India to deport seven Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar today
GUWAHATI: The Assam government on Wednesday sent seven Rohingya refugees from a detention camp in Silchar to Imphal, from where they will be deported to Myanmar before Thursday noon, a top government official said.
This will be the first such official deportation from India to Myanmar.
“The seven left the detention camp this morning for Manipur from where they will be sent back through a border post,” deputy commissioner of Cachar district, S Lakshmanan, said.
The Myanmar border at Moreh is about 50 km south of Imphal. The seven Rohingya Muslims have been held at the Silchar central prison in Cachar district since 2012 on charges of illegal entry.
The deportation order came after a last-ditch effort by advocate Prashant Bhushan for an urgent hearing of a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court to restrain the government from deporting the Rohingya refugees was not admitted by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi.
“It is a routine process. We sent back a Pakistani, an Afghani and 52 Bangladeshis recently,” said Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, additional director general, Border Organisation of the Assam Police, which deals with detection of foreigners.
A Union home ministry official in Delhi said the illegal Rohingya immigrants will be handed over to the Myanmar authorities at Moreh border post in Manipur on Thursday. He added that the deportation is happening following the confirmation of identity of the immigrants. Myanmar diplomats were given consular access to them.
According to government estimates, there are around 40,000 Rohingyas in India staying illegally.
The government’s move has drawn flak from a UN human rights expert, who said that returning the seven Rohingyas to Myanmar could violate international law. “Given the ethnic identity of the men, this is a flagrant denial of their right to protection and could amount to refoulement (forcible return of refugees or asylum seekers),” said the UN special rapporteur on racism, Tendayi Achiume.
“The Indian government has an international legal obligation to fully acknowledge the institutionalised discrimination, persecution, hate and gross human rights violations these people have faced in their country of origin and provide them the necessary protection,” Achiume said.
An intelligence officer, requesting anonymity, said there are about 32 Rohingyas in detention camps in Assam. At least 15 of them, including seven minors, are in Tezpur. According to detention camp documents that Hindustan Times has accessed, the refugees are from Rakhine state in Myanmar where violence against the ethnic minority is reported to have spiked.
Last week, the Centre asked all states to take biometric details of Rohingya refugees and other illegal immigrants in their jurisdiction as part of a countrywide security exercise. “The presence of Rohingya is confined not only to the northeastern states. They have reached south Indian states, including Kerala,” home minister Rajnath Singh said