Seeking Refuge In Apathy

WELCOME. March on with Hope and Wisdom." The motto above the office door could not have mocked better. The roof leaks and shutterless windows bring in the chill as it rains over the Indira Gandhi International Centre near Bangalore, causing the 230 children inside to draw their threadbare blankets closer and hope the skies will clear soon to spare them the agony of another sleepless night. It has been pouring relentlessly for three months now and hope seems to be the only element that’s been kind to these children of a lesser God from the land of an endless war. It has sustained these children of Sri Lankan refugees at India’s only residential and exclusive school for refugees for six years now. Few months of rain and cold winds are just another day’s agony for the tender souls who have subsisted on porridge, black tea and offerings of rice for a major part of the six years.

It was hope indeed which brought the children from across the seas and through Tamil Nadu to Yelahanka, 15 km from Bangalore on the Hyderabad highway. Orphans, semi-orphans and children accompanied by parents left a war-torn Sri Lanka in March 1990 and set foot on the Tamil Nadu shore along with troops of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) returning home. The refugees were provided shelter in special camps across Tamil Nadu while a section of them were moved to Orissa. With the camps providing only food and shelter to the refugees, senior members of the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front ENDLF—part of the ENDLF-EPRLF coalition government in Sri Lanka’s north-eastern province who also migrated to India with the IPKF—set up the school to rehabilitate refugee children.

And Karnataka was chosen as the venue for the school by then former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi—who maintained close contacts with the ENDLF-EPRLF leaders—after Tamil Nadu refused permission. The Indian branch of the European voluntary organisation, Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation, offered its building in Yelahanka for housing the school and the first batch of 75 refugee children moved to Bangalore in mid-1990. Says P. Rajaratnam, former ENDLF minister for land, agriculture and rehabilitation in the north-eastern province and a prime force behind the founding of the school: "Since there has been no sustained education in the north-east in Sri Lanka since 1983, we decided to provide education to the refugee children as it is a question of the future of our society."

A cruel combination of fate, domestic politics and sheer red-tapism has, however, undermined all the noble intentions with which the centre was founded. Starved of funds for a major part of the last six years, when the number of students touched a high of 300 at one point of time, the school is presently run on a shoestring budget with a debt of Rs 26 lakh staring it in the face. The daily menu for the children aged between five and 18 years: porridge for breakfast, a ‘good lunch’, and again porridge or a ‘little rice or wheat’ for dinner.

Milk is unheard of, as are eggs and meat. A cup of black tea a day is the only beverage and vegetables make it to the shabby dining tables when they are ‘affordable’.

The misery does not stop at food. Toilet and bathroom facilities are available only for girl students; boys use open fields as toilets and makeshift facilities in the open for bathing. Not once in the last six years have the children had hot water to bathe with. Soaps are provided when the school can afford them, and any twig serves as a toothbrush. Clothes are charity hand-me-downs while dirty sheets of cheap linen with lumps of cotton sticking out pass off for mattresses. A makeshift pharmacy stores drugs for simple ailments like coughs and colds. About 60 students were afflicted with conjunctivitis when the epidemic broke out in Bangalore last month, simply because the school could not afford the treatment or isolate those affected. Without water supply of its own, the school buys water for all purposes from a neighbouring farmer. Confined to the 2.25-acre school campus, the only outings the children have had in six years has been one trip to Mysore and another to Bangalore’s Cubbon Park, besides the annual visit to their parents’ camp.

"Everything started falling apart after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi," recalls R. Vijayraj, who came from Ooty six years ago to teach here and is today principal with a princely salary of Rs 1,500. Vijayraj is one of the seven paid teachers—three Sri Lankan volunteers teach the children free—whose irregular salaries range from Rs 650 to Rs 1,250. Adds Rajaratnam: "As long as Rajiv was alive, the fund-flow was smooth as he personally ensured that we received contributions through private sources. Even the Congress party funded us then." But Rajiv’s assassination changed all that.

THOUGH the management of the school passed on to Madras-based Bright Society, an NGO formed after the European agency withdrew help to the school, the fund-flow reduced to a trickle since the ENDLF was a major partner in the society. Being another Sri Lankan Tamil outfit, when anti-Sri Lankan feeling raged across the peninsula, didn’t exactly help.

Formed with the aim of collecting funds for the school and refugees in camps, Bright Society found itself up against a wall as it had to source funds from within the country. Without a FERA registration, the society is not permitted to collect funds from abroad either through foreign agencies or wealthy Lankan Tamils. "We applied for the FERA number two years ago and still correspond with the department. Though the school has nothing to do with the ENDLF as children of all refugees are admitted there, being identified with a Sri Lankan political party has ensured that our struggle to fund the school continues," says Rajaratnam.

Finally, the plight of the school was taken to the Karnataka High Court in January 1994 through a PIL filed by Digvijay Mote, a resident of Yelahanka. The court ruled a month later that the Karnataka government provide monthly rations worth Rs 41,200 to the school. The responsibility was handed first to the state department of Backward Classes and Minorities and subsequently to the Women and Child Development (WCD) cell and all seemed fine till October 1995 when the supply suddenly stopped. For the ostensible reason that the department had received no further norms to continue funding the refugees. Says R.S. Sujatha, WCD director: "We don’t have any scheme to run a centre for refugees. And it is the policy of our department that children should not be separated from their parents. We’ve repeatedly told them to unite the children and their parents." 

Ever since, there are few doors which Rajaratnam, as the secretary of Bright Society, has not knocked on. Two years ago, he met the then prime minister Narasimha Rao who directed him to the Union Welfare Ministry which told the society to furnish details about the school. It requested the ministry to transfer the daily allowances paid to refugees in camps to the Bangalore school once they got admission there. While a response is still awaited on that request, the allowances of refugee children are stopped once they join the school though the funds are not transferred to Yelahanka. Says Rajaratnam: "Though we have not got a no for an answer, all we keep hearing are excuses for the delay." And so the school has been spending only about Rs 900 a day on food when its minimum requirement is Rs 1,700.

Blissfully unaware of the struggle and politics behind their existence, the boys spend their leisure playing cricket while the girls hop-step. And Rajaratnam points out that though the children are not starving, their nutrition is suffering. "The situation in the camps is worse. They are better off here." They no longer run shouting "bomber vandidchi" (bombers are coming) when they spy an aircraft from the nearby IAF station or hide when nearby quarries blast rocks, like they did initially. But though the psychological trauma of the war back home may be healing, the trauma of being refugees battling for survival in a foreign land shows few signs of abating. Meanwhile, they carry on with hope and wisdom.