Sri Lanka beckons, but for refugees in Tamil Nadu, a long road to ‘homecoming’

Five days before his family fled Sri Lanka, men from the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front arrived looking for boys above the age of 12. Mahendran was 11. His parents hid him, his brother and cousins in the narrow space between the roof and a false ceiling of their home.

The children stayed there from morning until 9 at night. Soon afterwards, the family left home, escaping 15 km to Pesalai in the Mannar island. Two of Mahendran’s cousins travelling in another vehicle were captured by the LTTE, put into battle with the Sri Lankan army, and died fighting.

Mahendran’s family waited 15 days on the Mannar island for a boat, surviving on limited food, and dodging the LTTE and the Sri Lankan military. On the night of July 22, 1990, they finally crossed the Palk Strait, getting off near Dhanushkodi on the Indian shore.

The water, Mahendran still remembers, reached above his father’s waist as he carried the children to land. Thirty-six years later, Mahendran lives in Pudukkottai. His father, who was 42 when the family fled, died just seven years later.

Mahendran went to school in Tamil Nadu, studied at Loyola College in Chennai, and now sells furniture on instalments. Ask the 47-year-old where he comes from and his answer is still “Ceylon”. His son and daughter, he says, would answer differently: Tamil Nadu.

That gap between two generations is what Sri Lanka is seeking to bridge, removing this month a longstanding legal obstacle to the voluntary return of refugees who fled the civil war without valid passports or through unauthorised departure points.

As per a Cabinet decision by the Lankan government, returnees whose Lankan nationality is established can enter through an authorised port after clearance by the State Intelligence Service. Those cleared will not face prosecution under immigration law merely for having left the country without authorisation during the war.

It applies to all those who left before May 19, 2009, when the civil war ended. This is a major leap for many refugees. As late as August 2025, four returnees were detained on arrival in Sri Lanka because they had originally left the country illegally.

The Lankan government’s new decision has been welcomed by the UN as an important step towards “safe and dignified return” of its people. But, for the nearly 90,000 Sri Lankan refugees in India, moving back is not an easy decision.

More than 58,000 of them live in 103 camps spread across 29 districts of Tamil Nadu, and another 30,000 outside the camps, with one special camp within the Tiruchi Central Prison complex. Sri Lanka is a difficult choice even though, more than three decades after many of them arrived in India, they continue to be registered with police and subject to periodic renewals, sometimes weekly.

Those living in camps are allowed to leave the premises at 6 am but generally required to be back at 6 pm. There are curbs on travel outside Tamil Nadu. Says Mahendran: “The important thing is not a warm welcome, but how the government expects us to live.

How do they expect us to survive, how do we buy food there?” A friend who returned eight years ago managed to find his feet in Lanka, he says, and the dream of “Ceylon” is always there. But Mahendran can’t set aside questions about land, shelter, employment and his children’s education.

“Should we go back and start a life from scratch, worse than a refugee life here?… Am I asking for too much? I don’t know,” he says. While successive Lankan governments have offered returning refugees resettlement assistance, including with housing and livelihood, the latest Cabinet decision does not spell out any new package.