Views, hues of an NRI village

IF the ‘Dosanjh’ surname has attained global recognition, the residents of Dosanjh Kalan have a simple explanation — because the boys moved out. Decades before Diljit Dosanjh made the village in Jalandhar’s Phillaur tehsil famous, its residents basked in the glory when Ujjal Dosanjh took over as premier of the Canadian province of British Columbia. “All these big names found success only after they left home. So shall we one day,” declares Ramandeep, a school student, pointing to the palatial house of Ujjal.

Dosanjh Kalan is a microcosm, perhaps, of Punjab’s unabashed and unrelenting fetish for the phoren land. The movement abroad, through legal and illegal methods, is a common thread in most villages. There may be panic in some quarters over the recent deportation of 104 illegal Indian immigrants, including Punjabis, from the US, but there’s little to suggest a change of heart in containing the desire to go abroad any which way.

A common refrain in the area is that “if you can’t find success, pick up the lock”. The residents of Dosanjh Kalan and adjoining villages have literally taken it to heart. Of an estimated 1,000 houses in the village, owners of as many as 400 have locked homes and moved out — off to anywhere, including the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Dubai, Qatar, legally or illegally.

“Our youth look up to the NRIs in their neighbourhood. While some villagers have not returned in decades, there are biggies like Ujjal Dosanjh and Diljit who keep on visiting once in a year or two. Our youth get awed by their lifestyle and popularity. So, now, every single schoolgoer does one thing as he or she enters the senior secondary level — reaching out to an immigration agent and applying for a visa. My daughter, too, has chosen to settle in the UK even though I was averse to the idea,” says retired government school principal Gian Singh Dosanjh. A brief conversation with him is enough to gauge why an eerie silence and a feeling of abandonment permeates the village.

Another senior citizen, Sukhdev Singh, shares, “The village has about 3,500 registered voters. Less than half are able to cast the vote as the remaining are no longer here. In some cases, three generations have been living abroad and their houses have been lying locked for the past over 10 years.” He shows the barbed wires, CCTV cameras and security devices installed by the NRIs around the boundary walls of their locked houses.

Recently-elected panch Manvir Dosanjh is an exception. “I am perhaps one of the very few people in the village to not have a passport. I cannot move abroad. My parents are handicapped. They are my responsibility. So, I take care of our fields and rear animals. I have 10-12 men of my age in the village for company,” he says.

On whether anyone from the village has ever got deported, the standard reply is about the two youths who returned from Canada a few years ago. “Their version is that they did not find suitable jobs. Thankfully, our village is not in the news for any deportation cases.”

Unlike Dosanjh Kalan, another village in Phillaur — Lallian — is dealing with the deportation of Sukhdeep Singh from the US last week. His return has led to panic, the villagers confide. On whether the deportation has resulted in a rethink on plans to send youth abroad without proper documentation, there is a studied silence.

“There are about 40,000 Punjabis who have illegally entered the US. They are all in panic and are not even going to their workplaces fearing that their documents could be checked by the cops anywhere, and they could be detained and deported like the 104 who were sent back shackled in a US military plane,” says California-based Satnam Singh Chahal, executive director of the North American Punjabi Association.

The lawyers engaged in asylum work in the US claim that panic-stricken Punjabi families have been making fervent calls following US President Donald Trump’s executive order on the expedited removal of illegal immigrants. Jaspreet Singh, an attorney-at-law in the US, explains, “I have been getting many calls in my office enquiring about the status of their cases. I keep explaining that the US government has passed an order on the fast removal of illegal immigrants detained over the past two years, bypassing any court system.”

Giving the count of the cases, he says, “There is a backlog of about 37 lakh cases of deportation pending in the US courts, of which the recent ones can be bypassed now by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency or the Asylum Office. The officials can interview anyone and if unconvinced by their asylum story, they can order their fast removal. Normally, any applicant gets to stay longer as the court proceedings usually take two to five years. But Trump’s order is a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act, against which some organisations are planning to move court, the way it happened with the executive order against the Birthright Citizenship Act.”