India: India should abide by its international legal obligations and should not forcibly return ethnic Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, where they face persecution, without fairly evaluating their claims as refugees, a global human rights group has said.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had also expressed concern about India’s plans to deport Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, underlining that they should not be returned to countries where they fear persecution once they are registered.
On August 9, 2017, the Indian minister of state for home affairs, Kiren Rijiju, told the parliament that “the government has issued detailed instructions for deportation of illegal foreign nationals including Rohingyas,” noting that there were around “40,000 Rohingyas living illegally in the country.”
Minister Rijiju told Reuters news agency, “They [UNHCR] are doing it, we can’t stop them from registering. But we are not signatory to the accord on refugees.” He added: “As far as we are concerned, they are all illegal immigrants. They have no basis to live here. Anybody who is an illegal migrant will be deported.”
The Rohingya is a Muslim minority predominately from western Myanmar.
About 16,500 Rohingya living in India are registered with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The government contends that tens of thousands are unregistered.
The Rohingya are largely living in the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, and Rajasthan. Since 2016, Rohingya refugees in Jammu have been targeted by right-wing Hindu groups who have been calling for their eviction from the state, with some groups even threatening attacks if the government rejected their call.
In December 2016, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a group with links to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), demanded the eviction of Rohingya from Jammu, calling them a threat to security. Another group, the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party, started a public campaign against the Rohingya, putting up billboards in the city calling on Rohingya and Bangladeshis to leave the state. In February 2017, a BJP member whose lawyer is the BJP spokesman in Jammu, filed a petition in the state high court seeking the Rohingya’s deportation, arguing that there had been a sharp increase in illegal migrants from Burma and Bangladesh.
The campaign by Hindu groups against the Rohingya in Jammu has prompted vigilante-style attacks against them. In April, unidentified assailants reportedly set on fire five huts housing Rohingya in Jammu. Four days earlier several Rohingya families living in the outskirts of Jammu alleged that unidentified people beat them up and set ablaze the scrap they collected to earn a livelihood.
India has in the past called upon Burma to address the issues around the Rohingya and to ensure their protection. Minister Rijiju has stated that deportations will occur only in consultation with the authorities in Bangladesh and Burma.
