The underlying message from Supreme Court deliberations on the issue of 40,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees fleeing into India is clear. Don’t do anything now about deporting them is what the court has said without quite ruling so, but only in deference to the Centre’s request not to pass an order that may have international repercussions. Truth to tell, India’s image as a nation sympathetic to refugees in general going back to the early 1970s when thousands of Muslim and some Hindu refugees came in a wave from Bangladesh and in the early 1980s when Sri Lankan Tamils sought refuge from the civil war has taken a hit internationally. However, in those times the economic pressures on the population may not have been felt so much as in the present when India’s population has soared beyond 1.25 billion people.
The unstated reason for resistance to the Rohingyas is obviously their religion. National security concerns are not to be ignored. And yet to lump an entire exodus of 40,000 people is not to be lumped as a terror threat. The top court probably meant just that without explicitly saying so. There are ways to deal with them if some among the refugees are perceived to be potential terror threats. India must not lose sight of the fact that the exodus in a humanitarian problem and we need draw no lessons from how the West, save Germany, behaved when it came to accepting Syrian and other refugees from the Middle East crises. India has shown a greater understanding of the problem facing Aung San Suu Kyi as she may have had a limited role in handling the Rohingya crisis. There has also been an offer from Myanmar to take back the nine lakh Rohingyas who fled to Bangladesh and it may be possible to negotiate the return of those willing to go back to Myanmar from India.
