get a good match too,” says Mafeeda. The common destination of most young men in the regions is the Middle East.
Mafeeda wishes her brother would get a passport, even though she does not. She does not mind continuing the same life she lives now, but her brother’s future would be in trouble if he does not get an Indian♈ p✅assport.
52-year-old Shahid from Kathiroor still carries a Pakistani passport. His father migrated to Pakistan in the 1960s and Shahid and his three siblings were born in Karachi. Like Mafeeda, his par🅷ents too used to come to Kerala every year in the initial years of migration. Later, they had to take the Pakistani passport. “My father and mother passed away. I came back to Kerala and got married in 2000,” says Shahid. His wife is the only person in the family who is Indian. Both his sons and the younger daughter, who is in the 12th standard, do not have Indian citizenship. Soon after the marriage, Shahid went back to Karachi and stayed there until 2011. The two sons and the daughter were born there. According to Shahid, they (he and his two sons) renew the Pakistani passport every two years. They take necessary documents from the District Superintendent of Police and travel to Delhi for the same. However, this Pakistani passport is a ‘paper and not a computer-generated one’, according to Shahid.
Shahid is working as a building painter under a contractor. He wants to migrate to the Middle East in search of better jobs. He also wants his sons to🐭 go abroad. However, it is impossible. Shahid has no other hassles in his daily life apart from the worry that he and his sons are unable to go to the Gulf for work.
24-year-old Mohammed Ismail, who has completed a Master’s in Business Administration, is fully aware of the consequences of living without nationality. When we met Mohammed Ismail at his house in Kathiroor, Kannur District, he appeared visibly upset, restless, and disillusioned. "Like many of my peers, I too wanted to study abroad after 12th standard, but I couldn’t as I di𒅌dn’t have a passport. Now I have completed an MBA and most of my friends and classmates went abroad seeking jobs. I am the only one here,” says Mohammed Ismail.
Mohammed Ismail is the youngest son of Rasheeda Banu, the only woman who won a long and tiring legal battle to get citizenship. Rasheeda Banu’s father, Hassan, is one of the first-generation migrants who went to Karachi seeking employment. He was taken by his uncle, who had been there before him. In those ti🐎mes, hundreds of people from northern Kerala traveled to Pakistan, hoping to escape acute poverty.
Has💙san married Fathima, Rasheeda Banu's mother, in 1960 and took her to Pakistan. Though both of them wanted to come back to India after the outbreak of the India-Pak war, they could not. Rasheeda Banu was born in Pakistan in 1972. Hassan also took the three children of his sister, who passed away in Kerala, withꦜ him to Pakistan.
Rasheeda Banu was married to Hass𒅌an's sister’s son when she turned 18. The couple had six children, including Mohammed Ismail, all of whom were born in Pakistan. When the elder daughter reached the age of marriage, Rasheeda and her husband wanted to come back to Kerala and settle here. Thus, they came back to their hometown Kannur in 2008. Since then, life has been a long and exhausting journey to achieve nationality. “I traveled to Delhi countless times to meet officials, stayed there for days and weeks, knocked on each and every door possible,” says Rasheeda Banu, who finally cleared all the papers 🐬and acquired nationality. Though she got the official confirmation for citizenship in 2018, the document never reached her. “It was lost somewhere; nobody knew where it went. Again, I had to travel back and forth to Delhi as well as the SP office in Kannur,” recalls Rasheeda.
Though she had to fight a tough battle for 16 years, she managed to acquire citizenship for herself and her elder daughter. Her three daughters and two sons a💖re yet to get citizenship. Within the family, two are Indian and the rest are stateless.
Rasheeda has not stopped her struggle to get the documents for all her children cleaღred. She continues her journey back and forth to Delhi and knocking on doors of off♎icials.
"In the past, there were thousands of people who were stateless living in the northern dis꧑tricts of Kerala, such as Malappuram and Kannur. They include the first and second generation of people who migrated to Pakistan in search of work. In the 1950s, Karachi was the Gulf," says a police officer with State Intelligence. As people migrated to the Arabian countries in the 1970s and 80s, Karachi became a common destination for migrants from Kerala.
Accor🧸ding to the District administration (Kannur) the exact data of people who returned from Pakistan and seeking for citizenships is not available. "There are elderly people who have not submitted their applications in digital format. They had tried to do it earlier, but stopped struggling for it, but a large number of them passed away and their second generation is trying to get it done. So far less than ten individuals 🥃are on the list of people seeking Indian citizenship," says Shimy, a senior clerk in Kannur collectorate who used to handle the applications.
According to 2017 data collected by PUCL, there were 180 people across Malabar who returned from Pakistan and waiting fꦯor citizenship. However, this number has come down as most of them were old - either passed away or stopped the efforts to gain citizenship tired of the red tapes.
"Malayali community has a long and rich history of migration. They used to migrate across the globe from very old times," says Dr Irudayarajan, th𒐪e founder of International Institute of Migration and Development. "People used to migrate to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and many other countries even before the flood of migration to the Gulf countries started," he said. Karachi also was such a destination. According to Dr Irudayarajan, people from Hindu fold also used to migrate to Pakistan. He opined that people migrated for combating poverty and they returned to their home land in the best available opportunity and they should be given citizenship without dragging them through the bureaucratic procedures.
According to the police, a large majority of these migrants passed away without accomplishing their dream of achieving nationality. Their seco🅰nd generation has continued the stru💯ggle to gain citizenship. As many, like Shahid and Mohammed Ismail, have pointed out, the future is totally uncertain for them. One has to define one's nationality first. They do not face hassles in their daily life because of the support and empathy expressed by the people around them, but making a single step toward prosperity is an unachievable task—whether it be buying land, acquiring a passport, getting a better job, or even better education.
