Refused refuge

I

nside her family’s room in a shared shelter in Kalindi Kung, a Rohingya refugee settlement in the Indian capital New Delhi, Shaheena tried to make some space for a visitor. But that proved nearly impossible, as the room served as both living and sleeping space for her and her son’s family, as well as storage for all their belongings. 

Hanging across the tiny room of weathered plywood and tarpaulin are clothes of various sizes, while shoes, plastic containers full of water, and an assortment of utensils are scattered on one side.

“We have had zero electricity for over a year,” said Shaheena, who, like the other Rohingya refugees in this story, uses a pseudonym. “Our drinking water is provided to us after every third day of the week. Men, women, and children use toilets out in the field. That is the life we have here.“

And like all the other Rohingya refugee camps in India, the Kalindi Kung settlement gets no direct support from the Indian government. There are Rohingya settlements in at least 10 of India’s states and Union Territories, but the most sizeable are in slum areas in the cities of Delhi, Hyderabad, Jammu, and Nuh.

The Rohingya are a mainly Muslim ethnic minority who call Rakhine State in Myanmar home, but who have become the world’s largest stateless peoples of 2.8 million. Denied citizenship by Myanmar’s military authorities who have also earmarked them for abuse, many Rohingya have been forced to flee genocidal violence in Rakhine in the last three decades. 

Today Bangladesh hosts the largest number of Rohingya refugees, where they are estimated to have now reached more than one million. Malaysia is second with more than 160,000, and India is a far third with nearly 95,000. That makes the Rohingya practically invisible in a country that has been declared the world’s most populous with its more than 1.45 billion people.  

The recently concluded Delhi assembly election, though, has not only reminded many of the Rohingya in India, but also of the suffering of people like them in host countries that have no clear laws on refugees. 

Already stereotyped by politicians – mainly from the Bharatiya Jhanata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – as “illegal migrants” taking jobs and shelter from Indian citizens, Rohingya once more became targets of increasingly hostile rhetoric from political parties in the runup to the Feb. 5 Delhi election.

Last December, then Delhi Chief Minister Atishi Marlena even announced on X that “the Aam Aadmi Party [AAP] government of Delhi … is taking every possible step to ensure that the Rohingyas do not get the rights of Delhiites. Today, the education department of the Delhi government has passed a strict order that no Rohingya should be given admission in the government schools of Delhi.”

Source: Rohingya Refugee Movement

“The media and politicians run campaigns in our name that take a toll on us mentally and physically, leaving us feeling threatened,” Rohingya activist Sabber Kyaw Min told Asia Democracy Chronicles (ADC) weeks before the Delhi polls. “With the elections, we are being dragged into the spotlight again. This criminalization has now impacted even small children who are now being denied school admissions for 2025.”

Shaheen’s 30-year-old son Mohammad recounted that police told him not to travel for work until the elections were over. He added that whenever it is election season, the Rohingya community is hounded by authorities, who say that the refugees are a threat to national security. “Police took my fingerprints and footprints,” Mohammed said. “And we were also told to take our identity cards to the nearest police station,” said the father of two. “We always fear that we will be either arrested or deported.”

That fear has intensified in Delhi following BJP’s win in the recent election. Days before the poll, Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared that the party would “free Delhi of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and Rohingya.” 

By the last day of February, Shah had directed the Delhi police to clear the capital of “illegal migrants” and deport them. According to an unnamed senior official quoted by NDTV, an “audit” is currently being done in Delhi “in colonies which have a major chunk of Bangladeshi and Rohingya population.”

A picky host?

India currently hosts more than 200,000 refugees from various countries, including Sri Lanka, China (Tibet), Afghanistan, and Myanmar. It is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, however. The country also lacks a dedicated national refugee law or framework to comprehensively address the rights and protections of refugees, said Angshuman Choudhary, an Indian researcher and expert on North East India and Myanmar.

Instead, he said, refugee issues in India are dealt with under a combination of domestic laws, executive decisions, and international principles, often resulting in inconsistent or arbitrary treatment of refugee populations like that of the Rohingya.

Choudhary pointed out that without strong legal safeguards to protect refugees, let alone a protection-centric refugee law, the Rohingya in particular are left “exposed to arbitrary detention and forced deportation to Myanmar, where they face a serious threat of persecution and violence – not only from the military regime but also from the Arakan Army, a Rakhine Buddhist ethnic armed group that controls nearly all Rohingya areas in Rakhine State.

“The basic requirement is a national refugee law that distinguishes refugees from other forms of undocumented migrants, offering strong protection to the Rohingya fleeing war and persecution in Myanmar,” he said. “But such a law seems like a pipe dream for now.“

India does have two parallel systems for refugees: one for those from neighboring countries, except for Myanmar, and the other for those from Myanmar and non-neighboring countries. Refugees under the former category are supposed to be under the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) while those belonging to the latter are handled by the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR). At least 22,000 Rohingya in India are registered with UNHCR, but in the last several years, their U.N.-issued documents have no longer been considered enough for them to access state services, including education for their children.

Some Rohingya parents said that schools have been asking them to present Aadhaar cards – India’s biometric identification system reserved primarily for Indian residents – to secure their children’s admission.

Aadhaar is a prerequisite for opening bank accounts, obtaining SIM cards, and securing employment, making it critical for integration and access to services. Indian courts have rejected pleas to grant Aadhaar identification to Rohingya refugees, saying that possessing this digital identity is not a universal right and is tied to legal residency or citizenship status. 

On March 11 last year, India’s Citizenship Amendment Act came into effect, granting citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan – specifically Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees, and Christians – who arrived in India before 2015. But since the law notably excludes Muslims, most Rohingya have been left without any pathway to legal recognition or basic rights in India.

Interestingly, it was also in March last year that the Modi-led central government told the Indian Supreme Court that the Rohingya “do not possess fundamental rights to settle in India,” in response to a Public Interest Litigation that sought the release of the Rohingya in detention. The government told the court as well that the continued stay of Rohingya in the country has “serious ramifications for national security.”

That particular month saw a crackdown on Rohingya refugees across India, including in Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Chandigarh, and Delhi.

Detention and deportation

Citing the UNHCR, a Reuters report said that as of September 2024, there were 676 Rohingya in detention across India, with 90 percent of them without “ongoing court cases or sentences pending.” Other reports cite higher figures, as well as note that the detainees have included children below the age of five years and pregnant women.

“Moreover, many Rohingya detainees remain behind bars for years on end, and are forced to endure conditions that – as the December 2024 report “A Lifetime in Detention” by the Azadi Project and Refugees International describes them – are “inhumane and dire,” the report added.

Laila Begum, a Rohingya residing in Kalindi Kunj, said that she was once kept in jail for three months on “unclear grounds.” This was in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting, she added.  

“Police came here and said that because of COVID-19, I will have to show documents,” recalled the 30-year-old who had fled to India with the rest of her family in 2017. “But then I, along with a dozen more, were kept in jail.”

She was released only after she got sick and became unable to move her limbs. Her family has since moved to Bangladesh, she said, but she has no idea exactly where they have ended up. “We cannot get a SIM card here. How would I contact them? I do not know where they are right now and in what condition,” she said.

To be sure, the Modi administration would rather have her leave with her family. It has made no secret that it really rather deport the Rohingya; in 2017, it even announced plans to do so, but was thwarted from carrying out mass deportation because of the global backlash it received. According to media reports, however, India has forcibly deported at least 18 Rohingya to Myanmar since 2021. 

“This approach disregards the principle of non-refoulement under international law and India’s obligations under the ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), which it has ratified,” said Choudhary. “Deportations not only violate this principle but also contravene India’s constitutional right to life, which applies to all individuals within its borders, not just citizens.”

New Delhi-based lawyer Ujjayini Chatterji, who has worked on detention of Rohingya detention cases, said that in 2019, the Indian government introduced a procedure that requires authorities to assess refugee claims before taking any action. The procedure also allows authorities to issue long-term visas to the refugees if their claims are found valid, she said.

“But this process is often ignored, leading to indefinite detentions and deportations without proper evaluation,” Chatterji said. “Such treatment violates international laws that India has agreed to, which protect refugees from being sent back to places where they face danger. It also goes against basic human rights principles like dignity and fairness.”

“Refugees are being treated poorly,” a Rohingya activist said flatly. “As stateless people, our very existence becomes a contentious issue, and it’s deeply traumatic.” ◉

Quratulain Rehbar is a freelance journalist based in India. She has worked in multiple international and Indian media organizations. Her areas of focus include human rights, economics, and climate, as well as the intersection of politics and gender.