India gave them camps when they needed safety. It gave them rations when they needed rights. It gave them Aadhaar cards and then arrested them for using them. After forty years, India still cannot decide what these people are, and that indecision is a policy.
In April 2025, a thirty-four-year-old web developer named Bahison Ravindran applied to update his Indian passport, a routine procedure, the kind that takes an afternoon and produces a renewed document within weeks. The application triggered a police investigation instead. Officers arrived at his home in Tamil Nadu, arrested him on charges of cheating, forgery and illegally holding an Indian passport, and informed him, thirty-four years into his life in India and in the only country he had ever known, that he was not Indian. His parents had fled the Sri Lankan civil war in 1990, crossing the Palk Strait in fear, and arrived at a Tamil Nadu that accepted them into a camp. Bahison was born in that camp in 1991. He went to school in Tamil Nadu. He learned to speak Tamil and English with the accent of his state. He got a degree, built a career, married, held a voter ID, an Aadhaar card and an Indian passport that had been issued to him after police verification, issued by the same state that was now arresting him for holding it. “In all these years,” he told the BBC from somewhere inside his incomprehension, “no-one ever told me I was not Indian.”
Nobody had told him because, functionally, he was. The problem was that the law had never caught up with the function. The problem was that India had spent forty years giving these people just enough to survive and never enough to belong, rations but not rights, Aadhaar cards but not citizenship, a camp address but not a country. Bahison Ravindran’s arrest was not an aberration. It was the system working precisely as it was designed to work: generous enough in its humanitarian provisions to avoid an international scandal, restrictive enough in its legal recognition to ensure that the people inside the camps and outside them could be managed, monitored and, when necessary, rendered illegal again by the simple act of checking their ancestry. The Madras High Court issued an interim order restraining the government from taking coercive action against him while it considered his plea. The case continues. His life, meanwhile, is on hold, in the country where he was born, in the only home he has ever had, waiting to find out if India will decide he exists.
There are roughly 89,000 people waiting for the same answer. Nearly forty per cent of them were born on Indian soil. Some are the children of refugees. Some are the grandchildren of refugees. A fifteen-year-old boy in Tiruchirappalli, the son of a man named Shiva Ganesh who surrendered his own Indian passport in 2017 after the state decided he too was not Indian, has never been to Sri Lanka. He has never wanted to go. He has no memory of it, no connection to it, no claim on it. He is fourth-generation stateless, the great-grandchild of Tamil plantation workers brought to Ceylon by the British East India Company in the nineteenth century, stripped of citizenship by Sri Lanka in 1948, rendered refugees by a civil war they did not start, sheltered in Indian camps for forty years and excluded, with meticulous consistency, from the legal protection of every country that has had a hand in creating their situation. Four generations. Not one passport between them that the state will honour. Not one country in the world that will say: you are ours.
This is not a refugee crisis. It ceased to be a refugee crisis sometime in the late 1990s, when it became clear that the people in these camps were not going home in any foreseeable future, that children were being born there, that schools were being built there, that an entire social ecosystem had taken root in the red earth of Tamil Nadu’s camp districts. What it has been since then, what it is now in 2026, as the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister writes urgent letters to the Prime Minister and the Madras High Court issues interim orders and a web developer sits in legal limbo for the crime of being born, is a structural condition of manufactured rootlessness. And it has been manufactured, with great care and considerable consistency, by two governments over four decades, neither of which has been willing to accept the human consequence of the political calculation it keeps making.
To understand how this happened, you must go back further than 1983, and further back even than 1948. You must go to the nineteenth century, to the ledgers of the British East India Company, to the labour recruiters who walked the drought-stricken villages of the Madras Presidency and returned with men who had nothing, no land, no harvest, no option, and shipped them to Ceylon’s tea and rubber plantations in the hills of Kandy and Nuwara Eliya. These were not migrants in any meaningful sense of the word. They were the human cargo of empire, moved from one part of the British administration to another for the convenience of British capital. They planted tea that the British sold to the British world. They lived in line rooms, long, low barracks divided into single-room units, one family per room, a shared standpipe and an open drain per row. They had no vote, no tenure, no mobility. They were called “Indian Tamils” to distinguish them from the “Ceylon Tamils” who had been on the island for centuries, a distinction that, by the time of Ceylon’s independence in 1948, had been weaponised into a mechanism of exclusion.
The Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948 stripped approximately 700,000 Indian-origin Tamils of their citizenship in a single stroke. They were stateless before the ink was dry. The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 then enshrined Sinhala as the sole official language, further marginalising both the Ceylon Tamils and the Indian-origin Tamils in a state that was constitutionally reorienting itself around Sinhalese Buddhist identity. The seeds of the civil war were not planted in 1983. They were planted in the parliament of a newly independent Ceylon in 1948, by politicians who understood that the fastest route to majoritarian power was the erasure of the minority. They were right about the route. They were catastrophically wrong about the cost.
In 1964, after years of negotiation, Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike signed a pact, the Sirimavo-Shastri Pact, that attempted to resolve the statelessness of the Indian-origin Tamil plantation workers. The agreement determined that 525,000 of them would be granted Indian citizenship and 300,000 would receive Sri Lankan citizenship, with the remaining 150,000 to be dealt with in a later negotiation. The 1974 Sirimavo-Gandhi Pact split the remainder evenly. It was, in the language of diplomacy, a framework for resolution. In the language of the people it governed, it was a transaction in which they were traded between two governments without being consulted, divided into quotas like livestock and shipped in batches between two countries that neither fully wanted them. And it was never fully implemented. The civil war interrupted it. The administrative machinery of both governments failed it. The people it was supposed to settle are still settling, four decades later, in camps that were built as temporary shelter and have since calcified into something that has no honest name except permanent impermanence.
July 23, 1983, Black July, is the date the modern refugee crisis begins in the historical record. Anti-Tamil pogroms swept Colombo and the south after the LTTE ambushed and killed thirteen soldiers in the north. The mobs that answered were not spontaneous. The electoral rolls had been distributed in advance, marking Tamil homes. The violence killed between four hundred and three thousand people depending on whose count you accept, and the range itself is a commentary on how seriously the Sri Lankan state treated Tamil lives. It lasted four days before the government intervened with enough force to stop it. In those four days, 100,000 Tamils were displaced. Tens of thousands began making their way to the coast. The first boats started arriving in Mandapam, at the southern tip of Tamil Nadu, carrying people who had left with almost nothing and arrived with less.
The Tamil Nadu government, under M.G. Ramachandran, MGR, who was himself of Sri Lankan origin, a detail that sits significantly in the political history, opened camps. More than 134,000 refugees arrived between 1983 and 1987 in the first wave alone. They were processed at Mandapam, the transit camp built on a strip of land between the Palk Strait and a brackish lagoon, originally constructed by the British in the early 1900s for migrant plantation workers travelling in the other direction. History has a habit of using the same buildings for opposite purposes. The refugees were then distributed to camps across Tamil Nadu’s districts, 132 of them eventually, spread across 28 of the state’s 32 districts, housing people who had fled a war and arrived in a land where they spoke the same language, worshipped at the same temples and cooked the same food, and were nonetheless held at careful legal distance from the people who surrounded them on every side.
Three more waves followed. The second, between 1989 and 1991, brought fresh arrivals fleeing the Indian Peace Keeping Force’s disastrous intervention in Sri Lanka, a chapter in which the Indian state managed the remarkable achievement of being hated by both sides of the conflict it had entered to resolve. The third wave began in 1996 with the resumption of full-scale fighting as Eelam War III. The fourth and largest came between 2006 and 2009, as the Sri Lankan military launched its final offensive against the LTTE with a ferocity that killed, by the UN Panel of Experts’ estimate, up to 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months alone. The total number of Sri Lankans who entered India across all four waves, as documented in a 2023 report cited in research on the subject, was more than 303,000. Of those, approximately 100,000 were repatriated to Sri Lanka by 1995. Since then, thirty years, no organised repatriation has taken place. Those who remain are those who have nowhere to return to, or who will not return to a country they no longer trust, or who have built enough of a life in Tamil Nadu that leaving it has become its own kind of impossible.
There are, as of early 2026, approximately 89,000 Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu, around 57,000 in camps and roughly 32,000 outside them. The camps are run by the Tamil Nadu government, which provides a cash dole, five hundred rupees per adult per month and three hundred and fifty per child, and basic rations. The monthly stipend has not been meaningfully revised in years. Five hundred rupees. In a country where a plate of rice and sambar costs thirty to fifty rupees, where a bus ticket costs twenty, where a school uniform costs several hundred, five hundred rupees per month is not support. It is the administrative performance of support: enough to say that something is being done, too little for anything to actually be done with it. Adults allotted five hundred grams of rice per day at Mandapam. Children, four hundred grams. Malnutrition visible in the children, according to accounts from the camp. The infrastructure of the camps, shelters, toilets, water access, has been improved in places by NGO intervention, but the structural conditions remain those of a temporary arrangement that has never been made permanent because making it permanent would require making a decision about what these people actually are, and that decision has been consistently, deliberately and entirely rationally, from the perspective of two governments managing a complicated bilateral relationship, avoided.
The restrictions on freedom of movement are not incidental to camp life. They are definitional to it. Residents of the camps cannot leave Tamil Nadu without permission. They cannot travel out of their district without permission. Those living outside the camps must register fortnightly at the nearest camp and check in with local police. A visit by a politician or a foreign diplomat to the area surrounding a camp triggers automatic surveillance activity from the Q-Branch, Tamil Nadu’s intelligence unit, and from central intelligence agencies. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 by a suspected LTTE operative, Thenmozhi Rajaratnam, who had lived in the refugee camps, the entire camp population was subjected to a security reckoning that had nothing to do with individual guilt and everything to do with collective suspicion. The relatively open atmosphere of the early camps changed permanently. Interior locations replaced coastal ones, to prevent refugees from different camps communicating with each other. The people who had nothing to do with Rajiv Gandhi’s murder paid, and have been paying for thirty-five years, for the act of a woman they did not know, from an organisation many of them had fled.
A young man named T. Yanadhan, twenty-eight years old when he was interviewed for a report on stateless Tamil refugees, had been born in Tamil Nadu after his parents fled Sri Lankan state violence. He had never lived in Sri Lanka. He had no Sri Lankan identity. He was, in every meaningful sense of the word, Tamil Naduan, except on paper, where he did not exist as anything at all. He told his interviewer that he would prefer a mercy killing to continuing to live stateless. He was not speaking metaphorically. He was describing, with the precision of someone who has tried every other option, what it means to exist in a country that has given you enough to stay alive but withheld the one thing that makes staying alive feel like living rather than waiting.
Here is what makes this situation uniquely and unforgivably modern: India has, in the last decade, passed specific legislation to resolve the statelessness of persecuted minorities from its neighbourhood, and has with great deliberateness excluded Sri Lankan Tamils from it.
The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered an accelerated path to Indian citizenship for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who had arrived in India before December 31, 2014. The list of covered religions is specific: Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, Christian. Sri Lankan Tamils are Hindu. They are persecuted. They arrived in India fleeing ethnic violence. By every criterion the CAA claims to serve, they qualify. They were excluded. The DMK, in an affidavit before the Supreme Court challenging the CAA, argued that this exclusion is discriminatory and constitutionally indefensible. The central government offered no convincing answer beyond the operational convenience of limiting the act to the three named countries, a geographical reasoning that, when applied to a community living forty kilometres across a strait from Tamil Nadu’s coast, is simply insulting.
The Immigration and Foreigners (Exemption) Order of 2025, the most recent administrative step the central government has taken on this question, removed penal liability for registered Sri Lankan Tamil nationals who entered India on or before January 9, 2015. It exempted them from prosecution under the Immigration and Foreigners Act and protected them from deportation on humanitarian grounds. It was presented as relief. It is relief, in the narrow sense that people who were technically criminal are no longer technically criminal. But the Order does not recognise them as refugees. It does not confer residency rights. It does not open any pathway to citizenship. It does not even grant them the Long-Term Visas that would, as a precursor step, enable them to apply for naturalisation. It removes one threat. It installs nothing in the threat’s place. They remain legally classified as foreigners, without nationality, without passports, without the civil identity that the rest of the country takes as given. The relief is procedural. The condition is unchanged.
On February 15, 2026, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The letter, made public the same day, pointed out that 89,000 Sri Lankan Tamils have been living in Tamil Nadu for decades, that forty per cent of them were born in India and have never held a Sri Lankan passport, that successive Tamil Nadu governments, with central backing, have provided them shelter, education and healthcare, and that 18,542 persons have voluntarily returned to Sri Lanka in the sixteen years since the civil war ended, suggesting that those who remain have made their choice, and their choice is India. Stalin asked Modi to create a fast-track path to citizenship for those born in India, to empower district collectors to process applications locally, to waive passport and visa requirements for a cohort whose documents the Tamil Nadu government has already verified. He cited humanitarian obligations. He cited constitutional principles. He cited the reality of lives that have been lived, fully and irreversibly, on Indian soil.
The Union government has not responded publicly. It rarely does on this particular question. Silence is its preferred instrument here, silence broken occasionally by administrative orders that give just enough to forestall an eruption of public outrage, never enough to resolve the question that is actually being asked. The question being asked is not complicated. It is the oldest question in the register of human rights, the one that precedes every other claim to dignity and protection and participation in the life of a society. The question is simply this: who do you belong to? And the answer that India has given, consistently, for forty years, is: not to us. Not yet. Perhaps later. We will let you know.
The word that sits at the centre of this failure, the word that the government’s administrative orders and the camp superintendents’ registers and the diplomatic notes between New Delhi and Colombo never use, is inheritance.
What these people have inherited is not a dispute. It is not a pending case. It is not a situation requiring review. They have inherited, through no choice, no fault, no act of their own, the accumulated evasions of two governments, two colonial administrations, seven decades of legal frameworks written around them rather than for them. The plantation worker brought to Ceylon by the British East India Company in 1890 did not ask to be moved. His grandson, stripped of Sri Lankan citizenship in 1948, did not ask to be stateless. His great-granddaughter, who fled to Tamil Nadu in 1984 with her children, did not ask to be a refugee. And her son, born in a Tamil Nadu camp in 1991, educated in Tamil Nadu, employed in Tamil Nadu, married in Tamil Nadu, arrested in Tamil Nadu for holding the Indian passport that Tamil Nadu’s own police had verified and issued, has inherited every evasion in that chain, carried it in his body across thirty-four years of a life that the law refuses to ratify.
Inheritance is what makes this different from ordinary refugee policy. Most refugee situations involve people who come from elsewhere and must be integrated, or who come from elsewhere and must go back. This situation involves people who, in large numbers, are from here, born here, raised here, socially embedded here, and who are being treated as if “here” were a contingent fact rather than the most irrefutable fact in the argument. A man born in Tamil Nadu, educated in Tamil Nadu, employed in Tamil Nadu, who speaks Tamil Nadu’s language with Tamil Nadu’s accent, who has an Aadhaar card and a voter ID and a passport, all issued by the Indian state, does not have to prove that he is Indian. The Indian state has been proving it for thirty-four years, every time one of its agencies recognised him as real. The arrest of Bahison Ravindran is not the state discovering an error. It is the state choosing, at the moment of his greatest vulnerability, to pretend that thirty-four years of its own paperwork does not mean what it says.
The CAA is the sharpest instrument of this pretence. A law that fast-tracks citizenship for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from three specific neighbouring countries, and excludes Sri Lankan Tamils, who are Hindu, who are persecuted, who are from a neighbouring country, who are living in India in numbers that dwarf the populations the CAA was designed to serve, is not a neutral administrative instrument. It is a statement of priority. The priority is not the persecuted minority. The priority is the geopolitical relationship with Colombo, the electoral arithmetic of Tamil Nadu, the reluctance to set a precedent that might complicate India’s management of other refugee populations, Rohingyas in particular, whose exclusion from the CAA the government was at considerable pains to justify. Sri Lankan Tamils were caught in the middle of all of these calculations and deemed, once again, to be the expendable variable.
Tamil refugees in Europe and North America, as one Tamil leader pointed out to a journalist, received citizenship within roughly ten years of arrival. The people in Tamil Nadu’s camps have been waiting forty. The difference is not the severity of their persecution, which is documented and irrefutable. It is the location of their waiting. They waited in India, where their existence is politically complicated. If they had waited in Germany or Canada, they would have been citizens for twenty years.
There is a final cruelty in this story that deserves to be named precisely. The Sri Lankan civil war ended in May 2009. The LTTE was defeated with a finality that no one disputes, its leadership killed, its cadres surrendered or fled, its capacity for organised military action destroyed. The reason these people cannot simply return is not the continuation of the war. It is the continuation of the conditions that produced the war, the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism that has made the northeast of Sri Lanka, where most Tamil refugees’ homes once stood, a place that Tamil people do not feel safe, that they do not trust, that offers them, at this moment in Sri Lanka’s politics, neither their land nor their livelihoods nor the guarantee that the violence will not return. Between July 2025 and February 2026, 246 people from 46 families voluntarily returned to Sri Lanka from Tamil Nadu. In the sixteen years since the war ended, the total number of returnees is 18,542. There are 89,000 people in Tamil Nadu. The arithmetic is not ambiguous. The people who are there are there because going back is not, for them, a real option. They are not staying out of stubbornness. They are staying because they have weighed the alternatives, including the indignity of the camps, and concluded that the known indignity is safer than the unknown risk.
A seventy-five-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil refugee who tried to return in 2025 was arrested on arrival in Sri Lanka on charges of having left the island without a valid passport, decades ago, in the middle of a civil war, on a boat because there was no other way to survive. He was seventy-five. He had been in India for most of his adult life. The Sri Lankan government, under pressure from MP Sumanthiran and others, eventually issued instructions to stop detaining returning refugees. “Eventually” is doing enormous work in that sentence. The UNHCR, which had stepped back from facilitating returns after the arrest of some returnees, agreed to resume facilitation only in early 2026. The message that sent to the 89,000 people weighing the decision was not reassuring.
What does a durable solution look like? It looks like the Indian government accepting that the question before it is no longer a refugee question. It is a citizenship question, and it has been for at least two decades. It looks like a clear legislative pathway, not an exemption order, not a consultation paper, not a letter from a Chief Minister that goes unanswered, for the people born in India who have never held another country’s passport and who have nowhere to return to. It looks like the UNHCR being given formal standing in India’s refugee governance framework, which requires India to do what it has resisted doing for seventy years: sign the 1951 Refugee Convention, or pass a domestic refugee law that provides what the convention would provide. It looks like the camps being closed, not by deportation but by the grant of the status that would make camps unnecessary, the status that saves the government, by one estimate, seventeen million American dollars a year, money that could go directly into the communities whose integration it would be celebrating.
None of this is impossible. All of it requires a political will that has been absent from Delhi for forty years, across governments of every ideological colour, across every prime minister who has received a letter from Tamil Nadu and filed it without reply.
Bahison Ravindran, as of the last available reporting, is living under a Madras High Court interim order that protects him from immediate coercive action. He is not working. He cannot work with the legal cloud that now hangs over his identity. He is waiting for a court to tell him whether the country where he was born, where he went to school, where he married, where he has paid taxes and held a voter card and a passport, whether that country considers him real.
He should not have to wait. The answer should not be in doubt. The documents the Indian state issued to him across thirty-four years of his life are the Indian state’s own declaration that he is Indian, and the arrest that contradicts them is not a legal proceeding. It is an embarrassment, the embarrassment of a government that has given people just enough to survive and just enough documentation to feel safe, and then, when the political cost of acknowledging what it has already implicitly accepted becomes inconvenient, reaches back through those thirty-four years of papers and stamps and verifications and says: actually, never mind.
There is a child in a Tamil Nadu camp right now, born in this country, who will grow up and apply for a passport and face Bahison Ravindran’s moment. There is a teenager who has never seen the inside of a Sri Lankan classroom, who speaks Tamil with a Tamil Nadu intonation, who wants to study engineering or medicine or law, who will discover at some bureaucratic counter that the country he grew up in does not, technically, know he exists. There is a seventy-five-year-old man who will try to go home to a country that will arrest him for having fled it.
These are not edge cases. They are the predictable, inevitable, entirely preventable product of a policy that has, for forty years, refused to make a decision. Refusing to make a decision is itself a decision. It is the decision to let people live in permanent impermanence, in the limbo that is worse than either belonging or exile because it offers the discomforts of both and the dignity of neither.
India is a civilisation that has absorbed peoples across millennia, that has taken the displaced, the driven-out, the desperate, and made room. It did it with the Parsis of Persia, who arrived in Gujarat in the eighth century and were told by the king, Jadhav Rana, that they were welcome as sugar dissolves in milk, giving sweetness without displacing what was already there. The story is probably apocryphal. It is nonetheless what India has told itself about itself for a very long time. The Sri Lankan Tamils of Tamil Nadu are not asking to be celebrated. They are not asking for mythology. They are asking for a document. They are asking for the piece of paper that tells them, in the language of the state, what they already know in the language of their lives, that they are home, that they are here, that after four generations of being passed between empires and governments and policy frameworks that were never designed with them in mind, someone has finally decided to stop passing.
The document exists. The decision does not. Until it does, forty years of shelter without belonging, of rations without rights, of Aadhaar cards and arrest warrants and interim court orders is not humanitarianism. It is the management of people the state cannot bring itself to claim and will not bring itself to release, kept alive at the edge of belonging, which is, in the end, the oldest and most persistent cruelty that power knows how to inflict.
