A Pakistani-Indian origins community of at least 20,000 people in Madagascar are languishing in a stateless limbo as their home state fails to recognise them as citizens. The subsequent lack of documentation makes it impossible for them to travel back to their former homelands.
Details of the Karana community’s hardships have come to the fore as part of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) recent report on the current standing of the world’s stateless peoples, 75pc of whom are homeless because they are minorities.
According to the UNHCR’s report, the Karana community is a Muslim community residing mostly in urban centers of Madagascar, including the capital Antananarivo, and trace their roots to the South Eastern provinces of modern-day Pakistan as well as some areas in the Indian State of Gujrat.
The UNHCR reported that Madagascar has not allowed the Karana people to gain the Malagasy nationality even though they have been settled on the African island nation for numerous generations. The community had first moved to then French colony of Madagascar in the later half of the 19th century, well before the partition of the Indian sub-continent, as a result of increasing competition in the seafaring of the Indian ocean.
The Karana’s peculiar predicament is made even worse by the fact that their lack of documentation means they cannot travel to other parts of the world either. Other than this, they have been unable to attain education, and opportunities of employment.
One of the Karana women interviewed by the UNHCR, Sougraby Ibrahim, complained of this saying “I am 84 years old and have never attended school. I tried to go to school but they would turn me away saying, where is your birth certificate? But I did not have one!”
“My family in our old home often asks us to visit them, but how do I tell them I cannot because they will not let me?”
Another interviewee, Saghir Rahmatullah also made his woes clear saying “I am a Muslim but without nationality I have never been able to travel to Mecca.”
Source: UNHCR report
Despite these troubles, the community has found significant success and vitality in Madagascar and there is a general feeling among them that they wish to stay on in their newfound homes. However, after Madagascar’s independence in 1960, many of these were not allowed citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity, and neither were their children despite Madagascar’s jus sanguinis principle for giving nationality.
As revealed by the UNHCR’s report, virtually all stateless Karana reported having attempted to obtain Malagasy citizenship without success. Some retained lawyers to assist with the effort and continually requested citizenship over several decades without receiving any formal reply.
The situation is made even more complex by the fact that while many of the Karana would want to visit Pakistan and India, they would wish to do so as Malagasy nationals and not as Pakistanis or Indians, meaning the foreign services of both countries cannot do much to help the situation.
The UNHCR, on the other hand, is adamant that the community is given its full rights. In the same report, it also advocates for other stateless ethnicities such as the Roma in the former Yugoslav, the Pemba of Kenya among others.
It is pertinent to note that Pakistan itself, while not featured in the report, has often come under criticism for not granting citizenship to the Rohingya and Afghan refugees that it is host to.