Cast off by US, 33 Gujaratis will now be haunted by crushed dreams, hefty loans
The Federal spoke to relatives of some of the deportees and learned the circumstances under which they immigrated and challenges that await them in India
Hiding their faces behind masks, 33 Gujaratis including seven children, with little or no luggage, came out of the Sardar Vallabhbhai International Airport in Ahmedabad on Thursday (February 6) morning. They were among the 104 Indians deported by the US on charges of illegal immigration.
None of the families of the 33 deportees had come to the airport to receive them. As the plane landed from Amritsar, each of the deportees was escorted by two personnel to the police headquarters in Ahmedabad from where they would be sent to their respective homes.
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Among them was 27-year-old Khushbu Patel from Luna village Vadodara. Khushbu’s father Jaimin Patel was among the three families who were allowed to meet the deportees in Ahmedabad.
‘Daughter treated like criminal’
Worried sick about his daughter, Jaimin said he lost contact with her some days back and after meeting her on Thursday learned that she was kept in detention ahead of the deportation and treated like a “criminal”.
“I did not know that she was coming back. I saw on television a week back that some people were coming back, but I never knew she was going to be one of them. Then I got a call from an official in India that she is returning home. The first thing we did was to call her after that, but she was out of reach. We got worried. Now she told us that she was kept in a detention centre with the others for a few days in the US. They were not given access to communication and were treated like criminals,”Jaimin told The Federal.
‘Missing’ husband
He said the man who married Khushbu a few months ago and took her to the US is also incommunicado.
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“We don’t know what went wrong. She got married to a man from Ahmedabad eight months ago and had travelled to the US just 25 days back with her five-year-old child. Now I am being told that she is back with her child, but her husband has not returned. There is no news about his whereabouts. She had dreamed of a better life with her husband and now she is left alone with her child,” says Jaimin, a farmer.
Children, single moms among deportees
As per the list issued by the state Home Department, of the 33 people, 13 are from Gandhinagar, 10 from Mehsana, four from Patan district, and one each from Ahmedabad city, Ahmedabad rural, Vadodara rural, Petlad in Anand district, Ankleshwar in Bharuch district and Juna Deesa in Banaskantha.
“We called only three families to the police headquarters and the rest were told specifically not to come. The ones who were called were the fathers of single mothers who had come back with their eight-year-old and five-year-old children respectively, and relatives of a family who had twins aged 11 who got a sick while travelling. These families are being sent off home first,” said Ravi Teja Vasamshetty, Superintendent of Police of Gandhinagar who is heading the process.
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Hunt for agents on
“The other deportees are being held at the police headquarters in Ahmedabad for a basic health check-up and documentation before being sent home. Most of these deportees have huge debts and they take loans to pay the agents who help with the illegal immigration. Right now, we are also looking for the agents, but most of them have shut shop and have gone underground even since news of the deportation broke,” he told The Federal.
Gujarat’s ‘Dollar region’
Noticeably, among the 10 people from Mehsana district in North Gujarat, nine are from what is locally called the ‘dolariyo vistar’ (dollar region), a region comprising three villages – Kherva, Jorarnang, and Meu – that earned the name because of the large immigration of people from villages in this region to the US over the years.
Thirty-four-year-old Smit Patel is one of the deportees from the region. His family says he had paid hefty amounts of money to an agent to travel through the US through the ’donkey route’.
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“We paid Rs 60 lakh to the agent (to send them to the US) who is now not taking our calls. We were told we need to pay both the Indian and US securities agencies to help Smit get legal documents in the US. We paid hefty amounts for that too, but he never got his papers. He had gone to the US just seven months back,” says Smit’s unit in Mehsana.
“We took a loan of around Rs 1 crore just to send him to the US and were hoping him to repay it once he settled there. Now how do we pay back the money,” rues Smit’s uncle.
