Rohingya in India accuse Modi of double standards on citizenship law

As New Delhi claims to help persecuted minorities in South Asia through the law, the mainly Muslim refugees from Myanmar face deportation.

Kolkata, India – Muhammad Hamin has been unable to sleep at night since March 8 when the government of the northeast Indian state of Manipur ordered the deportation of Rohingya refugees.

On that day, the state’s Chief Minister N Biren Singh – who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – posted on X that his government had deported the first batch of eight refugees from a group of 77 members who had “entered India illegally”.

The deportation was later stopped after Myanmar authorities refused to work with India on the matter.

Hamin, a Rohingya who came to India in 2018, is in New Delhi, some 1,700km (1,050 miles) away from Manipur. But the 26-year-old, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in business administration in India’s capital, spends his time watching television or scrolling through social media platforms on his mobile phone for any updates on attempts to deport members of his community.

He does this even as he observes the dawn-to-dusk fasts during the holy month of Ramadan.

“The news of deportation has certainly triggered a panic button among most of the Myanmar nationals living in India as nobody knows who would be the next to go out and face the same horror of violence and bloodshed,” he said.

For many Rohingya refugees in India, that fear is tinged with bitter irony. Three days after the Manipur government began its crackdown on Rohingya, Modi’s government on March 11 announced the implementation of a controversial citizenship law aimed at granting Indian citizenship to persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries.

The Citizenship