Hope floats but fears linger in Kabul

Hope floats but fears linger in Kabul
June 2003

Times of India

Eleven-year-old Ajit Kaur wants to study English, prefers to wear trousers, play outside with her friends and roam her neighbourhood. Instead, she sits inside a dark, low-ceilinged room in
Kabul’s Karte Parvan area, clutching her pink dupatta so it doesn’t slide off her head.
Even after 18 months of practice covering her head, she still hasn’t got used to it. Besides, “people here comment if you play outside the house,” she says.
Ajit is the daughter of Tirloch Kaur and Tirlok Singh, who claim to be the first family of Afghans to have returned to Kabul from India. Tirloch and Tirlok, like others who returned from India, are among the 200 voluntary returnees. The remaining 12,000-odd refugees will return depending partly on whether New Delhi decides to extend their
residence permits. The permits come up for renewal in July.
Tirloch returned because her husband could not find work and developed psychosomatic disorders because of the heat. “I used to be the bread earner, sewing clothes from the house,” she says. Returning to Afghanistan was the cure Tirlok needed. He now works in a cloth shop and his wife Tirloch is happy, though the family lives out of a room in a building adjoining the gurdwara in Karte Parvan. Rents in Kabul have skyrocketed making proper housing unaffordable.
Ajit’s playmate, 13-year-old Gurmeet, returned after 10 years in India where they stayed in Karbala in Delhi. What she misses most is her school. “Studies here are no good,” she says of the school run by the gurdwara that she attends. During the Taliban rule, Hindu and Sikh families weren’t encouraged to send their children to schools run by the regime. Though there is no bar now, the two communities are loath to enroll their children in government-run schools, as the fear lingers. “Social acceptability of the minority communities which was lost during Taliban has to return first,” says Raminder Singh, spokesperson of the Hindu and Sikh communities who represented them in the Loya Jirga that elected Hamid Karzai as president.The Karzai government is taking steps to restore equal rights to minorities. While this correspondent was speaking to Raminder, he had two visitors - officials of the commission appointed by Karzai’s government to draft the new Constitution. The officials were meeting him to discuss
ways in which to ascertain the needs, rights and safeguards for the minority communities.
Raminder, who lived in Delhi’s Vikaspuri for five years, returned to Kabul last year to find his house occupied by a member of the dominant Panjshiri community, a fate of many refugees from the minority communities. As for Tirloch Kaur, her only worry is her daughter. “We
are used to the restrictions that living in Afghanistan imposes. But this girl grew up in India. What do I do with her? The only answer is to get her married in India,” she says of Ajit who has only fond memories of Delhi, including its harsh summer.