Relief for Assamese Chinese Community happy for inclusion in draft NRC

Wing Him Tham

TT, Guwahati: Septuagenarian Wing Him Tham was relieved to find his name and that of family members in the final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), an official recognition that he is now an Indian and a far cry from when his community was viewed with suspicion during the Sino-Indian conflict in the sixties.

Tham, who runs a restaurant in Tezpur, is a second generation Assamese Chinese whose father came to India during the British rule. His father was employed in a tea garden in Upper Assam. Tham had to get an employee certificate from the garden where his father worked to get his name included in the NRC.

"It feels great that I and my family are officially Indian. I was born in Dibrugarh in the forties. My father came to India somewhere in mid-twenties. I have a cousin (father's sister's daughter) who is still in China. Now I want to reach out to her," said Tham.

He said there are four or five Assamese Chinese families in Tezpur. With inclusion of some of its members in the NRC, the community has achieved what it has been vying for more than 50 years.

Brought to Assam by the British to work in tea gardens around two centuries ago, the Chinese migrants assimilated into the Assamese society by marrying local women. But everything changed in 1962, when paranoia took over and the community was left on tenterhooks.

"We are such a microscopic community that awareness about us is negligible. Our people have documents dating back to the British period," said Eugene Tham, a third generation Assamese Chinese, here.