INDIA’S DEPORTATION OF ROHINGYA SPREADS PANIC AMONG REFUGEES
Deportation of seven Rohingya spreads panic among 40,000 refugees
HOURS after Indian TV channels flashed that the country was deporting seven Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar, Sahidullah said he received a call from his nephew: “Uncle, please get us out of here. They will send us back too.”
Sahidullah, a Rohingya living in the far north of India after fleeing what he called persecution in Myanmar in 2010, said his relative, Sadiur Rahman, 40, was lodged in one of several detention centres for illegal immigrants in the northeastern state of Assam.
Rahman, he said, had been incarcerated with his brother and eight other relatives since being caught in 2012 at a railway station as they fled to India via Bangladesh.
Sahidullah had taken the same route two years earlier, but had escaped detection.
He said Rahman made the phone call when he was taken out for a routine medical check-up on Oct 3, the day when India moved the seven Rohingya men out of a similar detention centre and took them to the border.
They were handed to the Myanmar authorities the next day, the first-ever such deportations of Rohingya here, spreading panic among an estimated 40,000 refugees who have fled to India from its neighbour.
About 16,500 of the refugees, including Sahidullah, have been issued identity cards by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that it says helps them “prevent harassment, arbitrary arrests, detention and deportation”.
India says it does not recognise the cards and has rejected the UN’s stand that deporting the Rohingya violates the principle of refoulement — sending back refugees to a place where they face danger.
“Anyone who has entered the country without a valid legal permit is considered illegal,” said a spokesman for the Home Minister. “As per the law, anyone illegal will have to be sent back. As per law, they will be repatriated.”
Sahidullah is not just worried about his detained relatives, but also his family living in a mainly Hindu region of India’s only Muslim-dominated state, Jammu and Kashmir, in the country’s northern tip.
The Himalayan state that borders Pakistan and is home to Muslim separatists battling Indian rule has the biggest population of Rohingya in the country with around 7,000 people scattered in various makeshift settlements, largely in the Jammu region.
“We came to India because people told us things were better here, there’s more work and one could move freely unlike back home,” said Sahidullah, who works as a cleaner at a car showroom in Jammu city to support his aging amnesiac mother, wife and four children.
“All that’s true and we are thankful to India for letting us live here. But hatred against us is growing,” he said.