The purpose of this clause will be completely nullified, because we who are refugees, due to this exchange of population which necessarily involves exchange of property, will be put to serious trouble. This securing of permit from the Deputy High Commissioner’s office, I can assure you, is a cheap affair in its actual working. Besides these permits when they were issued, they were issued for various other purposes commercial trade, visiting purposes etc.- and never at any rate for citizenship. We should not give citizenship merely on the ground that a person is in a position to produce this permit, which he can secure from the Deputy High Commissioner’s office somehow or other. I feel that if at all the permit system was intended to confer benefits of citizenship, then a particular authority specifically constituted for that purpose should have been there and that authority should have realized at the time of giving the permit the implication that this is not simply a permit to enable a person to visit India for trade or Commerce but that it will entail along with it citizenship rights also. Apart from that, let us see how this will adversely affect evacuee property. Very recently an Ordinance has been promulgated throughout India that the property of a person who has migrated to Pakistan after March 1947 win accrue to the Custodian-General of India and that property will be, to that extent, for the benefit of the rehabilitation of refugees. The Indian Government is already short of property as it is and it is unable to solve the rehabilitation problem. The difference of property left by Indian nationals in Pakistan and the one left behind by Muslims, in India-this difference of property cannot be bridged. Pakistan has not given you a satisfactory answer how it is going to re-pay that difference. Naturally, our policy should have been to narrow down this difference of property. This clause, instead of narrowing down that difference, will widen it. Thus, while on the one hand we are unable to help refugees, on the other hand we are showing concession after concession to those people who least deserve it. I am told that these permits will be granted only in very rare cases. I am told that only 3,000 of them have been granted. Now, I do not know how much property will be restored back to those people who will come under this permit system-may be a crore or may be much less-a few lakhs. My point is this : that this property which will eventually go to these permit-holders will go out of the evacuee property and out of the hands of the Custodian-General and the very purpose of the Ordinance which you recently promulgated will be defeated.
