Indians Want Refuge In Australia, Get Hell

Australia’s harsh measures to curb illegal immigration have made life hell for hundreds of refugees seeking asylum in the country. Among them are many Indians, who would rather endure their suffering than return home

- Neena Bhandari

Well-known fact: Australia is a sought-after destina-tion for students, travellers and skilled migrants from India. Little-known fact: Indians also come here to seek asylum.

Last year, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said, based on data received from the Australian government, that 51 asylum seekers from India in Australia were refugees. Many of them are waiting to be resettled; others have been waiting—some for six years or more—for their asylum claims to be processed by Australia’s offshore immigration facilities in the Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.

Nisar Ahmad Haji of Jammu and Kashmir, who was declared a refugee in October 2015, is still at the Nibok Refugee Settlement in Nauru, waiting to be resettled. “I was 25 years old [in 2009] and was helping my father run our small general store in a village near Srinagar,” he told THE WEEK. “There was growing unrest in the valley. Someone told my father about jobs in Malaysia. He wanted to give me the best opportunity in life, so my parents sacrificed everything to buy a flight ticket to send me to Malaysia in December 2009.”

Nisar worked in Malaysia for two years, before “some people” talked him into going to Australia. For a few thousand dollars, they put him on a boat to Indonesia, from where he boarded another boat that took him to Christmas Island, an Australian territory south of Java. Like hundreds of other asylum seekers, Nisar had to endure rough seas, squalor, disease and hunger on a rickety boat for three weeks.