Ten Years in India: Rohingya refugees face an uncertain future

Mohammad Lais* is making his monthly trip to a local court in Jammu, around 500 kilometres North of New Delhi, for the release of his brother and father from a detention camp.

Forty-year-old Lais, a Rohingya refugee, says his 80-year-old father and younger brother were taken into a detention centre in Kathua in 2021 during a routine ‘verification process’.

“The policemen came to our camp one morning. They took around 700 people to a nearby stadium for verification,” Lais told TRT World. After the checks, over 400 were released, while others, including Lais’ family, were sent to Hiranagar detention centre.

What followed was a cycle of meetings with senior police officials, court proceedings, and legal notices—none of which yielded any relief for Lais and several other Rohingya refugees, whose relatives and family members were also taken into detention. Lais is one of 7000 Rohingyas living in India-administered Kashmir, who claim their lives were relatively stable until detentions began in 2018. While most of them hold UNHCR refugee cards – which in theory verifies their refugee status and grants them international protection – the Indian government does not recognise this.

Owing to their lack of documents they are put in detention centres. In 2018, 255 refugees were taken to the Kathua Holding Centre, where conditions are reportedly worse than prisons.

However, it is not just in Kashmir but across the country that Rohingyas face harassment at the hands of the administration. The situation is only becoming worse as elections approach. Political parties are ramping up anti-refugee rhetoric ahead of next month's provincial elections in Delhi, with the Rohingya people being at the centre of their target. The leading contenders—Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—have turned the issue into a blame game. Each accuses the other of "settling" Rohingya refugees in the capital for electoral gains.

Parvesh Verma, a BJP candidate, has alleged that AAP has provided Rohingyas with documents to secure them as a vote bank. Meanwhile, AAP leaders have criticised the BJP-led central government for relocating large numbers of Rohingyas to Delhi without informing local authorities.

Amid this political theatre, the plight of Rohingya refugees grows increasingly precarious.

Indefinitely detained

As of September 2024, there are 676 Rohingya refugees in immigration detention across India, with a majority of them having no ongoing court cases or sentences pending, a report by the Azadi Project and Refugees International states.

The detention centres separate families, deny children education, and fail to provide adequate sanitation or medical care.

Four detainees, including a child, died in the Kathua centre last year. Even after completing their sentences, detainees remain confined, the report states. Elderly detainees with mobility issues depend on others for basic needs, and some children have never known life outside detention.

Owing to the bad condition of the detention camps and the slums in which the Rohingya live, a two-member team of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) visited the camps in December last year.

The visit came after authorities began cutting off water and electricity supplies to Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi settlers, following a magistrate's order issued on police directives.

The provincial government of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), led by the National Conference (NC), has strongly opposed these actions.

J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and his father and party’s president Dr. Farooq Abdullah advocated for a more compassionate approach toward the affected families, emphasising the need for humanitarian considerations until the central government formulates a policy for addressing their situation.

Hostility against refugees

Seven relatives of 33-year-old Khaled Ahmad (named changed) were taken into a detention centre in 2018 for ‘lack of proper documentation.’

“My aunt, uncle, and brother are in the detention camp. They all have UNHCR cards. They (police) called us on the pretext of verification and then took some people from there to the detention centre,” Ahmad said, adding that he is afraid to approach the authorities fearing that he could also be taken into detention.

Finding safe shelter is a constant challenge for Ahmed and other Rohingya refugees.

Since 2012, he has had to move home 25 times. “We had to vacate and shift every time. If I am living on someone else’s land on rent, I build a hut there. Then someone would come and tell me to evacuate the area. Then we have to shift from there and move to a different place,” he told TRT World.

Many Rohingyas live in makeshift camps with no access to basic amenities. In one camp, two toilets serve 80 people, forcing open defecation. Bathing facilities are non-existent, and unsanitary conditions have led to frequent illnesses among children.

In 2021, fires destroyed 50 houses in a camp along the Yamuna riverbank in Delhi, with residents losing important documents. To prevent further incidents, residents now take turns guarding their camps at night.

“We’re afraid anti-social elements might set our camps on fire,” said Farooq, a resident. “From 11 PM-06 AM people guard our camp from all sides so that we can avoid any tragedy,” he told TRT World. These daily struggles reflect a broader issue: the lack of formal recognition and protection for Rohingyas in India.

Barriers to education

While basic survival is a constant challenge, access to education is another uphill battle for Rohingya refugees.

Khajuri Khas, northeast Delhi, is home to around 30-40 families of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, which the United Nations has described as “the most persecuted minority in the world.”

The refugees arrived in India mostly in 2012-13 after persecution by the military authorities in their home country. Here a one-room religious seminary serves as a lifeline for over 70 children. The majority of the students, aged between 12-16, are Rohingya refugees. They gather to learn at the centre, located on the ground floor of a cramped building, squeezed along a narrow alley.

“When we came here in 2012, some of the refugees got admission in government schools,” said Mohammad Fazil*, a Rohingya refugee who runs the seminary. “But from 2021, the schools have stopped taking admission of the refugees saying we don’t have an Aadhaar Card (identity card). Then our children stopped going to schools,” he told TRT World.

Without formal schooling, children rely on religious institutions for basic education. “I don’t charge the refugees any fees as they don’t have any money to pay it,” he added. While these efforts provide some stability, they are no substitute for formal education, leaving many children with bleak prospects for the future.

Detention and hostility

India’s lack of legal protections for refugees compounds their plight.

A recent report on the Rohingya refugees in India has called them “one of the most neglected and persecuted groups” among the refugees in the country and attributed the Modi government’s Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies for the problem.

The country is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. While the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) offers a pathway to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from neighbouring countries, Rohingyas are excluded.

“The Indian government wants to create a narrative that Rohingya refugees are a disturbance to national security and so they can deport them. But these refugees are the most persecuted, they are the most backward in terms of education, economics, and healthcare. You talk about any indicators and you will find that these people are at their worst,” anti-hate campaigner, Asif Mujtaba, told TRT World

Mujtaba, founder of Miles2Smile Foundation, which works with survivors of hate and communal violence in India, questioned the government’s hostilities against the refugees. He said the narrative about the immigrants has been “factiously created” because the Union government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, “feeds on fear and hate.”

As Delhi’s elections approach, the future for Rohingya refugees in India looks increasingly uncertain. Detentions, barriers to education, and unstable living conditions paint a grim picture of their lives, a stark reminder of the human cost of political rhetoric.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy