by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Centre on Tuesday said the Border Security Force (BSF) and Assam Rifles have been sensitised to ensure that members of the Rohingya Muslim minority do not enter the country and states have been asked to enumerate and confine those who have immigrated illegally.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh told the Lok Sabha during Question Hour that his Ministry had issued an advisory to the states in February concerning the Rohingya.
“The BSF and Assam Rifles have been fully sensitised to ensure that Rohingyas are not able to enter,” Rajnath Singh replied to a query posed by a Shiv Sena member.
He said Rohingyas have, however, entered the country in “large numbers”.
“It should not happen that the Rohingyas spread out and stay wherever they want,” he said, adding that the states have been advised to prepare their “biography” (profiles) and take biometrics.
“The advisory also says that their movement should also be monitored and the states should be fully alert,” the Minister added.
Rajnath Singh said the state governments have the right to deportation under the Foreigners Act.
“We have requested the state governments that after identification and enumeration of the Rohingyas, they should send the information to the Central government. Once we get this information, we will share it with the External Affairs Ministry. The ministry will talk to the Myanmar authorities and try to deport them,” the minister said.
Earlier, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju said Rohingyas were illegal migrants and there was no question of the government giving them any facilities.
“We will first take care of Indian citizens, take care of their rights. We are not here to take care of illegal migrants,” he said.
Answering another query, Rijiju said Jammu and Kashmir has the largest number of Rohingyas followed by Hyderabad. They were also present in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and some other places.
“We have taken firm steps that they do not become a threat to the country’s security and become a burden in the future,” he added.
Referring to the issue of ration cards, he said the government has not allowed the move and “if registration has taken place in a fake manner, action will be taken”.
He said every state and union territory should ensure that Rohingyas do not get a legal document.
Regarding border fencing, Rijiju said: “There is no fencing with Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, China. We have a different agreement with every country.”
The minister said about 10 lakh Rohingyas in Bangladesh have not been able to enter India due to steps taken by the government.
Trinamool Congress member Sugata Bose said he was saddened by the reply of the Home Minister and noted that India has 40,000 Rohingya refugees while there were over 9 lakh in Bagladesh.
Noting that the government was carrying out “Operation Insaniyat” (Operation Humanity) in Bangladesh, he asked if Centre will give shelter to all persecuted people, specially refugees.
Rijiju said he was “surprised and saddened” by Bose’s remarks, saying that despite India not being a signatory to the UN convention on refugees, millions of them were still staying in the country.
The minister said India has a tradition of receiving persecuted people but that does not mean that “we cannot regulate our system”.
“Does that mean that you can allow anybody to walk into this nation and claim the rights of this nation. We have to have a system. We have to take care of our people first and then other people,” Rijiju added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Naypyidaw : The World Bank has offered Myanmar $100 million in aid for development projects in the conflict-torn state of Rakhine, hit by violence in 2017 that led to the exodus of more than 700,000 Rohingyas, a Muslim minority community, to neighbouring Bangladesh.
The offer came during a three-day visit by the World Bank Vice President for East Asia and Pacific, Victoria Kwakwa, to Myanmar, according to a statement released after the conclusion of her visit.
The World Bank “supports, in collaboration with the UN and other partners, to put in place the conditions for safe, voluntary and dignified return of refugees,” read the statement.
The aid would be used in projects in Rakhine with a focus on job creation, micro and small-enterprise development and to ensure access to essential services for all communities, including repatriated refugees, Efe news reported.
During her meeting with Myanmar State Counsellor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, Kwakwa discussed the importance of inclusive and sustainable development for all communities in Myanmar.
The UN rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, had warned two days ago in Bangladesh that the return of the Rohingya refugees — whom Myanmar considers to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh — would be delayed as the situation in Myanmar was not yet favourable for their repatriation.
On November 17, Myanmar and Bangladesh had signed an agreement for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees living in the Bangladeshi refugee camps, which was scheduled in January.
The UN also signed an agreement with Myanmar in June to pave the way to recognize rights of the Rohingya community.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
Rohingya refugees at a camp at Baruipur.
By Nikhil M. Babu,
New Delhi : After Mohammad Haroon turned 15, he began watching Bollywood movies, walking four kilometres to a theatre near his village in Myanmar.
Little did he know that the Hindi he learnt watching these films would one day help him settle down in a foreign country to which he and his family had to flee to escape brutal persecution by the armed forces.
Haroon, a Rohingya, came to India, the country he had known from its movies, after fleeing to Bangladesh in a small hand-rowed fishing boat. That was after his cousin was raped and their huts were torched.
“I had watched about 100-150 Hindi films back home and I could understand Hindi by the time I came here (India). Speaking Hindi was a problem though,” Haroon, now 48, told IANS at a Rohingya settlement in Kanchan Kunj of south Delhi.
More than two dozen Rohingyas IANS interviewed in Delhi, Jammu and Hyderabad said they used to watch Bollywood movies in Myanmar that helped them to learn Hindi and made it easier for them to find jobs and make friends in India.
Rohingyas, mostly Muslims, are an ethnic minority, denied citizenship and have been “facing human rights violations and violence” at the hands of the military in the Buddhist majority Myanmar.
More than 800,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar in the last five years as a result of violence, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and there are around 21,500 Rohingyas in India.
Perched on a plastic chair, Haroon, a father of four, said the love for Bollywood was strong in Myanmar. He named his favourite stars — Amitabh Bachchan, Shatrughan Sinha, Mithun Chakraborty — and quickly added Hema Malini to the list.
Harooon’s favourite movies include Mithun starrers “Jagir” (1984), “Boxer” (1984) and “Disco Dancer” (1982) and Amitabh and Dharmendra starrer “Ram Balram” (1980).
“I’m forgetting the names, it was a long time ago,” Haroon said with a smile, remembering the times when Myanmar theatres had benches instead of seats.
But for Rohingya women watching a movie in a theatre was a strict no-no.
Tasleema, 21, stayed behind a tattered, shabby curtain with her one-year-old son in her arms.
Asked whether she used to watch Hindi movies, Tasleema told her husband Adbul Kalam in her native Rohingya language: “I can almost understand what he is asking, but I can’t reply.”
“Our women were never allowed to go out that much. My wife and other women never used to watch movies,” Kalam said in Hindi. “Now they have started going out a bit after coming here.”
At Channi Rama in south Jammu, Saitera Begum, 20, shakes her head when asked whether she used to watch Hindi movies. “Muslim women do not go to watch movies in Burma,” she said, according to her relative who translated her words in Hindi.
More than a dozen Rohingya women IANS interviewed said they never used to watch Hindi movies. A majority of them spoke in broken Hindi or did not speak in Hindi at all.
Haroon said the theatre in which he used to watch movies in Myanmar had a capacity of 250 and tickets used to cost him about 15 to 20 Burmese kyat.
Leaving Myanmar in 2005, he reached India after a couple of months in Bangladesh and worked at a chicken farm in Sonipat, where his Hindi improved further. “After one year, my Hindi was fine,” he said.
In Myanmar, since Haroon’s time, theatres, taste of movies and stars have changed.
Suhail Khan, 21, sporting a white skull cap, told IANS: “I like Shah Rukh (Khan) for his heart and Aamir Khan for his brain. I have listed all the movies I watched in a small book.”
Sitting on a wooden bench, he remembered how he loved coffee, cake, paratha at theatres in Myanmar.
“In Buthidoung (in Myanmar), there are big movie halls now and the ticket charge was 200 kyats when I left Burma in 2012. Now it should be around 500.”
Khan also said girls hardly came to theatres. “Girls would be thrown out if they come,” he said, adding things were slowly changing.
“In other cities girls had started watching movies by the time we left.”
(Nikhil M. Babu can be contacted at nikhil.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi : The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Central government to file a comprehensive report detailing the facilities being provided to Rohingya refugees staying at two camps in Haryana, saying “let us try to solve human problems first”.
A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud said the report should be based on data about basic facilities like water, hygiene, toilets and medical facilities being provided to the Rohingyas in the Mewat and Faridabad camps.
The court order came as the Central government said it could not offer Rohingya refugees more basic facilities than what it was providing its own people including those living in slums.
The next hearing will take place on May 9 when the report will be considered.
Facing a mounting attack by the refugees’s petitioner on the denial of basic facilities, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta raised questions on the spate of petitions filed on behalf of Rohingyas — a point he had made during the last hearing.
The government on March 19 questioned the credentials of the petitioners seeking to block deportation of Rohingya refugees, saying the genesis of the PILs threaten to change the country’s demography and destabilise it.
The petitioners on Monday demanded a court commissioner be sent to inquire into the conditions of the camps while senior counsel Rajeev Dhavan urged the court to ask the National Human Rights Commission — which he described as the custodian of human rights, civil liberty and socio-economic charter — to submit a report on the condition of refugees in Rohingya camps.
Both the suggestions were resisted by the government with Mehta offering to file the report.
The petitioners said the basic facilities that a human being should get under the Constitution’s Article 21 were being denied to Rohingya refugees.
Telling the court that Rohingyas were living in pathetic conditions, Dhavan said Rohingya refugees were a “separate class of people who have nowhere to go. They have no means to support themselves. This is a peculiar situation which is not there in any slums…”.
As Justice Chandrachud said the fundamental right to life is not just confined to Rohingya refugees but to every slum dweller, Dhavan said an Indian slum dweller can approach the elected representatives for help but Rohingyas can’t.
“They are helpless. They can’t approach anybody. Can’t go to anyone,” Dhavan said pointing out that “they are the most powerless of the powerless. They too have rights under Article 21”.
Making common cause with the Central government, senior counsel Mahesh Jethmalani said he supported the position taken by it and there could be no “privilege enclave” for Rohingya refugees.
Jethmalani appeared for one of those supporting the government’s stand on Rohingya refugees.
Defending the “push back” policy to prevent the Rohingya refugees from crossing the border into India, he said accommodating Rohingyas who have already entered was itself a difficult task.
He said “we can’t throw open our border and allow Rohingyas to come” as he taunted the “public spirited” petitioners to also see what happening the next door.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Saeed Naqvi,
Incidents, similar in their chilling monstrosity, came to mind when I saw photographs of a row of Rohingya Muslim young men, on their knees, hands tied behind their back. Gun-wielding military police, lurking within the frame, eventually mowed them down.
This is the face of the horror the world will remember. In a state of funk, Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, has admitted mass graves in one village: Inn Din, 50 km north of the Rakhine state capital, Sittwe. Journalists have scoured many other mass graves.
The other gruesome episode etched on my mind is Srebrenica in Bosnia (1995). Hashimpura in Meerut (1987), of course, is our very own tragedy, still lingering. In each one of these macabre events, Muslim youth had their hands tied behind their backs and shot by the local army.
In the latest massacre of the Rohingya in August 2017, the local Buddhist clergy and army turned upon the Muslims. The number killed exceeds 6,700, according to the NGO Doctors without Borders.
In Srebrenica, the orthodox Christian troops of the Bosnian-Serbian army murdered 7,000 Muslim youth and expelled 20,000 civilians from the area.
In Hashimpura, 42 young men were lined up along a nearby irrigation canal and shot by soldiers of the Provincial Armed Constabulary. These soldiers were Hindus. Can their denomination be spelt out? Apparently not, given the manner in which Asaduddin Owaisi of the Ittehadul Muslimeen has been shouted down for having dared to mention Muslims as “martyrs” because in the latest outrage it is mostly them who have been killed by terrorists.
Owaisi was making a simple point. Patriotism of Indian Muslims is regularly challenged on prime time television which places them on the wrong side of the secular line. But five out of seven killed in the Sunjwan Army camp happened to be Muslims. Why is this detail missing from reports? Such stories would go some distance in bridging the communal divide. No, said the anchors almost in chorus, “Owaisi is communalising the Army”. Pray, how? “By reporting that five of the seven killed in the camp were Muslims”? Muslims must never upstage Hindu soldiers in the martyrdom stakes?
Given this attitude, the killers of the 42 Muslims in Hashimpura must be seen only as instruments of the “secular” state. That 19 PAC personnel, under platoon commander Surinder Pal Singh, rounded up Muslims in the Hashimpura neighbourhood of Meerut, should be blandly reported without mentioning religious identities. Religious identity must only be mentioned if terrorists turn out to be Muslims, which is what they are when police shoots them down. The number of youth taken away is still unclear, but the police narrative suggests 42, mostly weavers and daily wage earners, who were taken in a truck to the upper Ganga canal in Murad Nagar, near Ghaziabad.
The men were blindfolded and shot. Their bodies were dumped in the canal. This was not the only such operation following a series of communal clashes in Meerut that year since March.
On May 24, 2007, 20 years after the massacre, 36 members of victims’ families filed applications under the Right to Information Act at the office of the Director General of Police in Lucknow. The inquiry revealed that all the accused remained in service. In their Annual Confidential Reports there was not even a hint of their involvement in the Hashimpura massacre. The secular state was protecting its own.
The case has dragged on, zig-zagged without any evidence of the establishment really searching for justice. News is expected from the High Court on February 20. Reporters recall the Minister of State for Home P. Chidambaram outside his North Block office actually scream at officials. “Crush them,” he shouted. He was very hands-on during the Meerut riots and the aftermath. Subramaniam Swamy actually named Chidambaram as an accomplice but the allegation, coming from Swamy, became prima facie suspect. In the fullness of time, the PAC men involved in the case, including Surinder Pal Singh, have all departed to their maker, one by one.
I have given the fairly commonplace details of the tragic saga of Muslims in the Hashimpura case simply to establish the contrast with massacres in Srebrenica and Rakhine in Myanmar. Orthodox Christians in one instance and Buddhists in the other brazenly targeted Muslims and for which they have been or are being punished. But in India the secular edifice would be weakened if the religious identity of police or army men who kill Muslims is mentioned. And the case will be dragged on eternally.
In Serbia-Bosnia, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded that what happened in Srebrenica was “genocide”. It pinned the blame on senior officers in the Bosnian Serbian Army.
Bill Richardson, former Governor of New Mexico and US Ambassador to the UN, resigned last week from a Myanmar Advisory Board on the Rohingya crisis. He called it a pro-government “cheerleading squad”. Richardson has been a friend of the country’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. This did not prevent him from expressing his anger at what he said was a whitewash in which she was complicit. “She has developed the arrogance of power”, he said.
For the horrors of Srebrenica, senior commander Ratko Mladic and a host of his accomplices have been awarded long sentences at the International Court of Justice. In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi and her military accomplices are inching towards global opprobrium and eventual justice.
Why then are the perpetrators of Hashimpura, the oldest of the three massacres, still scot-free?
Supposing Owaisi were to lift the scab from another raw wound and say “wheels of justice, even when the complainants are Muslims, move faster in non-Muslim theocratic states than in pretentious secular ones”. Would he be shouted down again?
Most Indians shy away from a glaring reality. Eruptions in former Yugoslavia and Myanmar took place when Muslims were in bad odour globally after the wars in the Arab world.
Communal clashes in India, particularly police versus people, have been endemic since the Partition of 1947. And the world does not take much notice because it is a routine “internal affair” of a sovereign state.
(A senior commentator on political and diplomatic affairs, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on saeednaqvi@hotmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
—IANS
