Aligarh: A good community leader, says Mohammad Zafar (24), should have three qualities: “Thanda dimagh, padhai-likhai, aur aadmi se nafrat nahi honee chahiye (He should have a cool head, be educated, and have no hatred toward anyone).”
Zafar is a Rohingya refugee and a leader, or zimmedaar, of the Rohingya community in Aligarh.
In November last year, just a month after Zafar was elected zimmedaar, officers from the local unit of the CID landed up at the community centre built by Rohingyas. According to a person present at the meeting, the CID men told the refugees gathered there that they would need to fill out a set of forms, or else their stay in India would be “beqanooni”, illegal, and the government could then do whatever it wanted with them.
This is the door that leads into a room that was previously occupied by a Rohingya refugee family. They fled when the local authorities started collecting biometric data in November last year.
The forms, which were in the Burmese language, were the first of a two-part data collection process conducted by state governments late last year, under a directive of the Ministry of Home Affairs. The second stage was the biometric registration of all Rohingya refugees above the age of ten.
This exercise followed on the heels of the deportation of seven Rohingya asylum seekers to Myanmar in October and led to widespread fear among the refugees, who – seeing that the language in the form was Burmese – refused to fill it.
Also read: India’s Decision to Deport the Rohingya Is a Violation of International and Domestic Obligations
In Aligarh, Mohammad Zafar and other community leaders were at a loss. On one hand, the officers were putting pressure on them to get the refugees’ data and to submit their own. On the other hand, if they complied, the data could be used to deport them.
Home minister Rajnath Singh had said as much in the Lok Sabha last July, when he detailed how the refugees’ data would be shared with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which would then contact the Myanmar government, with the intent to deport them.
Zafar told The Wire that he too was afraid: “Main samjha nahi paa raha hoo logon [ko], lekin mujhe samjhaana pad raha hai (I’m not able to explain [why it needs to be filled] but I have to do it.)” He says he had to be one of the first to submit his data, or else the other refugees would refuse.
A Rohingya community leader must act as the representative of the community in India and help other members, many of whom can neither read nor write, navigate life in a new country. This includes liaising with police if a refugee gets into trouble, resolving conflicts within the community and raising funds for the most needy among them.
Alhough it is an unpaid post, community leaders – all refugees themselves and all men – are usually elected by a community vote. In larger cities such as Jammu, there are 22 community leaders. In Aligarh there are only three.
According to a UNHCR spokesperson, all substantially large refugee communities registered with it in India have community leaders or “representatives”, as it calls them, who make it for the refugees to communicate their concerns.
What sets the Rohingyas apart, the spokesperson says, is that it is the only refugee community to be mentioned in a 2017 advisory issued on illegal immigrants and their deportation by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The idea of electing community leaders sprang from the realisation that it was becoming logistically difficult to manage their community’s affairs. But the data-collection exercise presented a new role and a challenge the elected leaders were barely equipped for: to be negotiators on behalf of their community and defend it from possible deportation.
A close-up of drawing on the door. It was made using a sketch pen and a ball point pen by the refugee woman whose home this was.
Mohammad Ikram (48), a former community leader in Hyderabad, said over the phone that when the police asked him to counsel the refugees to fill out the forms, he refused.
The reason was that the form stated their ethnicity as “Myanmar Muslim” instead of “Rohingya Muslim.”
That was the reason why we fled in the first place, he says; the country of his birth refuses to even recognise the name “Rohingya”; instead referring to them as “Bengali Muslims” and immigrants from Bangladesh. It is the reason that it continues to deny them citizenship.
He explained these reasons to the police, who then allowed him and other refugees to write down “Rohingya” in the form.
Some negotiations were not so successful.
Community leaders in Mewat and Aligarh wanted to write in their forms that they would not return to Myanmar until the situation was peaceful. The officers did not permit it. When asked why, one officer said to Mohammad Bashir (44), a former community leader in Aligarh, “There is no space to write that.”
In Mewat, when a group of community leaders who had not filled out the forms went to talk with a senior police official, another high-ranking official threatened to arrest them unless they submitted forms right then and there. Despite the intimidation, the authorities would rely on them to obtain that data.
This garment is the only object that the family left behind as they left in haste, telling no one.
In Jammu, police and local intelligence officers started rounding up refugees to submit their data without any explanation, which led many to disperse from their camps.
Community leaders decided to contact the UNHCR office in New Delhi to better understand the situation. According to community leader Ali Haider (48), a UNHCR officer assured them that they would not be deported. He also said, however, that this was a government directive and had to be followed if the refugees wanted to stay in Jammu.
Haider and other zimmedaars explained this to their fellow refugees, and the exercise got underway.
Since its completion, Mohammad Asif (48) in Mewat says that there has been an increase in police surveillance: he is now called in weekly as opposed to every two months to enumerate Rohingyas living there.
This means the loss of a day’s wages and an increase in out-of-pocket expenditure. For Zafar in Aligarh, who has been out of work for three months, the Rs 50 he spends traveling to the police station has become an extra burden.
Local authorities have also directed community leaders to disallow refugees from leaving. Refugees who live in small towns and migrate to work in other cities have been hit hard.
With these challenges facing their community, I asked community leaders if there was anything positive about their work. Ikram said: “Hum logon ko ghalat kaam karne se rokte hain.” (We prevent people from getting involved in any wrongdoing). The Rohingyas, he said, were foreigners and he wanted Indians to think well of them.
The names of all the Rohingyas have been changed on their request to protect their identities, after being verified by The Wire’s editorial team.
Meher Ali is an independent journalist based in Aligarh. She reports on refugees and human rights issues. She also writes here about the crafts and heritage of Aligarh and western Uttar Pradesh. Follow her on Twitter @aashi310.