Vietnam-born Indians return home

Vietnam-born Indians return home

Saigon's former Indian residents return to their roots. Satyanarayan Sivaraman of Inter Press Service reports.

HO CHI MINH CITY (IPS): French, Vietnamese, Tamil -- it is a strange mix of tongues that greets the ear inside Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City's only Indian restaurant. But for Mohammed Housaine, a middle-aged Indian businessman who has become a patron of the place, this is the only natural way to converse.

Born to Tamil parents in French colonial Vietnam, Housaine's fluency in the three languages is the only memory left of his days in Ho Chi Minh City -- then called Saigon -- before he fled along with his family when triumphant communist troops drove out the U.S. forces in 1975.

Two decades later, Housaine is back in the city where he was born and brought up, not on a mere nostalgia trip but to try and reclaim the ancestral property his family left behind.

He is just one of hundreds of hopeful former Indian residents who are making trips to Ho Chi Minh City, attracted by the political and economic changes brought in recent years by the reformist Vietnamese government.

"We owned several houses in the city but now I have to pay to stay here in a hotel," laments Housaine who migrated to France seeking asylum there in the mid-seventies.

Vietnam has no policy as yet on compensating former residents for lost property. But Housaine is hopeful that with the newly patched up relations between Vietnam and the United States, which is also trying to reclaim some of its pre-1975 properties in Ho Chi Minh City, officials here will consider the Indian's cases too.

Latest reports say Hanoi has approved the return of some of the U.S properties to the U.S government.

There are no formal estimates of the worth of property in Ho Chi Minh City belonging to former Indian residents, but it is believed to be in the range of several hundred million dollars.

Much of the appreciation in real estate prices has occurred in recent years, with foreign companies pledging over US$2.9 billion worth of investment into the city since 1988.

Indians formed the second largest ethnic minority group in Saigon, after the Chinese community, with an estimated 50,000 of them living here up to the early 1970s. A large number of the Indians were from Tamil Nadu who came here during the previous century from French colonies in South India.

Many Indians left Saigon before its fall to Vietnamese communist forces. And while some stayed on for a few years more, they were forced out of business by socialist policies imposed by the new administration.

The Indian community of Saigon included textile traders, money-lenders, real estate developers, blue-and white-collar employees.

But the several hundred Indians who were left behind in Ho Chi Minh City were all mostly poor artisans, mechanics and petty traders.

Due to the strong political ties between Vietnam and India, which were both on the side of the socialist bloc during the Cold War, these remaining Indians were the only foreigners in the country to be given official recognition and patronage by Hanoi.

Not all Indians coming back here, however, are after lost property. Many are looking forward to starting new business ventures including several large business groups that originated in pre-communist Saigon but shifted to Singapore, Malaysia and India in 1975.

"Our roots are here in Saigon and with this opening up we hope to revive our historical business link with Vietnam," says a senior executive of the Southern Petrochemical Industries Corp (SPIC), which is owned by the Madras-based M A M Ramaswamy Group that started more than half a century ago in Saigon.

The Group is negotiating with Vietnamese authorities to set up a fertilizer plant near here based on offshore natural gas.

But small Indian traders and businessmen who once formed the bulk of Saigon's Indian community are finding the going rather difficult in Vietnam.

Complains jewelry dealer L.M. Basheer: "Only foreigners coming with large capital investments are being welcomed while small businessmen like us are not even allowed to set up shop".

Vietnamese authorities have historical reasons for discouraging large numbers of former Indian residents from coming back to Ho Chi Minh City. Many Vietnamese remember well and resent the virtual monopoly Indian and Chinese traders exerted over the local economy before its liberation by the communists.

Indian traders in particular acquired a bad reputation among the Vietnamese due to their involvements in the money lending business charging exorbitant interests from debtors.

The Vietnamese themselves are also now attempting to become entrepreneurs, and local city authorities are actively discouraging competitors and blocking the influx of foreigners into the petty trade and small business sectors.

In the late 1970s, members of the city's Chinese minority fled in droves because of alleged racial persecution.

Many here say the authorities are trying to avoid a repeat of the incident, and are watching out for ethnic tensions that may arise due to the frustration of local people unable to do well in the changing free market economy.