Flight Out of Punjab

In rural Hoshiarpur and Jalandhar, for instance, the bungalows and havelis of the NRIs are eye-catching. Some flaunt concrete models of planes on their roofs, others have gone for falcons and footballs. The havelis are empty for most of the year. But once or twice every year, the NRIs visit their homes, driving up in their flashy cars, laden with gifts.

Other buildings are coming up fast. Western Union outlets, financing companies and travel agencies. And somewhere among these spiralling constructions, a few single-storey houses stand out like aberrations. Houses, perhaps, of families who couldn’t send any of their members abroad.

It was in this land of kaboortarbazi, as the immigration racket in Punjab is called, that the Delhi Police came calling last Thursday. The team visited three Hoshiarpur villages, nestling Tanda town. They were probing the case of BJP MP Babubhai Katara, who was caught at the Indira Gandhi Airport, boarding a flight to Toronto along with Paramjeet Kaur from Talli village who was posing as his wife and 14-year-old Amarjeet Singh from Jalalpur, who was impersonating his son. They also visited Salempur village, looking for a “travel agent” called Santu.

The police team met with little success. Santu has disappeared from his village and the families of Paramjeet and Amarjeet are in Delhi, trying to secure their bail. In Talli, Paramjeet’s three-storeyed haveli lies locked. Neighbours take it upon them to recount her saga. Similarly, the house of Amarjeet—whose father Jaswant Singh is apparently a “leader” of the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) who runs a tent-house business in Jalalpur—too is deserted.

In Salempur Santu’s mother Tarshada is alone, suffering from a bout of high-blood pressure. “We disinherited Santu two years ago and don’t know where he is. It was only when the Delhi Police came to our house that we learnt about his activities,” she said. But neighbours concede quietly that Santu was living in this decrepit house till the Katara case hit the headlines.

The recent hullabaloo and the imminent police crackdown on travel agents have not changed one thing in the villages of Talli, Jalalpur and Salempur. Everyone harbours a wish to go abroad, whatever the cost. They are willing to hock their jewellery, sell their land, do anything to get their hands on the big ticket.

What fuels this flight? Unemployment, rising prices and the drudgery of tilling depleted landholdings, answer the villagers. “Everyone who is left in the village wants to go abroad,” say the crowd outside Amarjeet’s deserted house. “The travel agents come door-to-door telling us the paperwork will be done for a price within a couple of days. We think everything is legal. Now they have all gone underground,” says a farmer, Shingara Singh.

An ageing Harbans Kaur speaks for the entire village. Waving at the imposing building, constructed by the NRIs, she says, “Jo chale gaye unaada ei sab hai. Jo nahin gaye, unaada kala kuan (Those who went have all these. Those who did not have only a black well).”

Punjab’s flourishing immigration racket reflects a deeper socio-economic phenomenon where people are willing to cross multiple borders, hide in ships as stowaways, impersonate, apply for asylum or exhaust an entire life’s savings to get a passage abroad. Every major immigration and human trafficking scandal, like the Malta boat tragedy, the Daler Mehndi case, the ICCR case and now the MP immigration scam, exposes the lengths to which the enterprising Punjabi can go to leave Indian shores.

The newly appointed Punjab Police chief NPS Aulakh admits to difficulties in trying to bust the illegal immigration network. “How can you stop people from trying to go abroad? We are contemplating a series of actions and trying to cleanse the system. In my first meeting with the senior officers of all districts on Thursday, I also reviewed the cases booked against travel agents who run such rackets.”

Figures maintained by the Punjab Police of action taken against unscrupulous travel agents reveal just the tip of the iceberg as thousands of cases go undetected. They show that in 2005, 594 cases were registered resulting in the arrest of 655 travel agents. In 2006, 751 cases were filed, with 755 travel agents being booked. In the first three months of the current year, 159 cases have already been registered and 57 travel agents arrested.

The graph shows a sharp upswing in the number of detected cases. But the problem, explain several senior police officers, is that a case is only registered if the complainant gets duped by the travel agent. Says S K Jain, Inspector General of Police (Chandigarh), “The pattern we notice is that once a case is registered, the travel agent and the complainant often reach a compromise and we have to close the case.”

Adds Additional Director General (Crime), GD Pandey, “The large number of cases booked by us reflect a social phenomenon and the psyche of the people of Punjab. Educating the masses about the need to follow legal immigration procedures is the only thing that will stem the rot.” The police in Punjab, he says, have a fairly high conviction rate of about 60 per cent for cases involving travel agents.

The Katara case, in one sense, fits into the familiar pattern of major immigration and human trafficking scandals, where a petty “sub-agent” like Santu first scouts for clients in rural hamlets and collects a token advance. Then, a more prosperous middleman takes over (in the Katara case, the paan-shop owner, Sunder Lal Yadav). Finally, there is the facilitator, sometimes a rare VIP like the BJP MP.

Among the districts of Punjab, Jalandhar has emerged as a major hub of the racket. So much so that it has prompted the government to put up a board at the state’s Central Passport Office, listing authorised travel agencies.

But hundreds of unregistered travel agents continue to do brisk business. Police officers say that in the entire state the percentage of unregistered agents could be as high as 90 per cent. This year, 76 cases have already been registered against travel agents by the Jalandhar Police and as Superintendent of Police Satinder Singh says, “What we have noticed is that once a travel agent involved in a fake immigration case gets bail in two or three months time, he gets back to business. Also, there is always a Delhi angle to major immigration scams. While the agents lure people from Punjab, the big sharks operate from Delhi and Mumbai.”

In a vast majority of detected cases, there is an element of clever forgery involved too. It is either the visas or the sponsorship letters that are forged using sophisticated computer scans. Senior police officers also admit that complicity of Indians working as visa counselors in missions located in New Delhi have come to light along with hundreds of cases of impersonation.

“People in Punjab will go to any extent to get their passports stamped with the important visa. There are cases where people have arranged fake marriages, thrown wedding banquets, even gone for honeymoons to prove they are man and wife to the visa officer,” reveals Satinder Singh.

During the Congress regime, the Punjab Government made a serious attempt to streamline immigration laws and draft a tough law that would also bring the complainant into its ambit. Kuljit Singh Hayer, president of the Punjab Travel Agents Association, says that they were all consulted about the provisions of the proposed new law but nothing came out of the exercise.

“Nothing will change in Punjab with the travel agents involved in these frauds being booked only for cheating,” he says. “The laws and the punishment have to be made much, much more stringent. And the person who pays the agents to enter into an illegal arrangement must all come under the scope of police action.”
Till then the pigeons will continue to fly out of Punjab.

Malta didn’t sink their business
Eleven years have gone but the pain is still sharp. The families of victims of the 1996 Malta boat tragedy have not been able to forget their loss. Of the 280 illegal immigrants from South Asia who drowned when the overloaded and decrepit boat Yiohan went down in the Ionian Sea on December 25, 1996, 166 were from Punjab. The boat was to ferry them to their land of promise—Italy.
The tragedy showed to the world the desperation of people willing to do anything to go abroad. In the Doaba region of Punjab, the families they left behind are still living with the results of that desperation.
Satinder Kaur lost her husband Jagdish Singh in the tragedy. Kaur who lives in Phillaur is still waiting for the Rs 50,000-compensation the government announced for the victims soon after the tragedy. “ The survivors who were deported were a shaken lot and forgot to put my husband’s name on the list. My son is now 24 and unemployed. Shouldn’t the government help us in some way?” she asks.
By her side sits Joginder Kaur who too lost her husband and has been struggling to bring up her three children since. She remembers, “I had pawned all my jewellery to help my husband reach Italy and give us a better life. But we lost everything.”
But Joginder Pal’s mother Gurbux Kaur says she has still not given up hope for her son’s safe return. “When we got news of the boat sinking, the travel agent told us my son will return. I still pray that may be true.”
Among those who help bereaved families visit lawyers and police stations is Harbinder Singh. One of the fortunate survivors of the tragedy, Singh has returned to till his fields in Pandori village.
“We had spent three months on the Yiohan and were given barely enough food and water to keep us alive. We were so weak we could barely walk,” he remembers. “I was saved because there was no more space in the boat that offloaded people to take them to the coast. That boat was so overloaded that it sank and we were first arrested and then deported to Punjab.”
He says he was also fortunate enough to get the Rs 2.5 lakh he had paid for his trip to Italy back from the travel agent and start life afresh.

In Jalandhar, more than a decade after the police registered the Malta case, the trial against the 20-odd accused drags on in court. Of the 20 travel agents, 17 were arrested but three remained untraced. “We are following up the case closely and ask for early hearings. But conviction for the culprits may still be a few years away,” says Superintendent of Police Satinder Singh.
Besides an early conviction, the family members of the victims have other demands. Some of them recall former Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s announcement that further compensation will be announced. Others ask for government jobs for the children of the victims.
Kuldeep Singh who lost his 19-year-old brother in the tragedy, says that while they are still looking for some tangible relief, the travel agents, all out on bail, were back at business: luring people to the West.
“Balwinder Singh, the travel agent, who duped my brother is still roaming free and doing the same work while we are still chasing lawyers and politicians trying to get some rehabilitation.”