Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Rohingya Wound Festers; Can India Stay ‘Neutral’?

The recent reported “arrangement” between Dhaka and Yangon may lead to nothing. But the announcement deserves at least a conditional welcome because it might hold out the hope, howsoever slender, of a secure future for one of the world’s most persecuted stateless minorities.

As it happens, the overwhelming majority of these Indo-Aryan ethno-linguistic people concentrated in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, follow Islam. But despite a substantial migrant population in Saudi Arabia, that doesn’t seem to mean that orthodox Islamic communities hold Rohingyas in high esteem. Indigenous Myanmarese have always looked down on them for being darker skinned and for their suspected roots in the Indian subcontinent.

Before the Rohingya genocide of 2017, when more than 7,40,000 fled to Bangladesh, an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya had lived in Myanmar for many decades. Nevertheless, Myanmar’s 1982 nationality law denied them citizenship rights. There were also restrictions on their freedom of movement, access to state education and civil service jobs. The Yangon authorities don’t even recognise the term “Rohingya”, preferring to refer to the community as “Bengali” to highlight its supposed foreign origins. Finally, Myanmar formally banned the word “Rohingya” on March 29, 2014, demanding that members of the minority group be registered as “Bengalis” in Myanmar’s 2014 Census, the first to be held in three decades.

However, no realistic assessment of the future can any longer overlook the fact that various armed insurrections by the Rohingya have taken place since the 1940s and that the population as a whole suffered military crackdowns in 1978, 1991-1992, 2012, 2015, and particularly in 2016-2018. Most of the Rohingya population was driven then into neighbouring Bangladesh. By December 2017, an estimated 6,25,000 refugees from Rakhine had crossed the border into Bangladesh since August 2017 in a brutal sequence that UN officials and Human Rights Watch observers described as ethnic cleansing. The UN human rights envoy to Myanmar reported that “the long history of discrimination and persecution against the Rohingya community... could amount to crimes against humanity”, and warned of an unfolding genocide.

The path to the recent agreement was paved by signs of increasing incitement of hatred and religious intolerance by “ultra-nationalist Buddhists” while the Myanmar security forces are reportedly busy conducting “summary executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and ill-treatment, and forced labour” against the community.

Before the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis and the military crackdowns in 2016 and 2017, Myanmar’s Rohingya population was close to 1.4 million, chiefly in the northern Rakhine townships, where the population was between 80 and 98 per cent Rohingya. Since 2015, over nine lakh Rohingya refugees have fled to southeastern Bangladesh alone, and more to other surrounding countries, and major Muslim nations like Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. More than one lakh Rohingyas in Myanmar are confined in squalid camps for internally displaced persons. Others are periodically exposed to brutal exploitation.

Brief reports of the supposed agreement don’t give any details or say anything about where returning Rohingyas are to be accommodated. Or their status. Obviously, citizenship rights will still be denied since the notification refers to them as only “displaced residents”. The calculated use of that term seeks to absolve Yangon of all responsibility for the targeted ill-treatment of — and violence against — Myanmar’s Rohingyas. No wonder some younger militants, especially some who take their Islam seriously, look for a solution to organisations like the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army which operates primarily in Myanmar's Rakhine State and along the border with Bangladesh. There is talk, too, of “an autonomous Muslim zone” in Rakhine.

Associating the name “Rohingya” with some such drastic solution, the military junta that has controlled Myanmar since 1962 refuses to use it. In fact, the authors of the 2014 census forced Rohingyas to identify themselves as “Bengali”. Many Rohingya equate this denial of their name with denying their basic rights and identity, and the UK Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar agrees. The name “Bengali” implies that far from being native to Rakhine or Myanmar, the Rohingya are recent interlopers with no historic hereditary ties to a region that is the only home that generations of Rohingya have ever known.

India is carefully neutral on this aspect of the controversy because although Narendra Modi’s Hindu revivalist ruling party has instituted a fast-track mechanism for the repatriation of Hindus stranded in neighbouring countries, it has no wish to become involved in their citizenship battles. Muslims already account for more than 172 million Indians (14.2 per cent of the population) with Rakhine State a western coastal administrative division of Myanmar covering approximately 36,762 square kilometres. Sittwe (formerly called Akyab) is the capital. Any further accretion of Muslim numbers is dreaded by Indian Hindus whose ideal remains a monocultural Aryan Hindu republic. But even if India is not directly involved in this myth-making, the repercussions of the Rohingya challenge on an assertive Muslim minority may one day drag all the countries of the region into the mounting humanitarian crisis.