BENGALURU – Fisherman Nye Nge Soe was returning from a night’s work to his village in Tanintharyi, the southernmost region of Myanmar, when he saw dark figures bobbing among the waves about 50m from the shore.

“It was almost 1am. From my boat, I saw a ship dropping many people into the sea. I could hear them shouting,” Mr Nye Nge Soe told The Straits Times over the phone, when describing events on the night of May 8.

“They had life jackets, but the water is 2m deep there. There were old people and women who could not swim. A ship crew (from our village) threw them a long rope. I watched the people swim to the shore holding this rope,” the 22-year-old said.

It was only in the light of dawn that Mr Nye Nge Soe realised that the people they had rescued were Rohingya – an ethnic Muslim minority group in Myanmar.

As the villagers gave the new arrivals food, water and dry clothes, the refugees told them that they had been deported from India.

In the same week that India was exchanging fire with Pakistan on the western border, its government deported at least 40 Rohingya refugees from May 6 to 9 from its eastern coast to Myanmar.

UN urges India to stop deportations

The UN has launched an inquiry into reports that the refugees were forced off an Indian Navy vessel and into the Andaman Sea, which it called “unconscionable” and “an affront to human decency”.

About the same time, India “pushed back” another 50 Rohingya men and women from the north-eastern state of Assam into Bangladesh. This means that instead of formal repatriation, they were sent walking across the border.

The UN and global refugee rights organisations have urged India to stop deporting Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar, where they face life threats, persecution and ethnic cleansing.

Many Rohingya fled a brutal crackdown by Myanmar’s military in 2017 – with the atrocities rooted in decades of state repression and discrimination that rendered them stateless by denying them citizenship.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar in waves, before and after the military’s violent 2017 “clearance operations”, which saw their largest exodus as about 700,000 sought refuge in Bangladesh, which borders Myanmar.

An estimated 40,000 Rohingya people live in India.

Analysts say that India is undertaking these elaborate, sweeping actions against Rohingya refugees as part of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) hard political stance against “illegal Muslim immigrants” that has reaped electoral dividends for the Hindu-first party.

“The Indian government’s political narrative clubs Rohingya refugees from Myanmar with undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh, who have religious and linguistic similarities but little else, into one subgroup of unwanted immigrants,” said policy analyst Angshuman Choudhury, a joint doctoral candidate researching Myanmar at the National University of Singapore and King’s College, London.

India’s Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to ST’s queries.

Although India is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention, Mr Tom Andrews, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said India’s “cruel actions” violate the international legal principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits states from returning individuals to a territory where they face threats to their lives or freedom.

Two relatives of Rohingya deportees have filed urgent petitions in India’s Supreme Court to cease such deportations, but the judges dismissed them as lacking evidence. One judge said that claims that the refugees were dropped in the sea were “fanciful”.

Myanmar locals and the authorities have confirmed the allegations. Mr Aung Kyaw Moe, the deputy minister for human rights in Myanmar’s in-exile elected government, the National Unity Government (NUG), told ST that “40 Rohingya refugees from India were deported and thrown along the coastal side of southern Myanmar. They landed on May 9 in Myanmar territory”.

He shared a list of 40 names of Rohingya deportees in Myanmar. ST found that 37 matched a list of 43 names submitted in the Supreme Court petitions.

All confirmed deportees held refugee identification documents issued by the UN refugee agency UNHCR, which guarantees basic human rights and certifies that the individual is verified.

Thirteen of the deportees are women. Most of the deported men are in their 20s.

ST was asked not to reveal the name of the village where the Rohingya landed, given security concerns. All the Rohingya people ST spoke to asked not to be identified, fearing deportation.

‘Anywhere but Myanmar’

Half the Rohingya refugees in India – around 20,000 – are registered with the UNHCR. Most of them live in poor Delhi neighbourhoods, while an unknown number are held indefinitely in detention centres.

The Indian government severely restricts their mobility, shelter and livelihood, but courts allow the refugees to access basic education and healthcare guaranteed to the Indian poor.

Ms Priyali Sur, whose non-profit The Azadi Project gives skills training to refugee women, said: “Since February, Rohingya refugees in Delhi have faced increasing police harassment in the name of verification.

“During these police crackdowns, racial slurs are hurled, the refugees are questioned about whether they are Bangladeshi immigrants and detained arbitrarily, violating their rights.”

On May 6, the police reportedly rounded up dozens of Rohingya men and women from Hastsal, Vikaspuri and Okhla neighbourhoods in New Delhi to resubmit their biometric details. But instead of being verified and sent back home, the refugees were detained overnight in several police stations.

A community leader in Vikaspuri said that “50 to 60 policemen came in many vans, forcing us to drop everything and go with them for document verification”. Others alleged that the police beat them, abusing them as “ghuspetiya”, a Hindi word for infiltrator that BJP leaders often use.

Mr Mohammad, a 25-year-old Rohingya man, was in a Delhi hospital with his wife who had just miscarried, when his parents and two brothers were detained. He shared with ST several photos and hurried voice messages his brothers had sent from the police van, before their phones were confiscated.

On May 7, at least 40 detainees were flown to the Indian union territory of Andaman Islands, then forcibly taken in a naval vessel to south Myanmar and dropped in the sea to swim ashore.

Non-profit Fortify Rights, which works on human rights in Myanmar, reported that in an audio recording of a call made to his relatives in India, a Rohingya deportee said that they were “blindfolded and handcuffed” on the ship.

In Myanmar, the rescued Rohingya borrowed phones from villagers and called relatives in India. Their worst nightmare – being back in Myanmar – had come true.

“We were thrown by the Indian (security) force at an island, in the middle of the night,” a man’s quivering voice tells a woman in an audio recording of a call heard by ST. “The island is surrounded by sea. We might be soon caught by the military, please let every know about our situation.”

In another call recording, a father asks his son, barely 20, if he is okay. When the young man mumbles a response, his mother shouts: “Don’t cry!”

Mr Mohammad said: “My brother said that the navy had asked if they wanted to be sent to Myanmar or Indonesia. All of them had begged to be sent anywhere but Myanmar, where death is sure. And still, Myanmar is where they threw them.”

On May 9, Myanmar fishermen handed the Rohingya refugees over to representatives of the NUG, a coalition of ousted democratically elected lawmakers and parliamentarians that was established in the wake of the February 2021 military coup.

Mr Aung Kyaw Moe said the refugees are “now with the People’s Defence Force, who are among several groups that work with the NUG to fight the junta”.

Myanmar is in the midst of a civil war, with several armed groups fighting the military junta since the coup.

“Myanmar is an active war zone now, and not safe. The Rohingya have been pushed back to a war zone that they had escaped from. It’s inhumane of India to do this,” Mr Aung Kyaw Moe added.

The UNHCR’s global spokesperson said it has sought further information from the Indian authorities on unconfirmed reports about the detention of Rohingya refugees in Delhi, “while seeking assurances that refugees and asylum seekers not be returned to a situation where their life or freedom may be at risk”.

BJP’s ‘push back’ operation seen as vote game

Apart from the 50 Rohingya people sent by foot into Bangladesh, at least 118 Bangladeshi immigrants were pushed into Bangladesh, confirmed Mr Debabrata Saikia, Assam’s leader of the opposition and legislator of Nazira border constituency. All including the Rohingya people were inmates of the Matia detention centre in Assam.

“It was so secretive that even the local district administration was not aware of the deportation,” Mr Saikia said.

Bangladeshi media reported that the Border Guard Bangladesh had on May 7 detained at least 123 individuals, including Rohingya and Bengali-speaking individuals.

In a May 8 letter, the Bangladesh Foreign Ministry called on India to immediately stop “pushing in people across the border”, warning that it posed risks to security and undermined existing bilateral frameworks.

But on May 11, the chief minister of the BJP-led Assam government Himanta Biswa Sarma boasted about the “push back” as a new operation of the government of India.

“Earlier, we used to arrest 1,000-1,500 foreigners,” he said, without providing details. “They would be sent to jails, and then produced before a court of law. Now, we have decided that we will not bring them into our country, and will push them back.”

Mr Choudhury said the BJP leader’s eagerness to “proudly announce this direct, extra-legal deportation as a new innovation” was an attempt to project itself “as a party that is proactive in the pushing out of undesirable foreigners”.

Previous governments in Assam have been known to push back Bangladeshi immigrants, but in smaller numbers.

The BJP governments in Delhi and Assam had pledged to throw out illegal immigrants, whom they hold responsible for crimes and loss of jobs, despite there being no evidence for these claims. Assam and the northern state of Bihar will face state elections later in 2025.

“There is great political premium in rounding up so-called illegal immigrants and sending them out,” Mr Choudhury said.

‘Where will I be safe?’

“Most Rohingya refugees in India and Bangladesh don’t expect citizenship here. They just want a safe place as they await resettlement through the UNHCR in countries like the US, Britain and Europe that have refugee laws,” said Mr Ravi Hemadri, founder of Development and Justice Initiative, a UN partner agency that works with refugees.

But after the detentions and deportations, Rohingya refugees, especially in BJP-led regions like Jammu, Delhi, Gujarat and Rajasthan, fear more crackdowns. Some of their landlords are also now forcing them to vacate.

A Rohingya student in his 20s who was to sit a 12th class computing exam in May said he is hiding in a south Indian city under a non-BJP government after the Delhi police burst into his best friend’s room at 3am and detained him.

Mrs S, 26, who is living in a refugee settlement in Jammu in northern India, has been sleepless since her parents and brothers, aged 18 and 20, were deported to Myanmar.

“Just like that, my whole family is gone. How are they? Are they dead? Alive? Are they in trouble with the military? I can’t bear it any more,” Mrs S said, sobbing over the phone.

To add to her anxiety, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs has set a 30-day deadline in May for all states to verify the credentials of people suspected to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar who claim to be Indian citizens. If their documents are not verified, they will face deportation.

Mrs S said that India had deported her family to Myanmar despite their verified refugee cards and never claiming to be Indian citizens. She now fears the same fate.

“I would rather die than return to the horrors in Myanmar. But if no one wants us – not Myanmar, not Bangladesh, not India – where will I go?” she asked.

Asia News Network/The Straits Times