The Invisible people – asylum seekers

12/10/2019 1 Comment read Features, Migration

The writer was a finalist in the 2020 NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Public Interest Award for this story

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 12 October 2019 (The Week): Australia is a sought-after destination for Indian students, travellers and skilled migrants from India, but it is a little-known fact that Indians also come here to seek asylum.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), population statistics based on data received from the Australian government, 51 asylum seekers from India in Australia were found to be refugees in 2018. Many of them are waiting to be resettled; others have been waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, some for six years or more, in Australia’s offshore immigration facilities in the Pacific island nations of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Nauru.

Nisar Ahmad Haji, an Indian national from Kashmir who was processed as a refugee in October 2015, is still waiting to be resettled. A refugee is someone, who has been recognised under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, to be a refugee.

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The botched case of Dr Muhammad Haneef

14/10/2008 0 Comments read Health & Science, Migration

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 2007- 2008 (IANS): Dr Muhammad Haneef, an Indian doctor working in Gold Coast (Queensland), was wrongly accused and detained on terrorism charges linked to the Glasgow international airport attack in 2007.

On 24^th December 2010, he received a formal apology, and substantial compensation from the Australian Government. In a statement, the Australian Federal Police said that it “acknowledges that it was mistaken and that Dr Haneef was innocent of the offence of which he was suspected. The Commonwealth apologises and hopes that the compensation to be paid to Dr Haneef will mark the end of an unfortunate chapter and allow Dr Haneef to move forward with his life and career.”

Earlier, The Clarke Inquiry Report 21st November 2008, had cleared him of any wrongdoing and concluded that mistakes had been made. The litany of errors by the Australian police and the government had not only stained the reputation and career prospects of the young doctor, but it also had a major backlash on Indian doctors in Australia.

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At home in the world: Indian diaspora in Australia

07/11/2007 1 Comment read Diaspora, Features, Migration

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 07.11.2007: Nestling amidst the unkempt undergrowth of native shrubs, a haven for Rainbow lorikeets, kookaburras, bush rats and possums, Ian De Mellow’s home in the Sydney suburb of Wahroonga has kept alive his memories of a childhood spent in a Delhi bungalow with sprawling gardens.

“When you live in Australia for some years, as in India, the land itself permeates your soul”, says De Mellow, who arrived on the shores of Sydney in 1948 at the age of 13 with his mother and half-sister. His father, whose career as a superintending engineer in the central Public Works Department was bluntly nipped with all senior posts in independent India going to Indians, joined them four years later.

“There was a tremendous sense of betrayal and disillusionment with the British Raj”, he says. “My mother was part of the secret committee for air evacuation of Europeans, in case the post-partition riots spilled over to consume the European population”.

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