Sri Lankan Tamils take risky boat rides to Tamil Nadu to escape crisis  

They are chasing elusive dream of a secure, peaceful life

For over 80 Sri Lankan Tamils, including children and infants, who took boats and landed in Tamil Nadu in recent months, the risky journey was not only about fleeing Sri Lanka’s dire economic situation, it was also about chasing an elusive dream — a secure, peaceful life. 

A majority of those leaving the northern Jaffna and Mannar districts of Sri Lanka, paying lakhs to be put on a boat to Rameswaram in Tamil Nadu, had returned to the island only in recent years, according to local organisations working with refugees and returnees in northern Sri Lanka.

“After spending years or decades away in refugee camps in Tamil Nadu, many families came back in recent years, hoping to build a new life here. But post-war reconstruction is incomplete, with hardly any jobs or meaningful development. The grim reality here is making families hopeless especially during the crisis,” says P. Nagenthiran, a coordinator at Forum for Returnees, a voluntary organisation helping families resettle on return.   

Thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils fled the island’s civil war in the 1980s and 1990s and found refuge in Tamil Nadu.

Several others, who had the means, went as far as Europe and Canada. The civil war years saw civilians caught amid clashes between the military and the rebel Tigers. Some faced the brutal violence of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) deputed to Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990.

The indiscriminate shelling in the north and east during the height of the war meant families lost their loved ones, homes, and belongings — all this while being constantly displaced from one temporary shelter to another with only hopes, no assurance, of safety. 

Tamil Nadu’s sympathy for the Tamil Tigers, or LTTE, that was leading the armed struggle against the oppressive Sri Lankan state, prompted different governments to take in and house scores of refugees in specially set up camps. Every time the civil war let up a little, some families tried returning. The number increased after May 2009, when the war ended, with the Sri Lankan forces defeating the LTTE.  Except, they may not have returned to peace.