They have been declared the most persecuted community, not the most radicalized as is being portrayed by the Indian media.

Our primary relationship with everybody is that of humanity. Then come religion and nation. If we fail in maintaining human relations, we can never be religious or loyalists of our lands. Just because some person in history has struck a line called border doesn’t make others any less of a human. And nobody can claim to be in love with anything while being an insensitive and harsh human. It’s this stage when you lose respect for your religious other or national other that you become terrorists.

For instance, an Indian TV journalist who’s the best at shouting amongst his peers recently opposed giving shelter to 40,000 Rohingya refugees by saying; ‘Let Rohingyas be found floating in the Indian ocean. Don’t dump them here’, as if they were garbage. These Rohingyas have rightly been described as the ‘World’s Most Persecuted Minority’, not by any Muslim body but by the United Nations which otherwise doesn’t have a good record of delivering justice to Muslims. The world media has reported thousands of deaths, rapes, and other atrocities on Rohingya in the Rakhine state of Burma by the government forces.

Unfortunately, the Government of India has hit a new low. Although the world has not done much to help Rohingya, India has exhibited communal posture by moving to deport Rohingya Muslim refugees back to Burma to face execution which they had somehow succeeded to escape from. Human Rights Watch calls it against the ‘customary International law’ & Amnesty International says it’s ‘morally questionable’ if Delhi does it. It’s true that India is not a signatory to 1951 Refugee Convention or even its 1967 protocol but dragging them to Burma where their children are being killed & women raped, is a monstrosity. As MP Shashi Tharoor says, this is being done ‘purely because Rohingyas are Muslims’. Forget Tharoor, in our J&K, apart from Indian citizenship, India wants J&K state subjects for the West-Pakistan Refugees, just because they are Hindus and our own state subjects who were hounded out to Pakistan during Jammu massacre, are not allowed back, despite there being a law in their favor- The J&K Migrants Resettlement Act 1982 or Bill 9- simply because they are Muslims. There was no BJP then. India has always been Pro-majority in such cases- Congress does it subtly while BJP does it with chest-thumping.

Consider this, Zoroastrian Parsis are welcome, Tibetan Buddhists are welcome, Bangladeshi Hindus are welcome, West Pakistani Hindus are Welcome, Afghan Refugee (85%Hindus & Sikhs) are welcome, Srilankan Tamil Hindus (with some Christians) are Welcome, Rohingya Muslim, beep beep! National (in)security. The statements come, ‘we stand with Myanmar against ‘terror’.’We are not the World’s Refugee capital’. In fact, in 2016, the Modi government allowed Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh & Pakistan to buy property for self-living, obtain driving licenses, receive PAN and Aadhaar IDs, etc. (TOI-Sep6,17′). There’s no doubt that India’s constitution is secular where everybody is an equal citizen, without any reference to religion. This is why many Muslims decided to stay back at the time of partition. The worry is that it shouldn’t become a country with phoney secular constitution as decoration.

The argument that Islamic nations and Ummah should take care of Rohingyas is a very bad one since the issue is if India really is as secular as its constitution professes. Just to add information here, Saudi Arabia is spending millions in aid and hosts 300,000 Rohingyas mainly in Riyadh. Pakistan also holds 300,000 of them in Karachi. Bangladesh which has only $220 billion GDP has more than half-a-million refugees, out of which 370,000 came in last two weeks alone. Turkey is building camps there and pressurizing the world community to act against Burma, and successfully so. Almost all the countries and organizations from Washington to London to Istanbul have come down heavily on Aung San Suu Kyi and the military junta of Burma. Some countries like China are complicit by being somewhat quiet, but ironically the Indian prime minister visited Myanmar during this genocide and expressed solidarity with it. The Govt. representatives come on TV and say, ‘we should stand up with Myanmar against terror since we have the same problem in Kashmir’. In fact, it wasn’t quite good for India that Aung Suu Kyi compared her Rohingya issue with that of Kashmir. This heartless woman in an attempt to find a common ground with Modi has actually hurt Modi’s India by insinuating that Delhi does the same in Kashmir what Rangoon is doing in Rakhine. Given the global support for Rohingya, this common ground was not healthy for India. A small group among Rohingyas might have turned to violence but it needs to be seen in perspective. They’re not violent people but such a worst persecution can turn quite a few of them into rebels. It’s natural. The Rohingya have been declared the most persecuted community, not the most radicalized as is being portrayed by the Indian media. They are not illegal immigrants but running away from death. All the western countries have opened doors for refugees of all kinds.

The whole point here is that India should live up to its own constitution by exhibiting human values and stop capitalizing on the growing trend of Islamophobia, for electoral gains. The Muslims might be a minority in India but it’s the 2nd largest Muslim community in the world. It must take them & their sensitivities along to become the Asian super power, not a Hindu power.