Mandapam, Rameshwaram: As crowds gathered in Colombo’s expensive Galle Face area demanding the removal of former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in early April, a young couple traveled by road from Vavuniya to the island of Mannar in Sri Lanka’s northern provinces.
IK Kodeshwaran and his pregnant wife Kasturi traveled for two hours in a bus, waited till evening at Mannar Island and were grazed in a boat along with seven others on their way to India. They reached Mandapam, Tamil Nadu’s largest refugee camp for Sri Lankan Tamils, on 10 April.
With fierce protests, a massive economic crisis that saw fuel and cooking gas shortages, Sri Lanka has had a tumultuous year. The sharp rise in the cost of living made it impossible for many Sri Lankan Tamils to make a living, prompting some to move to India in search of a better life. So far, 150 Sri Lankan Tamils have found their way to the Mandapam.
With a packet of roti worth Rs 200, a small biscuit packet for Rs 90 and a kg of rice for Rs 250, “it was extremely difficult to survive,” says Kodeshwaran, an agricultural laborer in Vavuniya district. His wife, Kasturi, was four months pregnant with their first child when the couple decided to leave their home and join the family in India. He said that his parents and sister have been living at Bhavanisagar Camp in Erode, Tamil Nadu for three decades. According to record Along with the Union Home Ministry, there are over 58,000 refugees living in 108 refugee camps in Tamil Nadu.
Kodeshwaran and Kasturi began their walk from Arichal Munai at Danushkodi towards the Mandapam camp – the end point of the tip of India which is 18 nautical miles from Sri Lanka – where the boat landed them in the midnight of April 9 to 10. “We finally got an auto flagged off and dropped outside the refugee camp at 5 a.m.,” he says. Once there, they were taken to the police station, asked for their personal details, divided into different groups, and brought to where they are currently kept.
About a week after the couple arrived at the Mandapam camp, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin inquired about their needs and well being of the new arrivals via video conferencing. “Only a few people saw him through the video, me and my wife were made to sit outside,” says Kodeshwaran.
Stalin written Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 1 April, as the Lankan Tamils started arriving by sea, to ask whether the state could be allowed to provide them with temporary asylum, so that “the concessions being given to the Lankan Tamil refugees” To be extended to the upcoming Tamils. Now.” Mandapam Camp, originally built by the British for migrant plantation workers from Sri Lanka, is located 700 km south of Chennai and is now home to about 1,500 Sri Lankan Tamils.
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Three Meals, Two Cups of Tea – Life in the Camp
For now, Kodeshwaran and his wife, like many other new Sri Lankan Tamils, have been provided accommodation, three meals and two cups of tea a day. “My wife is about 8 months pregnant and the food offered here is not conducive to giving birth to a child,” he says. “But I understand they’re cooking for 150 people and can’t change it for just one person.”
The couple has given several written petitions to the camp office, requesting that Kodeshwaran’s mother be allowed to come for three months. “We will need help during the delivery,” he says. “Even now for the scan we are expected to go to Ramanathapuram as the hospital within the camp does not have such facilities.”
Lata (name changed), had also come by boat along with nine other people and two children. On the day he decided to leave Sri Lanka from the Eastern Provinces, the cost of 100 grams of milk powder was LKR 400.
When she landed at the mandapam, her details were entered in the rose-coloured ’emergency registration form’: name, gender, place of birth, documents she had with her and so on. She says the form does not allow refugees to leave the camp. “Now, we are given three meals a day and two cups of tea while we await any paperwork that will identify us as refugees,” she says.
While Lata had come with refugees in search of a better life in financial distress, Mathi (name changed), who has been in the camp since 2006, says her situation was no different when she first came. “We didn’t even eat one meal a day,” she says. There was no water, food, nothing in the war-torn years.
“There’s not much to complain about,” Mathie says of her current life. “Others might, but I won’t because I know how much damage we suffered in Sri Lanka.”
For the past four months, Mathie has been keeping a close eye on news from her home country.
“When I see the news, I worry, I feel like crying thinking about my country,” she says. “Only now the Sinhalese understand why we fought. You cannot clap with one hand, if we had clapped together earlier, today our country would have been different.
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stuck between two countries
Everything from fresh chicken to gold loans is available on the road leading to the heavily surveyed Mandapam Camp. On Wednesday mornings, Sri Lankan Tamils walk in and out of the gate: some carry bags of string beans, others leave the gate to work at construction sites or buy vegetables from the weekly market in Ramanathapuram, about half an hour away . The people living in the camps reach the outside world by buses and trains. The mandapam is “a famous stop”, says Mathie.
A father and daughter visit a vegetable shop, then a bakery, before heading back to the camp. “My daughter has been living in this camp for years, but it has only been ten days for me. I came for a heart check-up,” he says. With the crisis in Sri Lanka making access to medicines more difficult, the only option was to seek medical attention in India. “It was really difficult to find medicine in northern Sri Lanka where I am from.”
Elsewhere, under a tin roof, an old Tamil man watches people pass by his house. “He is a Lanka karni (person), he is a Lanka karni,” he repeats, pointing to those who walk, cycle or drive on their mopeds. He and his neighbor erupt into a spontaneous discussion on the situation in Sri Lanka.
“They don’t have petrol, the cost of living is too high, they only have petrol if Modi sends them something,” he says. His neighbor said, “Then the Chinese came and pitched their big ship. Look at the cheek, that they do this.”
Kodeshwaran says he has no plans to return to Vavuniya. “It’s home now, my family lives here,” he says. But he is yet to meet his family as he awaits documents that will allow him to leave the camp. “I want to share something that hurt me so much,” he says. “The day before yesterday, I was collecting jamuns from under a tree near the police check post. The officer on duty spoke to me very rudely and said that I have come here to beg, and hit me without any reason.
An official of the Mandapam camp office says that so far 150 people have entered Tamil Nadu. “The normal practice is to first put them in Puzhal jail, but since these people are running away from economic crisis, they are brought here and fed and kept. I myself have provided food to them,” says the official.
For many households in Mandapam Camp, Sri Lanka is the home they can no longer reach. “I often think about the house,” says Madhi.
“I can’t go back. If this was my country, I could freely go and come back, but I can’t, it would make my return difficult,” she adds. “Here they are our Very well taken care of, providing a roof over my head. Yet I know that when I die I will not be buried in my own land.”