Manipur police conducting checks at the Moreh area (Manipur) bordering Myanmar on September 14.
NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 14 (Reuters): The Indian government on Thursday told the Supreme Court that Rohingya refugees were “a threat to national security”, pushing back against condemnation of its plans to deport them.
India’s top court is hearing a challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s decision to deport Rohingya Muslims, filed by two Rohingyas living in Delhi who fled their village in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State about six years ago.
The decision to deport Rohingyas comes as Myanmar’s military crackdown in Rakhine has forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to seek shelter in Bangladesh, in a process the U.N. has described as ethnic cleansing. Myanmar says its forces are carrying out their legitimate duty to restore order after guerrilla attacks on Aug. 25 on security posts and an army camp in which about a dozen people were killed.
Close to 40,000 Rohingya Muslims live in India after fleeing Myanmar over the past decade. Nearly 15,000 have received refugee documentation, according to the United Nations, but India wants to deport them all. Rohingyas are denied citizenship in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and regarded as illegal immigrants, despite claiming roots that date back centuries.
Some groups allied to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have stepped up calls for Rohingyas to leave, and Modi said last week that India shared Myanmar’s concerns about “extremist violence” in Rakhine state.
On Thursday, a senior lawyer representing India’s government told the Supreme Court that “the state considers that Rohingyas are a threat to national security.” Intelligence agencies suspect that Rohingya Muslim leaders in India are in touch with Pakistan-based militant groups, the lawyer said. The lawyer declined to be named because an affidavit the home ministry is preparing to file with the court has not yet been finalised.
Bangladesh is also growing hostile to the Rohingya, more than 400,000 of whom live there after fleeing Myanmar since the early 1990s. From Bangladesh, some Rohingyas have crossed into India.
Rohingya issue can become security concern for NE, warns B’desh envoy
NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 14 (HINDUSTAN TIMES): The mass exodus of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has to be tackled urgently as it has the potential of becoming a “huge security concern” for the entire region, including India’s insurgency-affected northeastern states, the Bangladeshi envoy said on Thursday.
Bangladesh is looking to India, as a regional power, to play a larger role in persuading Myanmar to both halt the exodus of Rohingyas from Rakhine state and to ensure the repatriation of those who have fled to other countries, high commissioner Syed Muazzem Ali told Hindustan Times.
“I am more concerned about my own region but the presence of Rohingya refugees elsewhere could be a security risk for everybody else. It could be used even in your northeast India,” Ali, a former foreign secretary, said.
The envoy evaded a direct response to a question on reports that groups such as the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh and Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba had established links with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, but said the Rohingya refugees could “fall victim to the various organisations who are trying to destabilise the region”.
“I’m sure you’re well aware of those destabilising factors (which) we have been working overtime (to counter) during the past four decades, even in the context of northeast India,” he said.
