New Delhi: Amal Akhtar could not walk by herself. She sat up uncomfortably on a hard mattress and rested her back on a pillow and talked in a soft but firm voice.
She looked straight into my eyes, as she recalled life after she was born in Myanmar’s westernmost state of Rakhine—a lush land riven by insurgencies and brutalities—bordering the Bay of Bengal. She grew up and lived there for 12 years with her mother, brother and cousins.
Akhtar, now 25, had never seen anything beyond the sickle-shaped sliver of Rakhine because the Muslim Rohingya of Indo-Aryan origin—routinely discriminated against for not sharing ethnicity, religion or language with the majority Buddhist Burmans—were not allowed to travel beyond its boundaries.
Approximately 9,000 Rohingya were killed in a genocide that played out over 2016 and 2017 after decades of discrimination. Rohingya were forced into bonded labour, regularly tortured and many disappeared, as the US state department reported in 2018. Rohingya women were raped, brutalised and murdered. In 2017, the United Nations called them the world’s “most persecuted minority”.
Survivors have reported seeing babies impaled on steel rods being thrown into fires and adults shot.
As Akhtar spoke to me from her tarpaulin-roofed home without electricity in a fetid slum called Madanpur Khadar in south Delhi, she said the last time she saw her country and relatives was before she swam for over six hours to cross a river in October 2012 in search of refuge.
After a three-month journey, mostly on foot, she finally reached India in 2012, enduring further abuse and witnessing several other Rohingya women being trafficked, raped and killed.
“I have lived my entire life in conflict and fear,” said Akhtar. “The only thing I want from life is to live without fear. I want to live in peace.”
But now that Akhtar is in India, she must live, like thousands of other Rohingya, with being called a terrorist, a termite or a security risk, terms used by politicians, the government and the media, and under constant fear of being detained and imprisoned without cause, explanation or legal recourse.
In January 2020, after her husband abandoned her, Akhtar was picked up by the police from Madanpur Khadar and sent to detention. She described how she was denied edible food, adequate medical treatment and legal assistance during 14 months in detention.
“I was released from detention when I was almost unconscious. I could not move or even recognise my mother,” said Akhtar. “Even now, I cannot move without support… I only hope that I can stay with my mother, and they do not detain me again.”
India Will Not Recognise Rohingya As Refugees
On 22 September 2022, the union government—refusing to provide documentation for a Rohingya woman and her children trying to join their father in the US—told the high court of Delhi that Rohingya refugees living in India “were seriously undermining the country’s national security”.
In 2018, claiming the Rohingya had links to “terror organisations”, the government of prime minister Narendra Modi told the Supreme Court: “The court has no business to interfere in such matters of what they call illegal immigrants or illegal migrants.”
With no evidence, television channels and media allied with the government have amplified allegations (here, here and here) that the Rohingya were linked to terrorism and were security threats.
This narrative has contributed, as many have observed, to the systematic criminalisation of the Rohingya, even as India says it will deport refugees as illegal immigrants who do not hold valid travel documents, even though deportation violates the international legal principle of non-refoulement, under which countries may not return refugees to countries where they face harm or persecution.
Since India is not a party to the United Nations (UN) Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and its 1967 Protocol, its refugee protection obligations are limited, as lawyer Malvika Prasad wrote in Article 14 in February 2020.
But non-refoulement is regarded as established global law binding on all countries, and the Rohingya are recognised as asylum seekers and refugees by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
India is also a party to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966, the Child Rights Convention 1989, and various other instruments that make clear rights for detenus, especially women and children.
Instead, India appears to be violating both global and national laws, with even minors held, as I found and as Article 14 reported in January 2022, at a detention centre called Sewa Kendra in the northwest Delhi suburb of Shahzada Bagh.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here