Living in Nagpur since '11, Bangladesh monk among CAA applicants

NAGPUR: Draped in a monk's maroon robe Joysen Barua from Bangladesh's port city of Chittagong, waits at general post office (GPO), Nagpur.
A Buddhist whose hill tracts had a protracted history of strife with Muslims, Barua stands out in the crowd of Indian citizenship seekers who mostly constitute Hindus from Pakistan's Sindh.
He has been in India since 2011, when he came on a tourist visa that now stands expired.Residing in Nagpur for close to a decade, Barua, 35, has applied for Indian nationality under Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
Admitting that his visa is invalid, Barua says he overstayed because he finds it safer in India. A communal flashpoint in Chittagong in 2014, when Buddhist shrines were destroyed and burnt by a mob, had left him concerned, he told TOI. He was in India at that time and decided to stay.
Barua says he came to India on a tourist visa to visit Bodh Gaya, a key Buddhist pilgrimage site. "I liked India and came to Nagpur after I learnt about Dr BR Ambedkar's embrace of Buddhism with lakhs of Dalits here. Since then I have been living in the city. My needs are being taken care of by fellow Buddhists. I am like a refugee," he told added. His parents and a brother still live in a village in Chittagong district. He says other Bangladeshi Buddhists too had come to India but he had lost contact with them.
"I am not a Chakma, they live in the hills. We are Buddhists from the plains and we comprise 400 families. Those in the plains are not involved in armed struggle like Chakmas. But the situation gets tense and we often feel a threat to our lives," he says.
"I applied for Indian citizenship soon after CAA became effective in March and got all my documents from Bangladesh," says Barua.
He shows a birth certificate, school-leaving documents, Class XII mark sheet and other govt papers. During his stay in India, he got an Aadhaar card and other documents. "I have been asked to get some corrections done in the application," he says.