Since entering India in 2017, Rohingya refugee Noor Mohammad and his wife have been forced to move at least a dozen times to escape unsafe conditions in the refugee camps and to avoid deportation.
Over the past seven years, shanties where they lived were destroyed twice when unexplained fires swept through Rohingya refugee camps in the northern Indian cities of Jammu and Nuh.
“Hindu leaders ordered us to vacate different areas a number of times in north India. They also threatened to retaliate with violent consequences if we disobeyed them,” Mohammad told VOA this week from an unidentified city in southern India.
“The police arrested some Rohingya on charges of illegal entry into India. To evade arrest and possible deportation with my children and wife, I kept moving from one area to another. Now, I have taken shelter in an urban slum and have gone underground,” said Mohammad, 37, who migrated to India following a military crackdown in Myanmar that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.
For more than 50 years, minority Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring countries, including Bangladesh and India, to escape persecution and discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. But in recent years in India, the Rohingya refugees have been detained by police for illegal entry and threatened with deportation.
Last week, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called on India to end the arbitrary detention and forcible deportation of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, where they would “risk being subjected to serious human rights violations and abuses.”
In a statement issued on July 2, the U.N. committee said it was “concerned about reports of arbitrary mass detention of the Rohingya, including children, in inadequate conditions, and in some cases without due process or access to legal representation.”
According to a 2019 UNHCR estimate, over 40,000 Rohingya refugees were in India, including around 22,000 who are registered with the U.N. agency. The refugees mostly work in menial jobs and live in decrepit shack colonies.
India has not signed the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention and views Muslim Rohingya refugees as “illegal immigrants,” although the Rohingya have mostly lived peacefully in the country for decades.
But the refugees began facing resistance after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in 2014. In 2017, in the northern Indian city of Jammu, the BJP and other Hindu right-wing groups launched a campaign demanding the ouster of all Rohingya living in a nearby refugee camp.
Although no police record in India has linked the refugees to any terrorist or criminal activities, on social media, Hindu nationalist groups label the Rohingya as “terrorists” and “jihadists,” and have for years demanded their expulsion from India.
In the past seven years, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs has repeatedly asked state governments to identify and deport all Rohingya “illegal immigrants” to Myanmar, where a widening civil war has brought new violence to their homeland in Rakhine State.
According to rights activists, around 800 Rohingya, including women and children, are currently in Indian jails and detention centers after being charged with illegal entry. So far, only 18 Rohingya refugees have actually been sent back to Myanmar since 2021.
Some rights activists argue that the deportations are illegal under Indian law.
Ujjaini Chatterji, a New Delhi-based lawyer, said that even though India is not a signatory to the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, India’s constitution guarantees “the right to life and personal liberty, along with the right to equality before law” for every person, including noncitizens, within the territory of India.
“The Foreigner’s Act, 1946, defines an illegal migrant who can be deported by the executive in India; however, the Rohingya are not illegal migrants. They are, as per the Standard Operating Procedure (SoP) circulated by the Union of India dated 20 March, 2019, ‘foreigners claiming to be refugees,’ and they cannot be either detained or deported without their claims being assessed within the timeframes as per the SoP,” Chatterji told VOA.
“This is not being followed by the authorities, and detentions are happening without a fair assessment of the refugee claims.”
Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia deputy director at Human Rights Watch, said that while the Rohingya are among the most persecuted communities in the world, “instead of treating them with empathy, Indian authorities and ruling political leaders have incited hate against them.”
“There is an ongoing conflict in Rakhine State. Most governments struggle when it comes to protecting refugees, but deporting them when their lives will be at risk not only violates international law but basic decency,” Ganguly told VOA.
“The Indian government should instead be working with partners, including ASEAN [the Association of Southeast Asian Nations], Bangladesh and others to ensure that Myanmar can have a rights-respecting government, and the Rohingya refugees can safely return.”
An official from the Indian Home Ministry in New Delhi that handles refugee-related matters declined to comment on Rohingya issues.
Bangladeshi author and rights activist Farhad Mazhar said that Rohingya refugees are being hounded in India largely because they are Muslim.
“BJP, the ruling party of India, supports the Hindutva forces that aim to turn India into a Hindu-only country. The party openly discriminates against Muslims,” he said, noting that a recently enacted measure offering citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries does not apply to Muslims.
“The world identifies the stateless Rohingya as the most persecuted minority in the world. Yet India is nonchalant about the plight of the Rohingya community from Myanmar simply because they are Muslim,” Mazhar said.
