Rohingya refugees flee India amid panic over data-collection drive

Rohingya refugees are fleeing India and going into hiding amid fears that a government campaign to collect their personal information is a prelude to mass deportation.

The data-gathering, which includes biometric information, follows the government’s first transfer of seven Rohingya back to Burma last month.

Critics say the ruling, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is targeting the persecuted Muslim community ahead of a general election due in May.

“We are sure the Indian government is preparing to send us back to Burma,” said Abul Foiz, who ran away from a Rohingya refugee camp in the northern city of Jammu last week.

Intelligence officers had visited the camp and asked him to write down the date he entered India and his original address in Burma.

“In the past few days over 200 Rohingyas have disappeared from Jammu,” Mr Foiz said. “No one wants to return to Burma where we are still facing violence and persecution.”

Abu Hossain, 65, told the Telegraph he fled a refugee camp in Jammu after six years and entered Bangladesh last week.

“Our camps were set alight by people we suspect were from the Hindu groups. Police said they could not help us... The situation was turning very hostile,” Mr Hossain said from his new home in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp.

Rohingya in Buddhist-majority Burma have faced discrimination for decades and last year the UN accused Burma's government of “genocidal intent” after a bloody military crackdown forced 700,000 of the Muslim minority out of the country.

The Indian home ministry refused to discuss deportation of Rohingya with the Telegraph.

As it has not signed the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, India treats the roughly 40,000 Rohingya in the country as illegal immigrants rather than refugees.

Around 18,000 are registered with the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, which issues ID cards to help avoid arrest, detention and deportation. But many ID-card holders are still scared of deportation, said Ko Ko Linn, a Bangladesh-based Rohingya political activist.

Even card-holders are now also "on the run", Mr Linn told the Telegraph, having been frightened by last month's deportations and the move to collect personal details and biometric information. 

In an emailed statement, UNHCR New Delhi said that it was “concerned about the anxiety in the Rohingya community” caused by the latest developments.

Although Rohingya lived in India without much trouble for decades, Narendra Modi's BJP has been fanning resentment since it won election in 2014. 

Last year the government ordered all states to identify and deport Rohingya, saying they were “more vulnerable for getting recruited by terrorist organisations”. Deportation efforts now appear to be getting underway.

On October 10th, the government of Assam state announced it would send 23 Rohingya back to Myanmar. In Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-dominated state, one right-wing Hindu group has threatened to “identify and kill” all of the state's 7,000 Rohingya the government fails to expel.

Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan said that claims the refugees are involved in terrorism are absurd. No member of the community has been implicated in “any matter that would jeopardise India’s national security,” the lawyer, who is fighting deportation efforts, told the Telegraph, adding that the allegations "being put forward by the government aim at polarising Indian society on communal lines.”

Calcutta-based Human rights activist Ranjit Sur said the BJP-led government has launched the anti-Rohingya drive with an eye on the general elections next year.

“Rohingya human rights have been sacrificed at the altar of electoral and communal politics,” he said.

Source: The Telegraph