Echoing Hills (2018) A Documentary by King Ratnam For the next several years the Indian and Sri Lankan governments failed to address this issue. The Indian and Pakistani Residents Citizenship Act (1949) [6] did not solve it; in 1954, the NehruKotelawala Pact did not adequately resolve it [7]. In 1962 there were still about 975,000 people caught in limbo between these two countries - classified by Sri Lanka as "Indian nationals" and by India as "stateless". It is said that during the repatriation, the people who were being separated from their families and the only home they had known, were weeping so loudly that the sound of the train approaching the station was drowned. This event is famously known as the "Oppari Kochi" in Tamil, meaning the weeping train. Here is a recent report looking at the legacy of statelessness of the Hill Country Tamils, “ Towards Meaningful Citizenship ” Click here to watch a film on the Echoing Hills. 9

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