Ethnic Chinese await apology for internment after Sino-India war
3,000 were interned in 1962 after India lost border war with China, with some held until 1967, but New Delhi is still silent on their ordeal
India-born Monica Liu was nine in 1962 when her family was loaded into box cars for an eight-day rail trip to an internment camp in the western Indian desert.
The Lius were among about 3,000 people of Chinese descent, most Indian citizens, rounded up without trial as suspected spies or sympathisers and placed in Rajasthan state's Deoli camp after India's one-month border war with China. Her family remained in detention until 1967.
Over the decades, the Chinese-Indian community has paid a high price for India's defeat and the subsequent distrust between the two Asian giants. In May, Premier Li Keqiang visited India in a bid to improve relations. But few expect close ties soon, in light of a disputed 3,400-kilometre border and India's hosting of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader.
Long consumed by fear, anger and denial, many former detainees have only recently begun speaking out, urging New Delhi to admit mistakes, as Washington finally did in 1988 for the detention of Japanese-Americans during the second world war.
"I've felt that the Indian government should apologise openly," said Harry Shaw, secretary of a Toronto-based association of former Deoli internees. "Unfortunately the whole thing's been swept under the rug."
Liu, the eldest of five siblings from the northeastern Indian city of Shillong, recalls the shock of arriving at the sparse barracks surrounded by barbed wire.