AMRITSAR: The family of 10-day old Nilakhi, born at Jodhpur in Rajasthan, finally left for their home in Pakistan on Sunday, exactly a week after they were stopped from crossing over at Attari due to a lack of papers for the newborn.
Nilakhi’s parents, Pritam and Rani, had joined a jatha along with their three children in January 2020 to visit various temples in India. However, they could not return to Pakistan as soon after the coronavirus lockdown was imposed and the borders sealed. Confined in a foreign land, without any means of livelihood, most of the jatha members moved to Jodhpur to work as daily wage workers.
On August 29, the couple, with their children Sagar, Hemraj, Deepa, and three-day-old Nilakhi, had arrived at the Attari land border along with some 84 members of the Pakistani Hindu jatha to return to their homes in Pakistan’s Sindh province.
190-member Pak Hindu jatha returns via Attari
The jatha was allowed to proceed, but the family was denied permission as they failed to produce the newborn’s birth certificate.
“We were not sure of our fate since we did not have any documents, like a birth certificate, of Nilakhi. We did not know whether we would be able to go back to our country along with the rest of the jatha members. But it has happened. We arrived as a five-member family in India but are returning home as six members,” said Pritam with folded hands, only too relieved to have finally got the permission to go home. A 190-member jatha of Pakistani Hindus left for Pakistan via Attari on Sunday.
Protocol officer at the Attari Integrated Check Post, Arun Pal said the family had gone back to Jodhpur, where Nilakhi was born, to get her necessary documentation. They got her registered on her mother’s passport from Delhi, following which they were allowed to cross the border.
The officer said that another Pakistani Hindu couple was denied permission to cross the border as they did not have any documentation of their newborn girl child Bharti. “They will have to go through the same procedure as that of Nilakhi’s to be able to go back to their country,” he said.
Recently, a group of around 80 Pakistani Hindus was not allowed to cross the border as they did not have RT-PCR test reports. They got the green signal only after the local administration got their tests done and received negative reports.
