Rohingya refugees caution India against signing a repatriation deal with Myanmar

Anxiety has gripped the residents of the Kanchan Kunj camp in Delhi’s south-east over the upcoming two-day visit of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to Myanmar, beginning May 10. During the visit, the two countries are expected to push for finalising an arrangement towards the repatriation of 40,000-odd Rohingya refugees who have called India home for years.

A resident of Kanchan Kunj, host to around 55 Rohingya families, twenty-six year old Abdullah says that the Indian government would be throwing the Rohingyas “back into fire” if they send them back to Rakhine state.

“I have relatives back home. They say not much has changed on the ground, even though the government has been claiming that things are returning to normalcy,” says Abdullah, who fled to India in 2012 to escape persecution at the hands of Burmese forces.

While he tells that Rohingya refugees have received no official communication from the Indian government, the stay visas of the refugees weren’t renewed this year.

“Our stay visas used to get renewed every year since I moved to India in 2012. This year, however, we are still waiting for the government to issue us fresh visas,” he says. Without any government documents, a card issued by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is the only form of identification Abdullah, and perhaps, India’s Rohingya refugees, possess.

A resident of a Nakhru village in Mangdu district, Abdullah claims that the military still exercises full control of people’s lives in an iron-handed manner.

“Anyone who ventures out of home beyond 6 PM is detained, with many of these people tortured by officials in custody. We are not allowed to own lands and are still disenfranchised. They mostly go after people who appear well-groomed and well-built. At times, they even pick up our women and rape them,” says Abdullah. “We even need permission to get married.”

The Narendra Modi government, since coming to power, and more so over the last year, has been creating a ground for a refugee resettlement pact. In December last year, then foreign secretary S Jaishankar signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Burmese government, as part of which India pledged its support for the socio-economic development of the Rakhine state.

Raveesh Kumar, the spokesperson at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), stated at the weekly press briefing on Thursday that normalcy in the Rakhine state would only return with the repatriation of Rohingya refugees. “India welcomed the Bangladesh-Myanmar agreement for repatriating the Rohingyas,” Kumar noted, as he responded to a query on Swaraj’s next week’s visit to Myanmar.

India is said to have facilitated the repatriation deal between Bangladesh and Myanmar in November last year, following which New Delhi pledged financial support for the construction of pre-fabricated homes in the Rakhine for the returned Rohingya refugees.

However, the much-acclaimed deal has already hit a roadblock, as Myanmar, till March, identified only 374 Rohingya refugees for repatriation, out of thousands who fled to Bangladesh in the wake of crackdown by Burmese forces in the Rakhine state following an attack by militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) in August last year. Around 7,00,000 Rohingya Muslims are believed to have fled Rakhine for safety during the crackdown.

Warning that a similar deal between Myanmar and India would invite international backlash, Delhi Minorities Commission chairperson Zafarullah Khan noted in a conversation with National Herald that the refugee agreement with Bangladesh was already unravelling. “The only way the Indian government could send back Rohingya refugees would be through the use of force. There is no other way. Rohingya are still fleeing for Bangladesh in large numbers, despite the resettlement deal,” said Khan.

“As a woman, I don’t feel safe at the prospect of returning to Myanmar,” says 26-year-old Fatima, who runs a grocery shop from a makeshift tent in Kanchan Kunj, adding that Rohingya need the permission of the local authorities if they want to travel more than 20 kilometres.

She explains her agony, “The Buddhist militias extort money from us. The military has taken away our land. They rape women in front of their families. How could India possibly send us back?”