VIETNAM: Saigon's Former Indian Residents Return to Roots (1) An Inter Press Service Feature
HO CHI MINH CITY, Nov 23 (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.
Nearly 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 Indians' cases too.
Though there are no proper estimates of the worth of property in Ho Chi Minh City belonging to former Indian residents, 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 2.9 billion dollars 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.
© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service