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Rohingya refugees facing new dangers in India

Friday, 19 March 2021 7:39 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 19 March 2021 7:39 PM ]

Shahana Butt
Press TV, Kashmir

For the past 15 years, these shanties have been the new homes of Rohingya refugees. A scattered community dwelling here, with no proper sanitation facilities and unhygienic conditions. To them, what matters is to survive, and that’s all they have been trying to do.

Escaping persecution at the hands of authorities in Myanmar, the Muslim Rohingya community has been fleeing their homes for safer locations, but decades have passed and they still have no place to call home.

New Delhi’s recent crackdown on illegal immigrants in the Jammu region landed over 160 Rohingya refugees in detention centers, which has forced others to flee the makeshift camps. The refugees are now heading to unknown locations.

Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in India, minorities in the country have been taking heat. The BJP introduced the citizenship amendment bill in 2019; it grants Indian citizenship to Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, and other minorities who fled neighboring countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan before 2014 fearing religious persecution. However, the citizenship amendment act discriminates against Muslims and violates the rights of equality enshrined in the constitution of India.

In the state of Assam, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh have long been a source of concern for India. Accordingly, around two million residents were left off the national citizenship register, a majority of them Muslims. The register is a list of people who can prove they had entered India by March 1971 right before neighboring Bangladesh became an independent country.

Analysts say the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party aims to transform India into a majoritarian community by granting citizenship rights to majority groups. But all this has dented India’s democratic image globally and downgraded it from a democracy to an electoral autocracy.

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