W" HAT is it like to be a refugee in your own country? What is it like to flee your home carrying nothing but terror and despair? The answers lie in the cramped cubicles of Delhi’s 14 refugee camps which house Kashmiri Hindus, known as Pandits, who abandoned everything in the insurgency-battered state and landed nearly eight years ago with just one possession — a will to live — and just one dream — to return home.

But eight years is a long time. In these eight years the trickle of refugees has turned into a flood. Over 300.000 Hindus have fled the Kashmir Valley and most of them have sought refuge in neighbouring Jammu.

An estimated 100.000 are in Delhi — sharing the same fate and leading almost similar lives as an estimated 80.000 refugees from Tibet and nearly 5.000 from Afghanistan who fled their strife-torn homelands. There Is just one difference though — the latter have sought asylum in another country; the Kashmiris are refugees in their own.

It takes a tragedy like the massacre of 25 Hindu members of a marriage procession in Doda in Jammu and Kashmir for the spotlight to turn on the Kashmiri refugees in Delhi. Little surprise then that the re- ■ sponse of a greying old lady at a camp in the southern Delhi neighbourhood of Lajpat Nagar to any query is a sullen silence

* A A Jr A A A

and an angrv glare. Her hunched back, bent further by the burden of bringing up her four children alone, (her husband was killed by terrorists, her neighbour said) however disappears when she musters up as much dignity as she can and says: "Don't make a spectacle of our lives. Give us some privacy."

But she knows, as do the other inmates at the camp, that from the moment they fled their homes under the cover of darkness nothing was private — not even grief. Tne curtains or the choir mats which separate the cubicles are their attempt to have a corner of their own.

Even after living in the camp at Bapu Dham. near central Delhi, lor over eight years. Suneeta Dhar can vividly recall her initial reaction when she was shown her new home. "I was shocked. After living in a four-storeyed house in Anant-nag. how will my family live in this cubby hole?' I asked myself." she told India Abroad News Service. "But. we did not have a choice. We did have a relative staying in Delhi, but how could we move in with them and for how long. We were a family of eight. And the space allotted to us was ten feet by six feet."

But this, as Suneeta and others discovered, was lust the beginning. It took but a few months for them to realise that whether one is a Kashmiri in the Lajpat Nagar camp or a Tibetan In the capital’s Majnu ka Tlla area in northern Delhi. AAAAAAAAAA A

one Is a refugee and will be treated like one. It did not take long either for them to figure out that for all the tall claims made by the government, their children were not to be easily admitted to schools here.

"It took me three months to realise that my daughter's admission was possible only through influence." says Ganga Nath Dhar. who owns several acres of land in Anantnag and lived in opulence — till 1990. For the past eight years his family has been cooped up in the Bapu Dham camp and has no illusions about getting out of it — ever. The family, which used to eat only the finest food, now lives on what is distributed by the government — Just rice and lentils.

Every day Dhar's wife has to spend at least half an hour trying to clean the rice. After all. it is not easy for her or anyone for that matter to cull out the rice mixed with tiny pebbles! But then the Dhars are actually not all that badly off when compared with the Shungloos. At least they have a room. That ten people live In a room which serves as a living-cum-dlnlng-cum-bedroom-cum-kitchen is a different thing.

The Shungloos continue to live in what can at best be called a pathetically small cubicle. Prabha Shungloo has tried her best to give it the look of a home. A small stove with a steel box to store cooking items is her kitchen, a few calendars of Hindu gods that are stuck on the curtain is her prayer room and A A A A A A A A A A A

a thin mattress serves as a living room during the day and bedroom at night for four people.

It has been like this for seven years now. The family held on In Kashmir while most of their neighbours fled. But one morning when Prabha opened the door to find a notice stuck on it asking them to get out. they boarded the first train leaving Kashmir. Armed with just a graduate degree, her husband. who was employed in a private firm back home. Is yet to find a job that will pay him enough to take his family out of the camp.

With the passage of time and the possibility of returning home turning bleaker, the survival instinct has taken over. Gone is the camaraderie and spirit of adjustment that marked the initial stages of camp life. The more enterprising ones have made their fives comfortable by getting an extra room.

The Afghan refugees managed to rent accommodation due to the financial aid provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Tibetans have their own colony In Majnu ka Tlla. But the Kashmiri Pandits, who receive a monthly dole of Rs. 1.500(835) from the Indian government, can neither afford to do neither.

And they continue to fume silently and long to return to the home that no more exists.

— IANS A A A A A A