Indian HC wants to reunite Ramzan,Salman with their loved ones

Karachi
Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan met with Razia Begum, the mother of 15-year-old son Mohammad Ramzan had mistakenly crossed over into India three years ago, and Salman Viqar Ahmed, an Indian national whose been stuck in Pakistan since he was a toddler, at a hotel on Tuesday and assured them that they would be reunited with their loved ones.
The Indian high commissioner told Razia Begum that she would be granted a a visa so that she could visit India to meet het son.
He also told Salman that efforts would be made to reunite him with his family in India.
“There is no doubt that Salman is an Indian citizen,” he added.
Mohammad Ramzan was 12 years old when he had wandered into India three years ago without a passport.
Around six weeks ago, his mother, who lives in Karachi, had stumbled across his story and photograph on the internet.
Ramazan was found by the charity Childline in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh state, two years ago and has been cared for by them ever since.
“When I heard about him, well...I cannot express in words my immense affection as a mother,” his mother told AFP.
“For so many years he has been far from me. I earnestly desire that he should live with me now,” she said.
Ramzan’s parents divorced in 2004, and his father took him to Bangladesh in 2008 without his mother’s knowledge, she said.
Claiming he was abused by his father and stepmother, Ramzan ran away, straying into India where he wandered from town to town, sleeping and eating at shrines and railway stations before being picked up by Childline in Bhopal.
The organisation’s director Archana Sahay told AFP this week that he speaks regularly with his mother ever since they made contact a month ago, and the pair have exchanged videos and photographs.
Ramzan’s identity has been established “beyond any doubt”, she said.
Sahay said the Indian government has told the charity they are waiting for Pakistan to put in a formal request for his repatriation.
In Pakistan, the Ansar Burney Trust has requested the government’s help in bringing Ramzan home, the human rights organisation’s director, Shagufta Burney, told AFP.
“Only a border is in between...there should be flexibility so that the child can be reunited with his mother,” Burney said.
“When I speak to my mother, we both cry,” Ramzan told AFP in Bhopal. “I want to go back to home as soon as possible...I want to be with my mother. Just like Geeta came to India, I will be sent to Pakistan.”
As for Salman Viqar Ahmed, who is 23 now, with the exception of a birth certificate and a couple of other documents, he does not exist in papers in both Pakistan and India. Yet this young man, too timidly-built for someone his age, perhaps because of his struggle with tuberculosis, is a living, breathing, and sad reality in one of the tiny houses lining the narrow, filthy lanes of an impoverished neighbourhood of New Karachi.
Never actually belonging to the land he has spent almost his entire life in, this terribly lonely existence had compelled him to end it all with four bottles of cough syrup. A fool, he admits with a sheepish smile, he had been when he did that, but he lived to continue coping with his nationality crisis. The hope that has kept him going – that one day he will live with his parents and siblings in India.
His is a unique case. Born in Aligarh, India, he had arrived in Karachi with his mother, Salma Begum, and two elder siblings in 1993 when he was only two-and-a-half years old. Being a Pakistani married to an Indian man, Salma had come to Karachi to visit her parents on a No Objection to Return to India (NORI) – commonly called "Noori" – permission.
When she returned to India, she was forced to leave Salman with her parents as he fell too sick to travel. Dealing with her own citizenship problems in India, by the time she managed to come to Pakistan with her husband and other children, Salman, almost five by then, had become too attached to his grandparents and they too could not bear to lose sight of him.
Emotions took over and letting Salman continue living with his grandparents proved to be a costly mistake. Salman's father, Viqar Ahmed, a diabetic, ran into financial troubles and his health suffered too, making it difficult for the family to afford travelling to Pakistan.
It was not until 2006 that Salman's parents and his six siblings arrived in Karachi and he, a teenager then, saw them in the flesh in a phase of life wherein he could actually remember doing that.
Though he had remained in touch with them, to embrace them in real kicked in the realisation that he was a bird lost from the flock – that he belonged with them. But, with his maternal grandfather's death in 2012 and the rejection of his application for a national identity card in which he had laid all details accurately, it was no longer a wish – it had become a necessity.
Since then, Salman's family has been coming to Pakistan every year, trying to take him back home. In 2013, his parents had approached the Indian High Commission in Islamabad and were told that the case would be investigated. But they received no response. This year, Salman's elder sister, Nida, came to Karachi, determined to take her brother back with her.
The ailing health of Salman's maternal grandmother has made that more necessary than ever.
Without a national identity card, Salman has trouble even finding odd jobs and financial restraints have not allowed him to finish his course of treatment for tuberculosis.
Salman and his family's hopes were rekindled by the developments in the case of a deaf and mute Indian girl Geeta, who had accidentally crossed over to Pakistan. Now that she has returned, Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, who played a key role in making that happen, has also expressed her interest in reuniting both Ramzan and Salman with their families.