Any one reporting in the 90s in Delhi would remember the unguarded government mansion at 3 Krishna Menon Marg that hosted Arakans, Chins, Karens, Burmese, artists, journalists, children and women. This was the address of India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes, who himself occupied just one room of the house . The Burmese resistance movement was literally being played out from the Indian Defence Minister’s living quarters. Former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral once remarked, with a touch of amusement, that Fernandes had always been a fighter for lost causes.
Gujral’s “lost cause” comment seems prophetic as India deports 7 Myanmarese nationals who allegedly fled religious persecution. The caveat, though, is India is deporting Rohingyas (not Myanmarese), an identity that has been cast around religion.
No “International Obligation”?
Nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled persecution in the northern Rakhine province of Myanmar for neighbouring Bangladesh since August 2017. The United Nations describe the Rohingya as the most persecuted minority in the world today.
Despite UN alert asking India to observe “international obligation”, India has decided to go ahead and hand over Md Jamal, Mohbul Khan, Jamal Hussain, Md Yonus, Sabir Ahmed, Rahim Uddin and Md Salam to the Myanmarese authorities.
They were arrested in 2012 and detained in Silchar Central Jail in South Assam. They were tried and convicted under the Foreigners Act. There are more awaiting trial.
Justice Gogoi’s Role
Call it a coincidence but the new Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi declined to list the plea against this deportation when it came up in the Supreme Court.
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No surprises given Justice Gogoi has been a crusader of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a master roll that is meant to determine all illegal migrants in the state of Assam.
If the Thursday morning deportation of the Rohingya is any indication for things to come, 40 lakh people excluded from the final draft of NRC face a similar fate if they fail to qualify another round of verification. This outcome, however, is a practical impossibility on ground. Unlike Myanmar accepting the Rohingyas, Bangladesh is unlikely to take back a single migrant.
Further, Justice Gogoi’s first challenge will be to firewall the centre’s attempt to amend the Citizenship Act and regularise minorities like Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists and Parsis from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Act systematically excludes the persecuted Shias or Ahmediyas from Pakistan or Muslims from Myanmar.
If this amendment comes through, the exercise of NRC— the largest disenfranchisement exercise ever undertaken anywhere in the world— will be futile.
It will also contradict the Assam Accord and create a political situation with the BJP in the state against the amendment. The Rohingya, however, will still face deportation.
Assam’s History of Ethnic Animosity
Assam is not unfamiliar to ethnic cleansing, refugees and internally displaced people. Citizenship has been a sensitive and much abused issue exploited by political parties and groups espousing “indigenous rights”. These exercises have only reinforced the once intense Bengali-Assamese divide: the animosity between the Brahmaputra valley and the Bengali dominated Barak Valley.
While the linguistic divide will continue to be a source of political mobilisation it is the Bengali-Muslim that shall carry the cross of the “illegal migrant”.
Any political rearrangement with or without the amendment to the Citizenship Act will ensure religious polarisation. In this dynamic the Rohingya will again find themselves disadvantaged.
Assam’s own turbulent history of ethnic violence and displacement has torn apart the state from all directions. The sub national assertions, often unbelievably violent, have hardly ever been addressed or resolved. As a case in point, the Bodo chauvinism in Lower Assam targeting Muslims, Adivasis and other ethnicities has been responsible for at least four waves of ethnic cleansing. The displaced minorities languish in refugee camps; most have lost land and occupation.
While the major ethnic groups in Assam have reiterated the question of “who is the Assamese?” defying the caste Assamese hegemony, they have always come together in the issue of chasing out the “outsider”.
For now the Rohingya fulfill that aspiration.
(Kishalay Bhattacharjee teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University and is the author of ‘An Unfinished Revolution: A Hostage Crisis, Adivasi Resistance and the Naxal Movement’. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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