 Thank you everyone for being here. You're in for a treat. I'm Rahul Bhatia, a journalist but also someone who like so many of you is trying to understand what makes a country ask its citizens to prove who they are. The events of the last year especially since December 2019 are the backdrop to the talk we're about to witness. That's because the three main people here Joy Ma, Dilip D'Souza and Srinath Raghavan are in a unique position to provide context. Srinath is a historian and a professor. He has written four pretty immense books and if you've ever tried to find documentation in this country you'll know how intimidating those books are. One's on foreign policy in the Nehru era. One's on the birth of Bangladesh. A third is about South Asia during the Second World War and his most recent one is a history of the United States in South Asia. Joy and Dilip are the authors of the Deolivalas which tells us a story that very few people knew about. It's about how Chinese and Chinese Indians were rounded up and kept in a prisoner of war camp in Rajasthan in 1962. Now while they were inside they watched neighbors and friends occupy their land, take their possessions. Eventually inevitably you could say there was an exodus. In an interview a few years ago Joy said something about that time that seems pretty relevant to this moment. These are Joy's words. In the beginning there was guilt and shame and humiliation. Anger came later. If you haven't read it already do pick up the Deolivalas. It's a pretty great book. Now before I hand this over to Srinath, a word about Karnat. This is a community started during the Adhaar case as a way to help people understand technology developments that were changing India but I think in time what's happened is it has expanded to help technologists understand the country that they want to change and so this is part of an ongoing series of discussions. With that here's Srinath Raghavan. Thanks Rahul. Good to see you if only virtually and thanks everyone for being here today for this discussion. I must thank the Karnat community for putting this together, Zainab particularly for her enthusiasm in getting us all together. But let me start by actually thanking Joy and Dilip for writing this absolutely fascinating and in so many ways such a timely book. You know I've been working on the history of the India-China conflict for a good about 20 years of my life now and you know I worked on it for my PhD thesis all the way back and I must say that this book was a revelation in so many ways. I mean as someone who's steeped in the literature at practically every page I found something new. I learned to see the conflict itself in so many new different ways. So this is absolutely this is a kind of book which comes in very rarely and forces us to you know think about a historical issue that we think we know very well in some ways and provides an stunningly different perspective which then changes the overall composition of what we imagine the history of that period to be. I must say this is Devli Valas is very much one of those books but it's it's a remarkable accomplishment for a second reason because you know in some ways we all write history because we want to talk not just about the past but also to the present at least that's my one of my main motivations in being a historian and somehow you guys have timed it absolutely brilliantly as Rahul said the book in some ways speaks to questions of identity, citizenship, what being part of a nation actually means in ways that I don't think you could have quite anticipated when you started working out on this project and of course we now have another India-China confrontation eerily in places which still carry the same names of the period from 1959 to 62. So that again provides us somewhat more sober and somber backdrop to our discussion today. So I wanted to really ask begin by asking the two of you know what the origins of this project were and how did you think of getting into this? Joy in your case of course you know this this was very much part of your personal story so perhaps you could begin but I'd love to get the lip in to understand how the two of you came together and really started thinking about crafting this book. Okay I can go first. So for me it was the 50th anniversary of the 1962 in general internment of the Chinese Indians and what happened was I had gone to India with my husband for a trip to explore some areas for another trip and so I met a friend and my friend Kai Friis said that he was writing a special report for Outlook India and he asked me did I know anybody who'd want to write about it and it just came crashing down on me because I live with it pretty much you know every week every day whenever my mom wants to talk about it you know she talks about it every birthday she you know it comes out since I was born in camp and so basically what happened is I wrote a first story about it and then I got connected because I was a little kid when I came out and all the people who had gone to the camp were teenagers or you know a little bit or maybe a little bit younger and so they had formed a group in Toronto and I went for that Toronto commemoration of the 50th anniversary and that's where I found that actually people were willing to talk people willing to do something to commemorate beyond just like having the community meet up and and after that time Rafiq Elias was doing the documentary and so we became a part of the documentary and in 2015 we went to India to show it and in certain universities and cultural centres and that's where we met I met Dilip and fast forward to a little bit a couple years later there was a demonstration in Ottawa outside the Indian High Commission and that's where the group presented a letter asking for an apology to the Indian government and Dilip actually made that trip I couldn't make that trip but when we met in the Bay Area I suggested that we might want to write a story and the reason is because Dilip actually didn't know about the internment knew about the war but not the internment and I encountered people like that every day when I say you know there was an internment camp in India and people's faces just dropped they can't take it it's a very heavy revelation and so I wanted somebody to talk from the other perspective from my perspective it's always knowing about it and I wanted to bring another voice and an informative voice to the story so yeah thanks Reenath for doing this really you know I want to say that it's a pleasure and an honour to have you talking to us about this but for me like Joy mentioned I didn't know about this and as I'm sure a lot of my fellow citizens didn't know about this till about about eight years ago 2012 and on the 50th anniversary that year where a Chinese Indian friend of mine came for dinner and this is what I've written the book and out of the blue she just said did you know that we had done this and you know I thought she was joking I thought this this couldn't have happened and really it just it just blew my mind that this had happened that I didn't know about it and and you know then I just got interested in this subject so in later that year I wrote a long article about it for Caravan Magazine and that's when you know that article got circulated I think among the Chinese Indian community so I got maybe known in that community a little bit and then you know that's how as Joy mentioned when there were these series of meetings in Delhi later in 2015 I went and joined them and and went along with them for these meetings just four of them were talking about their experience in the camp just that almost the first attempt to get this story out and I was so glad to be part of it and then again in 2017 I made the trip to Ottawa to be part of that bus trip to hand over this letter and then Joy and I started talking about this so that's my little history I just want to curiously enough the same person who who wrote I mean who told me that time about about this issue whom I refer to in the book as Jay she wrote to me just about 45 minutes ago and I if I can just read out what she said she says she just you know written to me because she knows Joy and I are going to be on maybe she's watching I don't know what she says my almost 90-year-old Bhua asked me the other day half fearfully if they were going to arrest us and take us to the camp again I told her jokingly that it's okay even if they do we will all go together and they will have to give us dalbhats to eat and she goes on like that but I just wanted to say that this this fear is still here and that's the you talked about this this this relevance and timeliness of this book totally by coincidence yes but in some ways I'm so glad that it is timely but I'm also so so sad that it is timely because this should never be happening again so in some ways you know just to go back to the history of that period you know the in the book you point out about how the ball is set rolling for the internment of these people of Chinese origin who are in India and there were about 15,000 of them in Calcutta itself and in fact there was an association of Chinese in India who were based out of Calcutta and as soon as the water had begun they had actually passed a resolution saying that they condemn the aggression of China you know they were actually quite proactive because they thought that some of this might be coming in fact subsequently they even write a letter to the government of India forwarding the resolution saying that you know we affirm our loyalty to India many of us have lived all our lives in India we were born in India we don't have some citizenship papers but please do not distrust our loyalties or question our loyalties we stand with the government of India they even make some donations actually yes now despite this you know there is a proclamation which is issued oddly enough under the Depends of India Act you know which is colonial instrument which was used to imprison many of the same leaders of India who are using it against other citizens now you know for instance during the Second World War so could you just walk us through to what was the context of the time which actually allowed this kind of a legal instruments to be promulgated and for these measures to be taken whereby 3,000 people were then interned in a camp in Devli in Rajasthan which is where the book gets started from. Sheena you know from my reading and understanding while I was trying to write this book so the tension on that border our so-called border with China had been going on essentially for many many years certainly since independence on and on there were there were incidents you know where Indian patrol would be intercepted or Chinese people would come across Chinese soldiers would come across what we thought was the border and then we would intercept them and there'd be some some hostilities you know essentially like is happening right now and that had been going on for all those years and maybe increasing in some respects as 1962 came around and I think it was just that at some point Mao who I got this quote from said that if you know if Nehru is going to keep on pushing us like this it would be ungracious on our part I'm paraphrasing ungracious on our part not to reciprocate and what he meant by reciprocate really was to deliver this hammer blow and so then out of the blue at least I think to some of the Indian leadership it was out of the blue that this this war certainly happened in October 1962 they came across the they came to what they thought was the McMahon line and and pushed our our soldiers all the way back and then in about a month later they withdrew to their original position and that is the end of the war so this building up of hostility and then this this this sudden flashpoint of the war was the climate in which all this happened and and by august of that year 1962 it was clear I think that that you know I think the government if India felt like they had to take some kind of action that showed that they were you know being proactive reacting at least you know showing some kind of opposition some kind of resistance to what this what was happening as they perceived it on the border and so one of the things they thought about was let's try and round up these Chinese Indians and you know that will show our population that we're taking some dramatic action and I honestly think that was the the reasoning behind this whole issue right joy in the book you mentioned that you know these people are this Chinese community in Calcutta had had sort of its origins going back all the way to the 19th century in India and it's actually around the end of the second world war that we find that the numbers have actually you know read some kind of substantial figure and in fact you know during the course of my research on the second world war I came across this extraordinary CID you know intelligence report in I think 1943 there was a demonstration of 10 000 Chinese seafarers people who had basically come on various ships got stranded in Calcutta who actually did some kind of a demonstration saying that you know we need to be able to sort of get back into circulation so to speak so so clearly the second world war and that period is a time when the Chinese community in Calcutta at least in numerical terms is strengthened but as you also point out this community is kind of you know initially divided because there are two Chinas so to speak there's Guomintang and there is the people the communists by the time the civil war gets over you know they have to sort of demonstrate and affirm their loyalties in different ways given what the government of India wants could you just walk us through what the how the community navigated and positioned itself before these events really hit them I can speak to a little bit of it because I we actually don't know that much but you're right I think the two Chinas play themselves in many different countries and suddenly India became one of those so basically going back to the World War II there was a mass exodus when the Japanese invaded or went to China and started fighting so a lot of people got away from Shanghai and they went to Singapore first and then through Singapore they started making their way and and for some reason I don't I can't even quantify it that much but India was seen as possibly because of the British rule there it was seen like as a safe haven and and California actually more than Calcutta I think Calcutta was a fair amount but to me California was pretty remote and up in the hills that place became quite a hub for Chinese because they've been trading from Tibet to China sorry from India to Tibet for for a good many centuries and so there were Tibetan traders in the early 19th century and so Chinese traders also came along and so they would ply their new train up and down between Town Tong and Lhasa and so Town Tong became a big hub actually and the Chinese schools were formed right and so the the way it works is the Chinese schools really helped me understand so the schools are created through donations from the community right and so I think it went along the lines of who sided with which group and and and there was a Chinese school created in in California but I think there were other couple Chinese schools also in Calcutta and so so I think what happened was there was one situation where Dilip talks about where there was a neighbor who sort of told on somebody else and that person got locked up but that person also ended up in the camp so there are many other situations like that but but when people got released I think some of the families were supported by the Taiwanese government because the ones who had to go back or had no choice they went to China on those ships from the camp but the people who didn't go and needed some of them needed aid when they got out right because they didn't have businesses they didn't have any savings there's no work and so some of the families took that aid but as far as the other families who you might say were not you know Quagmintan families they they were not aligned to any government as they were just really trying to survive so I don't know does that answer question yeah no I you know because no because reading the book I was struck by the fact that the Indian government had for all practical purposes and I'm pretty sure of this had actually through their intelligence agencies used the Kuomintang you know connections of some of the Chinese community and in fact the the PRC the People's Republic actually complains to the government of India repeatedly in the late 1950s saying that Kalimpong is a nest of spies and so on and you know a couple of years ago the the Lailama's elder brother Gyaludhundu wrote a memoir called The Noodlemaker of Kalimpong where he actually confirms pretty much a lot of this stuff so in a sense it seems like you know the community actually sort of despite in some way supporting the government of India's you know whatever covert ambitions were in the late 1950s paid the price for something that you know they should not have at all and then there was no reason to do that right I think it was a small community you can imagine you know like the governments are going to you know try to find intelligence but it was a very small community and I think they were mostly they had left because they had the means right governments are supporting them so for the people who were taken to the camp there was not one who was proved to be a spy because clearly they have the means to leave and they wouldn't have been able to yeah absolutely so Joy could you talk a little bit more about the sort of you know experience of the camp itself because one of the most powerful parts of this book is your attempt to go back to survivors to talk to people who live through the period and really in a sense stand testimony to that experience which I think is one of the great accomplishments of this book is that it's not just a history but it really brings the human element out and gives us a sense of what the experience of the camp meant I understand this is not something that is easily generalizable but would you just pick up a few things and talk about what you think were the most salient things that people went through in the time that they were there yeah so sure so I what struck me was you know at the time I had my kids who were teenagers and they're grown up now but um what struck me was the the depth of emotion that these folks had because they were teenagers when they went in right so I write about seven people and like about five of the six of the seven people are were teenagers and so they would so they lost you know if you want to look at it in sheer terms of you know how it impacted them the education got interrupted some never went back to school and hence never went to college never graduated none of that you know because when they got out of the camp they just had to start working immediately to support their families right so there was a kid who was 16 years old 17 13 10 they just lost all that school and education but the other thing that they really felt them what they felt was really important they really felt betrayed you know there's a lot of betrayal going on in this this whole story but as people who had lived in India for so long they were taken with police cars you know the army would come even like my mother when she was released to Calcutta and they're trying to find a place to put her in she had like a this group of people following her with guns drawn right and so they would go trying to place her in a place and everybody just scattered because it was so terrified it was very military kind of operation and so for for the kids it was a deep humiliation deep shame for for nothing they had done wrong but you know these days when you talk about you know when you deal with people you always tell them you've done nothing wrong with but this is like an old new concept for those days and those people the kids just they felt hopeless right because their parents obviously are sitting right next to them they couldn't do anything to save them and there's no hope for being released right and so actually when the ships were taking taking people to China the amount of the emotions that they went through right so some people were relieved that they made a choice to stay in India so they were they were happy to stay back but also one of the people left they felt lost and abandoned and I think the other aspect of it is the abandonment issue like the families that stayed there for a very long time including my family they were just forgotten they were told that they would be allowed to return home but that never happened for whatever reasons and there were small batches of people who were released and and so for the people who stayed back it was just the most desolate kind of feeling of not being remembered and no one was coming to really help them. Right Dilip tell me I mean while all of this is happening where is the great Indian constitutional protection system the legal system you know we rarely hear about any kind of legal challenge being mounted to the internment of these people I understand it's wartime there are you know legislation that the government can pass but none of the machinery which is there supposedly to protect the rights of individuals including anyone whether you're a citizen or not in this country doesn't seem to have rolled into action at all you know what really was happening why were we asleep. Well you know in February Joy and I had a discussion about this book in in California I happen to be there for a few days and a loyal friend of mine actually raised this question he said you know when the Japanese American internment happened in 1942 the ACLU kicked into gear and and filed cases and and so on there was this Korematsu case and various different things and at least there was this this challenge to this this internment and he asked didn't anything like that happen in India and as far as I know nothing happened you know there was perhaps it was before the the existence of the likes of the PUCL and CPDR and so on the equivalents to the ACLU but I think it's just also civil society somehow did they acquiesce in this you know much like the Germans acquiesced in the in the in the holocaust I don't know I I can't help thinking that that's what it was there was a climate in this country of hostility and prejudice towards these towards this this community and so then when all this action was taken there wasn't anyone really at least amongst civil society as we like to call it who was willing to stand up and and and say something against and as for any official machinery I think they were just caught up in in prosecuting the war and and and you know this was one small aspect for them of the war and it was just something that had to be done it had a big may have had a big public dramatic effect I think that was part of the reason it was done but you know there was just no no real opposition to to this it's it's sad to acknowledge that but I think that that's a feature of it's unfortunately a feature of this country you go forward every time there are communal riots 1984 the killings of Sikhs 1992 year in Bombay the 2002 killings in Gujarat has never really been any serious effort on on the part of authorities to actually stop these things so it was unlikely to happen and it didn't happen in 1962 to these people who went to Delhi no I think you're right you know because the the climate of the time particularly if you read the press and the periodicals is very strongly xenophobic in fact some of the coverage is downright racist there is no other way of putting it in fact there is a very systematic campaign of you know describing the Chinese in time in terms which you will only think of as dehumanization right you know Srinath is being repeated now you know people are sending me little for example of a picture of of some statue maybe in Hampi or one of one of our hale build or I'm not sure where where some person is showing his own apparently a Chinese trader from some prehistoric times who's who's tabbing the Indian in the back and people are saying look the Chinese stabbed Indians in the back even then so we should we should know that this these things happen you know it's it's it's not new it's it's not changed but but if you would say that there is anything that we should learn from this history what should it be that this this kind of you know this prejudice doesn't work I mean it's it's so it's so sounds trivial to say but I think that's what it is it's we are it just causes horrible things to happen and this we should have I think by now 70 years later 60 years later we should be able to have the perspective to look back on that war look back on on on how it happened look look again at our our relations with China our border with China and then and look at this this huge aspect of what happened to these these people who were put in that camp and say that this was this was a blot on our on our country on our constitution on our on our whole image of ourselves as a nation and I think that time has come to do that and if we are able to do that if you're able to at some in some way acknowledge that in some way apologize to people like joy I mean I really think it would be a it would it would be an awakening in this country it would it would peace would break out I'd like to say that joy in fact earlier the lip had mentioned about the you know the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War by the Roosevelt administration and then of course there were about 100,000 of them who were put into various kinds of camps that episode had got more traction even at that time and subsequently and opposing I think it was in 1988 that Ronald Reagan passed a new legislation which then paved the way for some kind of reparations etc and some restitution of the wrongs that were done to that community I mean do you see that some such thing is important in the context of the Chinese Indians who were so needlessly put to you know this kind of an internment experience during the war? Yes I think it would be really important you know just from even a political perspective or a human I think there are two perspectives one's political and one's human humanitarian so I just feel it's very different for countries to be fighting that's one thing but you're talking about citizens you know what have citizens done to the country they just live and they make a good make their living and they're they contribute to society and so from that point of view the Chinese and India are doing that they they have deep roots there they just they love you know the life they have and they cherish it like even for people who leave you know it stays with them forever and then I'll read a little piece to you guys at the end of this talk but it's really important to to acknowledge that there was a humanitarian wrong that was done whether there's an apology or not we always hope but we can't dictate where that goes but it is important to acknowledge first that it happened and that's never happened from a official perspective of yes it was wrong right and as Thilip said you know in some ways it is strange that despite the passage of so many decades we still don't seem to be very comfortable landing asking in our national identity right I mean there's still a degree of fragility and you know we just get unnerved by things which happen around us and start asking ourselves and identifying who's not an Indian so to speak you know that reflects it remains in place I'd like to open up for Q&A and I'll request everyone who is on the Zoom call to please post questions in the Q&A tab but while you are you know coming up with your questions and posting them could I please request Joy to read out some passage from the book so that our you know colleagues on the call can get a flavor of both the texture and quality of the writing which has gone to this book sure and thanks Trina so I'll read a short passage from chapter two it's Ying Shang Wong within Bob Wires and the reason I want to read this is it'll give you a sense of what we're talking about as far as who these people are Ying Shang Wong lives in the Toronto area he was present at the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the internment of the Chinese in India he later became the president of the AIDCI the non-profit organization that was set up to connect ex-internies and survivors of the Uli camp AIDCI stands for Association of Indian Uli Camp Internies Camp Internies that's right thank you Ying Shang is as comfortable with Hindi as he is with Hakka often breaking out into an old Hindi movie tune as he did on the bus to Ottawa in Rafik Elias's documentary beyond Bob Wires Ying Shang speaks in Hindi he reveals that the officials in the camp was shocked to hear that the Chinese could speak Hindi they had expected a group of foreigners who could not communicate with them having grown up in India immersed in its culture and language it was also a shock for the Chinese who first arrived in the camp to learn that the camp officials in that remote part of Rajasthan knew nothing about them the wide gap in knowledge and the lack of information about the Chinese interned in Bili would take years to sort out. Ying now reminisces about the day decades ago when his family first heard about their fate and what was to be a long journey from which some did not return in 1962 Ying Shang's family lived in Shilong the capital of what is now the state of Meghalaya in 19 on 19 November that year military personnel went to Don Bosco school and rounded up the Chinese students and his share whose account appears later in this book was studying in Don Bosco and was among the students taken by the soldiers then I was 16 that year I was born in Calcutta and sent to Shilong when I was 13 that day seems a lifetime ago Ying Shang says he and his family were unaware that the students were being rounded up until a neighbor came to their house and told his father all the Chinese students are rounded up in the school today your family must prepare to leave the next day on November 20th a group of six to eight soldiers came to his house he remembers it was close to 4 30 in the evening when they knocked on the door the soldiers met his father and told him the family was to come with them and to take only a few belongings they were told to take a little money because they would be released in the short period the whole family was arrested that day his father mother four brothers and twin sisters Shrinath can I just uh yes please to come in here to learn a couple little points that she said sure one is uh that she mentioned these dates November 19th and 20th where Ying Shang Wang's family was was picked up so that's interesting because if you look at the history the war the war lasted actually ended on November 20th so the the fact of this the early internship is that most of the people were picked up and sent to the camp after this war was over and people like Joy spent five years in that camp well after I mean there's five years when there was no war after the war so that's something that to think about why would we keep it why did we put these people into the camp after the war was over and why did we keep them there for so long the other point I wanted to because I just love telling the story as you know I started the book with it Joy mentioned about how Ying Shang Wang was in the bus to Ottawa and he sang the song so you know this I think it needs to be told the the bond that India I mean these people still have with India all these years later and and and that shows it sort of underlines to me the injustice of what happened to them because we were on this bus going from Toronto to Ottawa and then somebody said because I think Ying Shang Wang is uh was known to have a nice voice and so they said you know please sing us a song and here I am the only guy who's not part of the community thinking he's going to sing a Chinese song and that's my stupidity at work and and what does he break out into he starts seeing a jibidasa time yeah you know it's a song from when is it from 1962 or something so about the time he left he's singing this Bollywood song and he sings many other Bollywood songs on this bus to Toronto shows what it's not just that he speaks in me but he has this this deep love deep bond with India okay so uh we have a question here from Tarangini and uh Tena tells me that it is the historian Tarangini Sri Raman whose book I have read which is a history of citizenship and identity in India uh in terms of documentation and you know it's a fascinating piece of work and Tarangini is asking us uh to reflect on the question of saying you know what were the other kinds of persecution and discrimination that happened against the Chinese Indian community beyond the internment I mean can can we talk a little bit about you know if we take this particular uh episode uh obviously they were they must have been various other forms of what she calls everyday microaggressions which must have happened at a social level perhaps even at an official level uh could we talk a little bit about that as well is that all you want to do yeah uh I think um you know some of it you can talk to just kids being nasty so when I was in Calcutta I you know it wasn't often but once in a while I would get racial slurs thrown at me right and so that was in Calcutta um I remembered it um so obviously made a mark but I think um the the stigma of the camp stayed for a long time so when people released to the camp uh from the camp um my mother didn't want to go associate uh or like pay social visits to people because um they were really afraid that we would bring the stigma along with us um so that was happening in part um on all the most of the Chinese state in the Chinatown or Kapa area um but you know I think on a day-to-day level in Calcutta people mingled and they were friends with their neighbors but um but the camp wasn't very far away as in those who were not taken uh were always dreading the knock you know like right now everyone is afraid but even after the internment um normal regular people would be afraid and they would talk about it they'd feel guilty that they weren't taken it was very complicated but as far as microaggressions um you know it happens on a daily basis there's name calling there is um you know um if you don't speak the language well like you don't speak the well uh you might get uh you know taunted uh by it uh but I'm just trying to think um it was just you know the way my mom says uh she just felt like for the 10 years uh the first 10 years in Calcutta there was a deep anti-Chinese Chinese like it was simmering um kind of uh attitude towards uh towards the people who are of Chinese origin um for me as a child I was sheltered from it because I just went to school and you know these were my classmates and I didn't feel it as much but she definitely felt it and a lot of people were harassed by the CID uh the people who came out uh they would follow the men around uh my father was followed a lot um and so those types of things I think um it was uh for people who were asked to quit India and those who chose to stay it was very very difficult. Okay uh we have another historian uh on the uh discussion here today who's uh my friend Cheri from Dwarlaleh University now president in Bombay I believe who's um says that many of the Chinese interns uh interned in Daibli were identified perhaps because they also had lucrative businesses which were then taken over and sold to Indians so the process of interning and identification uh itself perhaps was driven by things which were not necessarily at the national security level I mean at the highest level yes you are right uh that you know perhaps the decision was taken to send the message out but perhaps uh you know there were other kinds of issues uh which played out in a in a more local setting as well. The second thing and then Dilip perhaps you may want to talk about this a little bit is he says that Daibli camps were modeled on the FDR's camps for Japanese Americans right I mean so in a sense the Indians quite consciously took that model um and uh Cheri wants to know how these models of identification and internment are kind of you know move around and perhaps you know these are the sort of longer term institutional uh you know practices that are now being played out in places like Assam in the context of the NRC and such like. Um am I going for that? Yeah why don't you answer that and then Joy you can take a crack at that. So I think uh to say that the camp was modeled on the on the Japanese internment camps I'm not sure if the in in its physicality it was not because it it has a history going back to the 19th century the camp was set up by the British and and has a long history of being used was used for German POWs and in the Second World War for Indian freedom fighters and all so I don't think it was a I mean it was not a camp that was built based on what was built up for the Japanese interns in in 1942 but this whole idea of interning of of putting people into camps was uh you know has its parallels with the with the Japanese internment so and I think it's instructive also to look at what what's happened with that camp afterwards so it was it was used for at the time of uh when uh when the Chinese Indians were there there were also as Joy's one of all in one of Joy's stories somebody talks about how there were Pakistani POWs also there there were some Tibetan people also kept there but in later years it became a training camp for our paramilitary units and for the last many years it's been a training camp for the CISF the Central Indian Security Force which is the people who check us at airports and so on the reason I mentioned that is because what I found really interesting was that there used to be a history of the of the CISF of this camp on the CISF website which mentioned this the the Chinese Indians being there in just two lines and it said something about how at in in the early 60s or something there were 3000 people put in this camp and they were it was called Chinese camp and there's no mention I like to point this out each time because there's no mention of the fact that these were Indian citizens Chinese Indians so you know you you read this and you wonder who were these people and I think you I think you were meant to wonder that because you were not meant to ask you're not meant to know that they were actually our own fellow citizens so I mean that's the history of that camp yeah no and then I'll just say that you know there is a bit of a pre-history as well during the Second World War again German citizens who were in India at that point of time for whatever purpose were rounded up and put into these camps in fact Rajmohan Gandhi who's on this call mentions in his biography of Rajaji that you know Rajaji himself you know took such measures as the premier of Madras presidency at that point of time so in a sense there is a institutional precedence to these kinds of things just as there is an institutional continuity afterwards as well and in fact I came across a wonderful set of watercolors by one of the German internees they somehow landed up in the Imperial War Museum it's absolutely moving to see how that person sitting in that camp has captured everyday life I mean it's it's I can well understand what Joy is saying but Joy do you want to talk a little bit about you know what is the whether what is the kind of role and in fact we have Usha Gandhi who's asking a related question about whether there was any method to this or were just people picked up rounded up because you know there's a 15,000 strong community about 3,000 people were interned Cherry has this hypothesis that perhaps you know there were other kinds of local political economy reasons for wanting to commercial reasons for wanting to send some people off to these camps and so on I mean could you speak to some of those questions yes so sorry that sounds in my eyes but so basically I think what what someone said previously that certain like big businesses were targeted that was certainly the the case in my family my family had a very big construction company in the Aleppo Duarez area and so that completely got destroyed so that was one piece of it but the other thing sorry I'm getting a little bit distracted with this sunlight but the other thing I wanted to talk about was someone else was in someone else was any method of to the madness so so the way it worked for our company was we had a lot of carpenters from who were from China and we've been living in Hashimara for like decades by then so they had married local women so when when the general internment happened the carpenters were picked up for us we our family was picked up like a month later and so only the men were taken all their wives and children were left behind and my grandfather ran a very sort of paternalistic kind of company where they just took care of the wives and the children and he promised all the carpenters who were locked up that they would take care of them so that was one way it happened it seems to me that in from the people I spoke to the people in Assam and and the whole family was taken right and like like all the children and so on but in Calcutta I'm told by my mom that a lot of the men were just picked up like there would be two brothers or like from the big tannery companies they would just take the men and so these men had to figure out a way because they couldn't cook for themselves and so like you hear all these stories right so they'd attach themselves with the family who you know would would cook for them and then they would share whatever they were given but I'm digressing a little bit though from this but I also wanted to talk about the there was no method to the madness right and so and I mean it in like an operational point of view I wanted to talk a little bit about it so even if the camp the people in Delhi had taken the Japanese internment just like a playbook and tried to play it out it did not work that way they were just not staffed to even register the people like everybody had to have a registration everybody like your process in 3000 people the food supplies were not there and there was absolutely besides just taking care of like living and eating there was nothing if you were to talk about the playbook from the Japanese camps there was no entertainment there was no school there was no any other social kind of activities I think the Japanese interning they had a lot of that you know they had activities even though it's probably horrible and very depressing to it but there was nothing for the Delhi internment right we have another historian Kunalji Troy who's actually writing his PhD dissertation on Kolkata Chinese not historians to Finland sorry yeah I know it's a tribute to your book that you've gotten so many of us who are otherwise not to do anything else on a Sunday evening out in force so you know I'm glad my tribe is flourishing and that you give us opportunities like this so but Kunalji is asking he has also interviewed a lot of you know Indian Chinese in Kolkata a few in Makum, Tinsukiya and he has read the book closely and he says that one of the things which is to him very striking is how even now you know the community is very sort of cagey about talking about these events perhaps because there's still fear that they could be presented as the other and in some ways victimized especially in the context of what's happening with Koruna and so on right yeah so that's one particular question and then we have another question here from Akshay who was saying that you know so what have the survivors of this internment demanded so far I mean have they actually demanded a formal kind of apology or reparations restitution of any kind so could we talk to both of those questions first? So about the demands I'll let Joy expand on that too but as far as I know there's just been this one it took a while for the community to come together and say that we'd like to demand this apology to ask for an apology I mean I think demand is too strong they so what the form it took was this bus trip that we talked about earlier in 2017 where we where they went to Ottawa and went to the High Commission and they they had this letter printed out which is addressed to Prime Minister Modi saying we would like an acknowledgement and apology for what happened to us in 1962 and so I want to underline again what happened there because these they they had informed the High Commission that they were going to come with this letter and that at a certain time on a certain date but when they get there the the gates were locked and they were not allowed in and the somebody standing at the gates said we have no orders to accept any letters from you so we spent they spent I keep saying we because I was also there but spent about three and a half hours standing outside holding up placards and so on and then eventually left after taping the letter to the to the gate so frankly I don't think that letter was read by anyone so that's what I mean it was it was the demand for an apology is really just a it's like a plea that's that's I've fallen on deaf ears as far as I know I'd like to I'd like to think that the community is going to ask for an apology again or in a in a larger form I don't think there is any such move Joy can you correct me if I'm wrong on that yeah I just not nothing currently planned as far as I know but I do want to say that before that Ottawa trip around 2000 and after 2012 they had written some letters a letter to the government at the time so the congress government I guess so they had written it and be addressed it to the president Manmohan Gandhi sorry it's not a thing sorry apologies and so so it just went into this pile I don't know how they sent it but that letter had gone in so there were two I guess requests or apologies what is the other question other question was about the you know the the kg-ness of the community even today when they want to talk about these memories and so on I mean is there still a feeling that you know somehow they could even in the current context you know be treated as the other rather than as someone who's an integral part of this country again I think Joy should answer that but I'll just give you one little data point on that again just before this the same Ottawa bus trip as they were planning it there was a mail that came from from somebody we know in the community here in fact the same person who's whose little message I read out earlier today saying that you know there is you're planning all this and that's good but you got to remember that there are repercussions on us here in India you know there are people knocking on my door even now just by the way and asking me about my papers and so on so when you do this kind of thing keep in mind what's going to happen to us in the community to India and so you know they are definitely worried I don't blame them for being KG is the word you used that's that that's the reality for them Joy yeah definitely to address that kg-ness everybody in India's absolutely not in a good place they feel very worried whenever anything happens you know on the border whether we groups like us speak up so we have to be very careful and very aware of what they're going through because right now it's very difficult for them so on so so there's there's that but also people are exhausted about the subject from among the internees because like nobody knows about it right so the book actually helps get people who ask some questions a little further along because if not then they would have to address everything so and they're a little bit more elderly also so there are only a few people who are willing to to talk at great length if they haven't already been recorded in books or pieces and all that so the community is not that big either and so that's the reason why you're not going to get a lot of spokespeople and spokespeople are going to be we have to prepare themselves mentally to talk about it and also the people who usually go for the community picnics it's all like rolled into the experience they don't like sometimes they're not such an existential question for them for example like there's this little lady I met and her daughter is around my age and she calls her daughter Dioli because that's her name she was born in Dioli and everybody knows her and they're like oh yeah Dioli so and so yeah we know who she is even her email you know has that it's so people they survive people are survivors right they're very resilient and they have conquered all this and so sometimes they don't want to talk about it like for example I'm drawing it to a little more contemporary things BLM Black Lives Matter there's some people who who don't want to go there you know and there's some people who want to take it for this so you're going to have these people who don't want to dig up the past dig up everything you know they feel that they have they have got it to some place and they're all right where they are we have a question for you from Anushka Gupta who's following this discussion on our youtube streaming and Anushka asks how you perceive the question of citizenship in the context of majoritarian politics playing out in India today and whether you believe there is a grave threat than earlier times especially because institutional redressal mechanisms also seem to be compromised Zanab adds another important point which is to say that you know perhaps now the Indian state because of various modern methods of streamlining identity is even better positions to target individuals and smaller groups and deprive them of you know the normal rights that the constitution affords to everyone so do you want to talk a little bit about these issues well of course I think it's it's I mean the threat is still there and I think it is worse and it is true because of things like other and and you know computerization of records all that makes it so much easier to do this do what happened in 1962 so I think that's you know there's no question and these laws that we've seen in recent times as CAA and the NRC are a threat to citizenship and and for this reason people say you know there's nothing wrong with the CAA no Indian citizen is going to be a threatened by the CAA well if you want to take that attitude I mean I have a problem with it being discriminatory anyway excluding the Muslim immigrants you know whatever it is illegal immigrants but that apart the our home minister told us explicitly you've got to remember the chronology our chronology Samaj Lijit we're going to have the CAA and the NRC by his own admission and the and what that means is that if there's a there's a guy let's say there's there's you Srinath and there's my friend Gulzar who by his name you will know as a Muslim and they both both of you have lost your papers after the CAA and NRC are in place it's you can go you can say look I'm an immigrant from I was pushed out of Bangladesh let's say by persecuted and pushed out and you will get a fast track to Indian citizenship Gulzar does not have that fast track so that's the problem and I think that's the that that whole question that it raises of who is a citizen who becomes how do we define citizenship who's a foreigner how do we define who's a foreigner all those questions that were raised and answered in in 1962 answered by all those different laws that you mentioned earlier are again in focus because they're going to be they're going to be raised again we mean we have in Assam what are called foreigners tribunals there are people who are deciding who's a foreigner that's that I mean so this is a reality today we are building detention camps in Assam and elsewhere in this country you know this is a reality today it's there is the potential to do it on a much wider scale is here today and that's what I'm so frightened about. Anushka has a follow-on question for you which is that you know in the discussion you had mentioned that one of the reasons why this internment actually went unchallenged and you know there's practically no questions asked of the government for you know doing this was that you know the complicity of civil society and perhaps even the general public or acquiescence in a situation and and she wants to know whether government backed propaganda had a role to play in furthering this perception and how did this whole narrative get created actually? I don't know if I don't know if there was any government backed propaganda against Chinese Indians I mean as you yourself said there was a lot of if you look at the papers of that time there was a lot of xenophobia and that was I think fueled by the or at least helped along by the government of the time you know it was easy to just be xenophobic about about this other country that was getting ready to invade us so we heard and then that was therefore easy to translate to action against people who look like those people who've come from the from the soldiers are going to come from that other country so to that extent I think it was I mean the administration of the time had a role to play I think again that's what's happening now you look at the rhetoric that we see today around us it's not just civil society but you look at what the kind of rhetoric that our leaders talk about we have a minister who said boycott Chinese food I mean what does that mean that the Chinese Indians who are who have nothing to do with China and in fact even Indians not even people who look like joy who run Chinese restaurants are suddenly going to be out of business because of this foolish call so and a responsible member of the of the government says this and he's not pulled up for it so I mean we have to be we have to be aware of that these things have a have a history they have a roots in our in our governments I mean this prejudice has roots in in the policies and actions of our government yeah so one of the you know interesting ways in which you know the post war sort of propaganda or narrative was managed by the government at that point of time which I came across in the letter was very interesting you know Jawaharlal Nehru's sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit was the governor of Maharashtra at that point of time and she writes a letter to him in early January 1963 saying that you know I've just met this very you know impressive young filmmaker called Chetan Anand and why doesn't the government of India subsidize him to make a movie of the sacrifice made by our soldiers against the Chinese in the border that's what leads to the making of the film Hakeeka which incidentally is one of the better kind of war movies made in the Indian context but nevertheless you know we have to see it for what it was well I don't know maybe there are movies being made now or will be made about the sacrifice of those 420 soldiers who died in Calhoun yeah I'm told that they've been has already been lined up for some such thing but I can't vouch for it anyway joy I want to sort of go back to the story of what happened after the you know the internment experience itself because as you said some people you know opted to go to China which as you say in this country was as foreign a country to them as anything could have been taken they might as well have opted to go to Rwanda's what you write which I think is very appropriate but a lot of people opted to stay on so one of the questions which Tarangini has asked following on your earlier responses was you know how did the question of citizenship for these people get settled for those of them you know who needed official Indian identity now was this forthcoming did it take time what is the experience I mean do you know anything from your experience of your own family in navigating this particular situation after the experience of internment itself so I can speak to what one of the one of the internees did he was Stephen Wan so for him he came out of the camp he worked a little bit and then he decided to go to Canada and it's seen you know I don't know the details of you know how he probably he had his papers clearly so he went to the to the council or the embassy in Delhi for his interview and he was granted so I think at that time Canada was looking for skilled workers and a lot of the Chinese who worked in the shipyards were able to do my immigrate the other batch of people actually left right before 1962 because things were not not looking very good but on the other hand my mom tells me that because you have to understand my mom the family lived in quite a remote part so they were a little bit cut off perhaps from all the buzzing that was going around in Calcutta so basically from Calcutta there was a mass migration of skilled workers like skilled office workers because they had to help rebuild you know Britain or Britain needed people at that time so a lot of secretaries office workers those folks left they were also probably granted a citizenship to to the UK I think that was their path but for other people after the internment they just had to prove their papers there was nobody came and said you know hey you guys are political prisoners or like you deserve to be visited refugees so everybody who migrated immigrated to Canada on their own and so this huge population of Chinese Indians in Toronto lesser in Vancouver and so once one person grows they are usually able to sponsor their family so um so I think for the people who came from the camp it was a no-brainer you know they didn't want to stay they they felt the country had nothing left for them if anything it was just momentary if they stayed on and they were young and they had their skills and their labour and they were able to to leave um my dad on the other hand because we had a big company and then he was old payment for a certain project he decided not to go and that was actually probably really very uh it was the most difficult thing for him um so sorry does that answer what you're saying yeah sure uh so Dilip of a last question uh which perhaps I should post to you uh and Xenov um sort of you know has been thinking about this which is to say that you know how do narratives like the ones that you put out historical narratives uh accounts uh like the Debi Valas really help us frame or reframe older kind of ways of thinking about and understanding certain histories right in this case of course the history of the perhaps uh and then it's something that as a historian I constantly wonder you know because at some level much of the work of people and Mia Culpa including me is very much tied to what the official archive uh manages to capture whether we like it or not you know history in some ways turns out to represent the most centurion voice of the state rather than other voices and then recovering these kinds of voices I mean what do you think such narratives can really do in to help us uh you know re-craft the sense of what that history was about? Xenov yeah it's true uh history I'm no historian but it's I always wonder about this history is you know the easy thing to say it's it's the it's the it's the history of the victors it's the history of the winners but it certainly is the history of the most centurion voices uh so therefore I think it was it was really important for us for Joy and me to uh for Joy really to to write about these uh stories of these seven or eight people uh who were in that camp so it's this is this is not just something that happened and and it's kind of a historical um you know maybe turn that really into a museum and you go there and visit I mean there were real people who who lived there who suffered there who whose lives were destroyed and we need to know how those lives were destroyed and that is why to me um you know when I was doing this writing of this book uh I mean thinking of writing this book it always struck me what am I going to be able to say that is authentic because I wasn't in that camp I'm not part of the community how how easy is it going to be for me to talk to people so I was glad to jump on Joy's bandwagon for that reason because then you know Joy has was is able to tell those stories with some authenticity and uh the function that this book and the telling these stories plays today is that we have we have so you know cleanly wiped out this memory from our collective memory in this country nobody knows that this thing happened I didn't know and and you know I with some pride I like to think of myself as a knowledgeable Indian and I didn't know that this had happened if if I am like that how many are how many more are like are there like that in this country and I think uh I really want this book I really want these stories to really hammer up that forgetfulness that amnesia and and to tell us that this is what happened in our history let's confront it it's 60 years on it's not going to harm us if we confront it later and I I think it will only it'll benefit our country you know it'll it'll make us a more a stronger or more compassionate or wiser country in many ways if you if you're just able to look back and say this happened we are sorry that it happened I'm sorry to rant like this maybe it seems like I'm writing but I really this is this is really close to my heart and this is why I wrote this book joy can I turn to you you were the youngest member of that community now you've given us this account which really as I said stands witness to what happened in history can you also quickly tell them why you're called joy uh sure uh so my poor mom you know when they were they were picked up on June January 25th 1963 um she probably didn't know she was pregnant um and um they stayed in they were put in a camp for a month before they went to Dioli and one of the first things she went to Dioli she found she was pregnant and so um she didn't have a um she didn't have a good time obviously um and she um but she stuck um you know she when she met a good doctor the doctor was very um you know doctors being a doctor and kind to her and give her medicine and vitamins and so on and so when they had so here's the story so my mom had to get a a pass to go to the hospital to have the baby right she had to go alone walked by herself uh dad couldn't go with her and um she delivered the baby uh me and he was so happy they called um they named me joy joy so double joys for a miserable you know uh out of miserable time they had um a moment of pleasure so um that's one called joy but I distracted her from the question no I was just wondering joy I mean any thoughts any final thoughts on uh how do you hope that this narrative will help us think again about uh that particular period it's really about awareness and education so I think that's our biggest uh challenge right now for all the people who are connected with Dioli you know whether they ex internees or descendants of that group because it affects them so our we would like to obviously like acknowledgement and an apology in some distant future but right now we need to get this in history books we um we need to be a history book that stands out and um it's really about having that awareness that uh as Dilip said makes the whole rich rare person and um and also makes um you know brings people together um through our suffering um we want some good to come out of it no absolutely I really hope this is the beginning of a serious attempt to come to terms with this particular historical plot uh in our record and the fact that there are so many other historians in this discussion today who are working on various aspects of it were interested gives me a lot of hope that there will be more to be written to be done but uh you people have really put this issue on the map uh thank you so much for writing this book uh I'd once again just like to thank uh the Karna community and Xenna for giving us this opportunity to celebrate Joy and Dilip's book it's a wonderful account I've seen many of you who are here uh writing in the comments saying you're already enjoying it a lot those of you who haven't got your copies please rush out uh unfortunately there are no book signings thanks to covid but uh it's a wonderful read uh and it's a story that deserves to be read told and to be understood and and really remembered in these times thank you very much have a very good evening thanks a lot