Northeastern View | Rohingya refugees entering India through the Northeast need humanitarian assistance, not punishment
The Indian State must deploy its security assets towards human traffickers, and not the refugees who are merely victims of extraordinary circumstances.
On the evening of July 30, police in Tripura arrested six women from Bangladesh who had allegedly crossed over to India illegally. According to another media report, as many as 29 “Bangladesh nationals” without valid travel papers have been arrested in the state since July 27.
While commenting on these arrests during the ‘Videsh Sampark Programme’ in Agartala on July 29, Ankan Banerjee, who is a joint secretary in the Diaspora Engagement Division of the external affairs ministry (MEA), noted that “Rohingya infiltration” was a “very serious issue.” He also said that it was being “discussed at the highest level” and that the MEA was struggling to push the Rohingya back without the “host country” confirming their nationality.
The detentions, once again, bring to sharp relief the role of Northeast India as a key asylum route for Rohingya refugees. But Banerjee’s statements also capture the serious problems with the Indian state’s understanding of and response to what is essentially an unending humanitarian crisis.
Rohingya refugees and the Northeast
For long, Rohingya refugees have entered India through Northeast India, which shares an 1879 km-long border with the primary transit country, Bangladesh. Many of them have also entered through West Bengal, which shares the longest border with Bangladesh at 2216.7 km.
A 2019 briefing paper by the Mixed Migration Centre notes that most of the movement of Rohingya asylum seekers from Bangladesh to the Northeast happens through Meghalaya and Mizoram. However, Tripura has also been a crossover state of choice for asylum seekers. This is largely because several parts of the 856 km-long Tripura-Bangladesh border remain unfenced.
In recent years, several cases of Rohingya detentions have emerged from two states: Tripura and Assam. For instance, in April 2018, 18 of them were detained by Tripura police from a Guwahati-bound bus in Khowai district. Next year, Assam police arrested at least 30 Rohingya refugees from Churaibari village near the border with Tripura. In 2020, three Rohingya women who entered Assam through Mizoram were arrested in Cachar District.
Assam has been the most proactive among all Northeastern states in cracking down on Rohingya asylum seekers and treating them as criminal trespassers. Currently, 89 Rohingya refugees are detained in the Matia Transit Camp in Assam’s Goalpara district, some of whom have completed their sentences.
Most recently, in November 2023, the National Investigative Agency (NIA) arrested 26 people from Tripura and Assam for allegedly running a human trafficking racket for Bangladeshi nationals and Rohingya in India months after the Assam police arrested eight individuals for running a similar network.
Refugees, not infiltrators
When the Myanmar military unleashed genocidal violence against the Rohingya in northern Rakhine State after an insurgent attack in August 2017, hundreds of thousands of them fled to Bangladesh. At that time, the Indian government put the Northeast on high alert in anticipation of asylum crossings into India. The key concern for the government at that time was not the unfolding humanitarian crisis, but the infiltration of Rohingya militants into India.
This emanates from the Indian state’s narrow and securitised understanding of the Rohingya crisis, which is at its core, a protracted political and humanitarian emergency. The Rohingya flee to India via Bangladesh not because they wish to engage in criminal endeavours, but because they are forced to. Bereft of citizenship rights in Myanmar and dignified living conditions in the squalid camps of southeastern Bangladesh, they cross over to India seeking a better life.
It is this collective vulnerability of the Rohingya refugees that human traffickers exploit to make money. The Indian state must deploy its security assets towards these traffickers, and not the refugees who are merely victims of extraordinary circumstances. Instead of taking a punitive approach towards the refugees, New Delhi and governments in various border states in the Northeast must join hands to rehabilitate them in asylum shelters.
Because the current Myanmar junta, much like its civilian predecessor, doesn’t recognise the Rohingya as citizens, it is practically impossible for the Indian government to deport them using standard protocols. In that view, India, which has not ratified the Refugee Convention (1951) but has signed the Global Compact on Refugees (2018), must treat them as stateless refugees and offer them protection from deportation. In reality, as media reports around the recent arrests in Tripura indicate, Rohingya refugees are often mistakenly conflated with Bangladeshi nationals (who are not stateless).
A tricky bilateral issue
Banerjee, the JS at MEA, in his recent remarks in Agartala also alluded to India’s warm relationship with the Sheikh Hasina government in Dhaka in the context of the Rohingya issue. Since 2017, Dhaka has grown increasingly anxious at the prospect of permanently hosting the nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees who live in Cox’s Bazar. It seeks early repatriation to Myanmar, a process that has become complicated due to the ongoing civil war next door.
In that regard, any pushback of Rohingya refugees by India to Bangladesh could sour Delhi’s equation with Dhaka. Bangladesh anyway remains less than happy with India’s unwillingness to resolve the Rohingya crisis at source by urging Myanmar to recognise them as citizens as well as provide adequate humanitarian aid to sustain the camps in Cox’s Bazar.
This diplomatic dilemma, however, should not come in the way of India treating the Rohingya asylum seekers as people in need of aid, rather than threats to India’s demographic sanctity, which these minuscule groups of refugees most certainly are not.
Angshuman Choudhury is a New Delhi-based researcher and writer, formerly an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research and focuses on Northeast India and Myanmar. The views expressed are personal.
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