As we have reported earlier, 31 refugees who were stranded between the India-Bangladesh border in Tripura were handed over to the state police after talks between the BSF and their Bangladeshi counterparts did not yield any fruitful results.
Now, the UNHCR has claimed that 27 of the 31 arrested are registered with the global agency as refugees and that they had been living in Jammu for the last several years. Urging the Indian government to not detain or deport the refugees, the agency remarked that “a family of five Rohingya was returned to Myanmar in January 2019” despite being “registered with UNHCR as asylum seekers”.
As is most obvious, India is not obligated to heed the urges of UNHCR as we are not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee convention. Moreover, there are serious security threats associated with Rohingyas in India which the agency conveniently chooses to ignore.
Rohingya refugee camps have been strongly suspected to be breeding grounds for radicalization and terror activities. Rohingyas have been arrested in the past for involvement in human trafficking. They have been arrested for involvement in dacoities. There has also been the suspicion that there is a deliberate attempt to Islamicize Hindu-majority Jammu by settling Rohingyas. Rohingyas are known to have committed massacres of Hindus. It has been confirmed by Amnesty itself.
Under such circumstances, it appears bewildering that the UNHCR would insist that India take no against the demographic invasion. Take a moment to consider the duplicity of the global agency in its treatment of Saudi Arabia and India. The Sunni Islamic country deports hundreds of Rohingyas and the UNHCR utters hardly a whisper while India deports a handful of them and yet the agency wastes no time in expressing their ‘dissatisfaction’.