The Jammu and Kashmir government has asked the Indian government to decide the fate of the Rohingya refugees living in the restive region, but until such a decision is taken, the refugees should be treated with dignity.
Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who leads a government with limited powers formed after India scrapped the region’s autonomy in 2019, told the media that the Indian government needs to address the issue of Rohingya refugees with compassion and clarity.
“The central government should decide what to do about them. If they can be sent back, they should be sent back. But if we cannot send them back, we cannot let them starve or freeze to death.”
“We did not bring them here. If the central government’s policy has changed, they can take them wherever they want. But as long as they are here, we are responsible for caring for them. They are human beings and must not be treated like animals,” Omar said.
His remarks came days after revenue officials in the Hindu-dominated Jammu province launched a crackdown on landlords renting out properties to Rohingya besides cutting power and electricity to nearly 407 families.
According to Rohingya community leaders, nearly 5,000-6,000 Rohingya live in shacks built on such rented properties in several clusters in Jammu. Local media reports said nearly 13,700 foreigners were living in the region, many of them Rohingya and Bangladeshis.
The refugees do a variety of jobs in the unorganized sector, do not receive any official assistance and their children study mostly in community-built religious schools as they cannot take admission to local schools.
The region, comprising two main provinces of Kashmir and Jammu, has a history of hospitality towards refugees. More than 140 Tibetan Muslim families took refuge in Kashmir Valley after fleeing the Chinese crackdown on an uprising in Tibet in the 1960s. They live in two main clusters in the capital Srinagar and their numbers have grown since.
Similarly, thousands of refugees fleeing the violence from West Pakistan during the partition of British India settled in Jammu, where they were granted the region’s residency after 2019.
But India’s Hindu rightwing has been hostile to Rohingya, often clubbing them with illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
This hostility is especially felt in Jammu, where members of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party termed the “settlement of Rohingya and Bangladeshis in Jammu city a major political conspiracy” and demanded an investigation by India’s internal intelligence agency, CBI, to identify “the people involved in facilitating their settlement.”
“It must be determined who brought and settled the Rohingya and Bangladeshis in Jammu, and stringent action, including prosecution and imprisonment, should be taken against them,” BJP chief spokesperson Sunil Sethi told reporters on Monday.
He said NGOs have played a role in settling Rohingya in the region and called for a probe into the sources of funding of these organizations.