GUWAHATI, India: Indian police on Thursday took a five-member Rohingya Muslim family to the border by bus, readying to deport them to neighbouring Myanmar, Reuters reported.
It is the second such group expelled in four months during a crackdown against illegal immigrants.
India’s Hindu nationalist government regards the Rohingya as illegal aliens and a security risk. It has ordered that tens of thousands of the community, who live in small settlements and slums, be identified and repatriated.
The husband, wife and three children comprising the family set to be expelled on Thursday had been arrested and jailed in northeastern Assam state in 2014 for entering India without valid documents, police said.
“These five people are now at the border gate in the adjoining Manipur state, and we are waiting for Myanmar officials to hand them over formally,” Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, Assam’s additional director general of police, told Reuters.
More deportations to follow: Indian police
Jails in Assam held 20 more Myanmar nationals, all arrested for illegal entry, he added. But it was not immediately clear if all were Rohingya, a mostly stateless Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
“We shall send them back to Myanmar once we get their travel permits from that country,” Mahanta said. “Most of them sneaked into India in search of a livelihood.”
India’s first deportation of seven Rohingya men to Myanmar in October sparked fears of further repatriations among those sheltering in its refugee camps, and concern that those returned faced the risk of abuse at the hands of Myanmar authorities.
The government estimates that 40,000 Rohingya live in India in camps across the country, including the capital, New Delhi, having arrived over the years after fleeing violence and persecution in Myanmar, which denies them citizenship.
In August, a United Nations report accused the Myanmar military of committing mass killings and rapes on the Rohingya with “genocidal intent” in 2017 in an operation that drove more than 700,000 of them to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.
Myanmar has denied the charges, saying its military launched a counter-insurgency operation after attacks on security posts by Muslim militants in August last year.
Who exactly are the Rohingyas?
In Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, the Rohingyas are an ethnic minority which predominantly adheres to the Islamic faith. Under the 1982 nationality laws of Myanmar, the community is denied the right to citizenship and is forced to live as an alien in its home country Myanmar, where they mostly reside in the Rakhine state.
The United Nations has termed the Rohingya community as one of the most persecuted communities in the world. Repeated military operations by the Myanmar government over the last few decades has resulted in deaths of thousands of the minority community’s members.
In 2017-2018, a military crackdown against the Rohingyas in Myanmar forced the majority of the community to take refuge in neighbouring countries, primarily in Bangladesh.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel peace laureate and the current State Counsellor (prime minister) of Myanmar, has been repeatedly criticised by international human rights organisations and various governments for her silence on Rohingya persecution.
In September 2018, Canada stripped Aung San Suu Kyi of her honorary Canadian citizenship for failing to stop the Rohingya crisis. She has even kept herself from refuting the military operations against Rohingyas which have been described by the Human Rights Watch as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and by Canada as ‘a genocide’.
