Bringing relief to a Tamil repatriate from Sri Lanka, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court directed the authorities to treat the petitioner and his family as Indian citizens. The court said he was entitled to the relief measures announced by the Tamil Nadu government for Sri Lankan repatriates.
The court was hearing a petition filed by T. Ganesan, who resides at the Irumboothipatti camp in Karur district. He came from Sri Lanka to India in 1990 during the civil war. He said he was an Indian citizen and sought its confirmation. Since the authorities treated him as a Sri Lankan refugee, he had filed a petition in 2021. The court directed the Centre to consider his representation. But the authorities said the material submitted was insufficient to conclude that he was an Indian citizen. He was asked to submit conclusive evidence. The present petition challenged the directive.
Justice G.R. Swaminathan observed that Sri Lanka has the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. The Tamils, however, are not a single homogenous group. A substantial number of them was native of Sri Lanka in every sense of the term and hailed from the northern and eastern parts of the country. A section of them was descendants of workers who migrated from Tamil Nadu in the 19th Century. When Sri Lanka became independent, they were rendered stateless. The status and future of persons of Indian origin was a subject of more than one agreement between the Indian and Sri Lankan governments.
