The Struggle of Chinese community in Kolkata

 The Struggle of Chinese community in Kolkata


The Chinese community in Kolkata, India is unique and little known. A majority of the Chinese in Kolkata migrated from China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mostly escaping turmoil in their homeland or seeking better economic prospectus by the early twentieth century . they had established south Asia's only china town in Kolkata. 


Chinese Indian nationality laws have become even more restrictive and powerful after the 1962 war period. After the Indo-China war in 1962, the Indian government changed its foreign policy. Since then Chinese Communist activists were detained at concentration camps in Deoli, Rajasthan and sent back to Mainland China (Kwai-YunLi, 2011). The Chinese community felt like they were living under a cloud of official suspicion as well as in distrust and that the Government was treating them as Communist spies, and AntiIndians even twenty years after the war. Their movement was restricted and their stay in India was controlled by renewable permits. Many Chinese were declared as stateless people. The ambiguous status of the Chinese residents in India proved to be disastrous.


At this point of time leaders of some of these groups wrote letters to the Indian government pledging their loyalty to India and expressed the desires of thousands of Chinese residents to become Indian citizens. But in October 1959, 8127 Chinese in Kolkata were enrolled as foreign residents. Some of them held because of the outdated passports issued by the pre-1949 GMD government in China. Others identified themselves as citizens of communist China. There were also thousands of unregistered Chinese, who were born in India but did not possess birth certificates. They were thus considered stateless as well as homeless. 


If we talk about current situation they don’t have proper identification .Many of them don’t have even birth certificates so they don’t have voter id but they are in very small groups so the government of Bengal didn't give attention to them some want some work in china town they have to do it own .but in election time they came for a vote. Even children of Chinese people study in private schools. There are very few students who are studying in government schools.




source:

https://iosrjournals.org/iosr-jhss/papers/Vol.%2022%20Issue8/Version-15/J2208154854. pdf


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