New Delhi: A report of the return of large numbers of Indians deported from the United States to Gujarat has noted that those who returned were asked not to speak to the media.
On February 17, two flights with 33 people from Gujarat landed at Ahmedabad airport, the Press Trust of India reported. Eleven of them were children, eight of whom were under the age of 10.
They were part of groups of Indians who landed in US military aircraft at Amritsar.
PTI reported that three immigrants – two from Mehsana and one from Gandhinagar district – arrived at around 12 noon, 30 others landed on another flight at around 2 pm. Police vehicles transported all 33 Gujarat residents to their homes.
The first US Army plane carrying 104 undocumented Indian migrants landed at the Indian Air Force Station base in Amritsar on February 5. It had 33 from Gujarat. They were also taken to their homes in Mehsana, Gandhinagar, Patan and Ahmedabad districts.
Ten days after the first flight, a second military aircraft carrying 119 Indian deportees from the US landed at Amritsar’s international airport late on February 15. It had eight from Gujarat.
Out of the 112 Indians who were sent on the third deportation flight from the US, which landed at Amritsar’s Sri Guru Ramdas Ji International Airport on the night of February 16, 33 were from Gujarat.
Families’ accounts
Many who left Gujarat to seek a future in the US illegally noted having paid lakhs to agents who have so far done flourishing business on this promise in India. Gujarat is state touted as a shining example of the Narendra Modi dispensation’s model of governance, so the fact that so many have travelled out of it in search of a better life has been a sobering discovery.
A report on Dainik Bhaskar quotes some of the Gujarati families who spoke despite an unofficial order to not speak to the media. The father of a deported person identified as “Aruna” told the paper on video that they were told not to speak to the media – something the reporter repeats.
At Mehsana, the report features a mother saying that her daughter, son-in-law and their two children went to Paris on a holiday. The next thing she knew was that they were being deported from the US.
Others’ families said that they did not know that their relatives were taking illegal routes but that they did know that they were visiting the US. A mother said that she understood why her son wanted to try making a living in the US – their family was large and there was little money.
Another man whose face is blurred speaks of how “rope ladders” are constructed from Mexico to get people into the US. “There were gunmen on either side who said, ‘If you come any closer, we will fire,’ so we stood. They never let us lie down even once [during the wait],” he said.
All said that the method of deporting them was inhumane. India’s external affairs minister has said that the restraints are “part of US protocol” – a comment that has been severely criticised.
On the question as to why several were travelling out of the model state of Gujarat, scholar Christophe Jaffrelot has written on The Wire that “the explanation is rather simple: there are very rich people in Gujarat, but many more very poor people, because the state has not been creating good jobs for years.”
Not only did the growth rate of jobs not increase in proportion to the growth rate of the state GDP, but the quality of jobs did not improve either, as shown by the 2022 Periodic Labor Force Survey, that says that 74% of Gujarati workers had no written contract, against 41% in Karnataka, 53% in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, 57% in Madhya Pradesh, 64% in Haryana, 65% in Maharashtra and 68% in Bihar.
