The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas in Myanmar by its military junta is now the biggest international headline of the day, with ghastly accounts of how their homes are being burnt down to cinders, how landmines are littered all over in the fields as these hapless, stateless people cross to escape the firing squad. When they are not drowning or facing bullets, they are being massacred by majority Buddhists of Burma, who are citing the 1982 citizenship law to perpetrate one of the worst excesses of 21st century anywhere in the world.

But the Indian government, as well as a substantial section of the media, wants to deport the Rohingyas who have braved unfathomable dangers and literally cheated death to arrive here in India, mostly via Bangladesh, or by sea on the Bay of Bengal shores, saying that most of them are illegal Bangladeshi migrants, with terror links.

That’s not just a travesty of India’s secular tradition of giving refuge to those suffering religious persecution in their homelands regardless of the religion, it’s also thoroughly unconstitutional and against international humanitarian laws guiding these policies.

In fact, the Supreme Court has asked the Centre why it wants to deport the Rohingyas, almost 1,20,000 of whom have fled Myanmar in the recent past as the military junta tries every means to obliterate their existence from the country’s territory. Centre’s hypocrisy has been duly exposed because it had adopted a completely different stance when Modi said that Bangladeshi Hindus would be given refuge during the Assam elections. Similarly, the persecuted Hindus in Pakistan are often cited in various high-octane speeches by various members of the ruling regime, to whip up “Hindus under threat” hysteria.

Until 2014, India has had a “golden tradition” of welcoming victims of religious persecution, whether they are Hindus and Christians of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, millions of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists of East Pakistan in 1971 after the Bangladesh war, many religious minorities of Afghanistan, Tibetans persecuted by the Chinese. However, under the Narendra Modi regime, we have unequal treatment for the Rohingyas of Myanmar, who are clearly facing as big a genocide as those that were carried out in Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia and more.

It’s unbelievable that the ministry of home affairs’ September 2015 notification under the Passports Act and the Foreigners Act welcomes “Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsis and Buddhists” facing religious persecution, clearly omitting Muslims. How is it that the fundamental right to religion, right to equality, right to life and liberty are ignored when it comes to Muslim refugees, particularly the Rohingyas?

It has been amply demonstrated that Rohingyas are neither “terrorists” as many in the right-leaning, Islamophobic media, as well as the government, would like us to believe, nor are they economic migrants like some Bangladeshis or Afghanis. Rohingyas face the worst plight in South and Southeast Asia, and calls to rescind the Nobel Peace Prize of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese “Iron Lady” for her deafening silence on the Rohingyas, have already been sent out.

Yet, despite this international humanitarian disaster unfolding in our immediate neighbourhood, and a terribly discriminatory citizenship law being used to exterminate an entire group of people, rendering them stateless and landless despite them staying in the land for 13 centuries, the Indian government would be in talks to deport the Rohingyas, practically back to being slaughtered in their own country. This is unacceptable and unpardonable complicity in a war crime, and can never be condoned by the secular citizens of India.

It’s appalling that even as PM Narendra Modi is visiting Myanmar as we write, the rhetoric from the Centre, if MoS Home Kiren Rijiju is to be believed, is this: Rohingyas are all “illegal immigrants”, who have “no basis to live here” and “anybody who’s an illegal immigrant will be deported”. However, the stunning silence on where they would go once are in fact deported is proof enough that Centre doesn’t want to rock that boat.

How can any government in a democratic republic that is still ruled by its Constitution turn back people who are facing sure death – either by bullets, or starvation, or by being hacked, or by being burnt down, or by drowning – in their homeland which refuses to call them their own?

First of all, instead of the deportation talk, what the Centre must do is put pressure on Myanmar to change its draconian citizenship laws, while accepting the refugees in this land of multiple religions and constitutional plurality.

India is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and countless global treaties and conventions that have sought to end discrimination on the basis of religion, race, domicile, gender and other indices of separation. If India could boycott South Africa, along with half the world, during the country’s immoral apartheid years, why wouldn’t it extend the same curtness to Burma?

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