The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
‘Was told I could earn Rs 300, I immediately left for Jammu’
WHEN JAHURA Bibi, 60, illegally crossed the borders of two countries in 2009, she wasn’t just fleeing the persecution back home. Her husband, Mohammad Yakub, had gone into hiding and the family — Bibi and her seven children, all minor at the time — were hoping to locate him. That expectant reunion, stifled by a protracted legal battle, would never happen — at least for Bibi.
When the family landed in India, through Bangladesh, they were apprehended by police at Kolkata. A local court sentenced Bibi to 14 months in prison for not possessing valid documents, while sending her children to a juvenile home.
Yakub would eventually discover that his family was jailed in India. “Woh merey ko jail mein mila. Woh hume dhoondtey humarey baad mein Bangladesh se India aaya. (He met me in jail. He came looking for us from Bangladesh),” says Bibi says. Yakub, she adds, got himself a refugee card from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Delhi and spent time in Jammu, where he knew fellow Rohingyas, before reaching Kolkata.
While he succeeded in getting custody of his children, Bibi continued to remain in jail even after the completion of her sentence as she hadn’t yet received her refugee card. When Bibi’s six-year incarceration ended in 2015, however, there would be no Yakub. He had died of tuberculosis in 2014.
“Woh last time, mere ko bachhon ke saath milatha (The last time he met me was with our children),” says Bibi, now living with her children in a jhuggi at Narwal on the outskirts of Jammu city.
The Rohingyas in Jammu have grown from the single family, which was arrested in the ’80s while attempting to cross over to Pakistan from the international border in the Kanachak sector, with much of the migration coming in thewakeofthe2009 unrest in Myanmar.
Though there are no official numbers, a recent police survey found 1,100 Rohingya families comprising 4,500 people in the city, many reportedly lured by the chance of crossing over into Pakistan. A senior police official believes their total number in Jammu may be around 7,000 to 8,000.
Their presence though has become a political and economic flashpoint in a state sticky about its demography and its scarcity of jobs. BJP leaders have threatened to raise the issue of “increasing number” of Rohingya Muslim refugees in the ongoing Budget Session of the Assembly, which began on January 2.“There are no records regarding them, and their settlement in a sensitive border state is a great threat to national security as these people can be easily used by anti-national elements,” BJP JAMMU Nowshera MLA Ravinder Raina had said.
Without naming the Rohingyas, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Jammu has called the presence of “foreigners” in the city and its outskirts a “sinister campaign” to change the demography of the area by “unseen forces”. It alleged that they were employed by the Railways for loading and unloading of goods trains.
The opposition National Conference, however, says the BJP is opposing the Rohingyas purely on religious grounds and that by the same yardstick, it should also not support West Pakistani refugees, nearly all of them Hindu.
Apart from being a natural choice due to its Muslim majority, the Rohingyas say they pick Jammu and Kashmir on economic consideration. And most of them follow a similar pattern: Once a Rohingya reaches Jammu, he stays a few months and then invites other relatives, informing them of job opportunities and better pay.
Farid Alam, 33, says he came here alone in 2009 and later married. Farid, who has two children — Rukhsan Bibi, 6, and Kashar Bibi, 3 — later called his parents and four brothers. Now, two of his brothers are also married and have a child each.
Zahid Hussain, 45, his wife Rabiya Khatoon and 8-year-old son Mohammad Zubair had left Rakhine in 2009, after the Junta confiscated all his property. He says that when he landed in India, after a guide helped him through Bangladesh, his family took a train to Jaipur, where he worked in a soap factory for Rs 150 a day. It was while he was seeking refugee status at the UNHCR office in Delhi that he came in contact with other Rohingyas, who told him that they had been working for Rs 300 a day in Jammu. “I immediately made up my mind, returned to Jaipur and left for Jammu along with the family,” he added.
The Rohingyas here work as ragpickers, collect scrap, work in wholesale vegetable and fruit mandis, shops and even local industrial estates in Jammu city and its outskirts. They have set up their clusters around Muslim-dominated localities of Jammu and its outskirts, where landowners charge them Rs 500-800 per jhuggi. While they are not entitled to electricity or water supply, the local landlord gets a water connection in his name for a cluster of 10-12 jhuggis and charges them an additional Rs 200 each for electricity supply.
Local NGOS have chipped in, running schools for the children, setting up community sheds and even toilets for the Rohingyas. With donations from local Muslims and other Myanmar refugees, prefabricated huts with tin sheds have come up at a place in Narwal where three Rohingyas were killed when a blaze reduced 81 jhuggis to ashes last November.