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India
This Week in AsiaPolitics

India lambasted for deporting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar in violation of international law

  • The move to deport the Rohingya refugees happened just as India enacted a controversial new citizenship law
  • The Rohingya are at risk of becoming ‘victims of genocide’ amid the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, a rights advocate says

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Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar gather outside a mosque in Jammu, the capital of Kashmir, India, on March 7, 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE
Junaid Kathju
India’s newly enacted law purportedly aimed at giving citizenship to persecuted refugees in the country and its first round of deportation of Myanmar’s vulnerable Rohingya minority have been slammed by rights advocates as “extremely dangerous” moves and a violation of international law.
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The Indian government unveiled the rules for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and implemented the controversial law on March 11, more than four years after it was passed by Parliament in December 2019.

The CAA grants citizenship to the followers of six religions – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and Christians – who came to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan before 2015 and faced religious persecution. Muslims, however, are conspicuously absent from the list.

As a result, the CAA does not apply to the Rohingya, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, rendering them without basic rights within India.

Abdul Rohin, a 50-year-old Rohingya Muslim, came to India in 2014 with his family. Living in the northern state of Jammu, he said that he, his wife and eight children left Myanmar amid the “atrocities” being committed against Rohingya by government forces.

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“The ethnic cleansing of Rohingya started in 2012 but at that time, not much of it was reported. So my family and I took asylum in India,” he said.

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