Sometime around mid-December 2024, on a routine day at our women’s centre for migrant and refugee w🔴omen in New Delhi, Yasmin Begum walked in sounding ecstatic. “The IOM (International Organization for Migration) called me today. We are leaving for the US next month,” she said, beaming with excitement. For 12 years, Yasmin waited patiently for this day while living in India, where she is discriminated against and mistreated for being a Rohingya refugee woman.
The Rohingya of Myanmar are one of the world’s most persecuted populations and the largest stateless population, estimated at approximately 2.8 million. The Myanmar Junta has attempted to systematically and systemically wipe them out. The Rohingya have been discriminated against since the 19ꦇ70s. They were stripped of their citizenship in 1982. The violence and genocidal attacks that began in 1991, still continue.
Yasmin fled in 2012 from Buthidaung district𓄧 in Rakhine state—the epicentre of violence—with her three-month-old infant. She carried her across borders and entered India, hoping for some relief. She thought she wouldn’t have to fear being killed or getting raped here because of her ethnic identity. However, she could never imagine that even everyday survival would be so challenging.
Upon arriving in India, she expected to find UNHCR camps. She thought that with their help, she would be able to take care of herself and her infant. But India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 protocol. The UN refugee agency, at best, can offer a UNHCR card, but shelter, food and everyday survival is up to the refugees themselves. So, instead of a secure camp, Yasmin found herself in a cold, damp and dark refugee settlement in Delhi where houses were made of plastic sheets, cardboard and mud. This is where the other Rohingya families lived. She paid for the small space in that refugee jhuggi (slum) with the little money she was carrying. There💫 were no toilets though and every day she had to walk to fetch water from a tankeꦯr.
Twelve years have passed since she arrived. The ground realities haven’t changed at all. In fact, the hate against the Rohingya refugees has only increased in the past decade. The present government’s Islamophobic rhetoric and anti-immigra꧅nt policies have translated into police harassment, demolishment of settlement huts, power cuts, arrests and detentions. Yasmin, who is now 35, has witnessed and survived all this. The single mother of two girls—the second one was born after she moved to India—set up a small knick-knack shop, but within months, her hut and shop were burnt down by miscreants.
I often ask her how she has managed to stay so strong despite so many hardships. “Nothing 🎐can break Yasmin,” she says, referring to herself in the third person with pride, softly combing her younger daughter’s hair with her fingers. I follow up with another question: “Do you ever want to return to Myanmar?” She looks at her little girl, for whom India is the only home, and says: “There is no way back home”—a sentiment echoed by every other refugee from Myanmar who I know.
The year 2024 saw escalated violence in Rakhine state with increasing deadly attacks against the Rohingya, bearing a𝓡 terrifying resemblance to the atrocities of August 2017, reported Amnesty International.
“Rohingya men, wo🥀men and children are being killed, towns are emptying o👍ut, and vestiges of Rohingya history and identity are being eroded,” states Joe Freeman, Amnesty International’s Myanmar Researcher. To go back or to be deported back to Myanmar would mean facing the same spiral of violence they escaped in the first place.
Like Yasmin, most refugees wistfully wait for resettlement in a country that treats them respectfully and in a dignified manner. But the dream of resettlement doesn’t become a reality for most. Yasmin beloꦇngs to a very small percentage of refugees who manage to get a nod for resettlement. Only about 8 per cent of the total global refugee population in 2023 was declared as n🦹eeding resettlement by the UNHCR and only 0.32 per cent of them were finally resettled.
Yasmin is anxious and nervous. She knows that despite having her resettlement approved, things can go wrong at the last 🐈minute. Most recently, Yasmin’s neighbours, a family of six, were offered resettlement in Phoenix, United States. The week before they were to leave, their exit from India was denied. Two of the four children didn’t have birth certificates and without proper documentation, they could not board the flight—a flight that they waited to board for almost half their lives. The family left no stone unturned, but their resettlement dream crashed, neverthel༒ess.
A human rights lawyer, who did not wish to be identified, says: “It’s a vicious cycle—documentation remains the biggest challenge for refugees, especially Rohingya refugees living in India. The Government of India 🍸categorically denies them any legal identity or documentation, including Aadhaar cards and birth certificates. Without proper documentation, any hope of resettlement becomes even more distant.”
Despite knowing that less than 1 per cent𒁃 of the refugees are ultimately resettled in countries that will provide them permanent residency, it’s the primary hope that most refugees hold on to; knowing that returning to their home country, in most cases, is next to impossible. The UNHCR bases the resettlement criteria on eight key categories—legal and physical protection needs, survivors of violence and torture, medical needs, women at risk, family reunification, children and adolescents, elderly refugees and lack of local integration prospects.
Minara and her family check every requirement under ‘legal and protection needs’, which specifies pr🌟otection needs on the basis of threat of refoulement, arbitrary arrest or detention in the country of refuge or/and threat to human rights in the country of refuge.
Like Yasmin, Minarꦆa, too, fled Buthidaung in Myanmar in 2012 and entered India with her spouse and three children. Upon arr♌iving in the country, the family reached a local railway station from where they innocently walked up to the police to ask for help, stating that they were fleeing persecution. They were detained. Minara’s youngest child was just two month old then. Her other two children were 18 months and seven years, respectively.
In 2023, after more than ten years of languishing in different jails across the country, Minara and her family were moved to their fourth detention centre. In all these 12 years, she has forcefully been kept separated from her husband and her first child. Minara’s youngest child, who was two months old when they fled Myanmar, is 12 now and does not even know if life exists beyond prisons and detention centres. This family, after fleeing persecution in their home country—Myanmar—and being subjected to 12 years of unlawful detention in their country of refuge—𒁃India—fits every requirement for resettlement. But once a person is stateless or an asylum seeker, their fate, unfortunately, is determined by authorities and they barely have a say.
For Minara and her family, the Canadian High commission was keen to give resettlement and requested to interview them to start the process. This gave a glimmer of hope to Minara after years of despair. But the In𝄹dian government denied their request to be interviewed either virtually or at the detention centre for resettlement in Canada, stating that the go🦹vernment is not willing to allow them to seek asylum in a third country. This decision was challenged by a pro bono lawyer but was upheld by the High Court. “We have spent our lives in jails. We want to save the lives of our children so that they can live freely. Help us!” says Minara when she was informed about the rejection.
It’s not clear how much longer Minara and her family will languish behind bars for being asylum seekers or refugees. Would it be anꦆother 12 years, sooner or could the wait be endless? Their chances of being deported to their home country, too, are next to zero. First, the escalated violence there would put their lives gravely at risk if they ever returned, and second, according to their lawyer, the Embassy of Myanmar rejected their appeal. “The Embassy got back saying they couldn’t find their whereabouts in Myanmar and could not determine that they originally came from there and hence their deportation, too, was rejected. Neither can they be resettled nor can they go back home,” says their lawyer.
Minara, though, remains hopeful of getting out of this state of limbo. Successful resettlement stories from her community give her hope as she says that’s the only thing she can hold onto in detention. Stories like that📖 of Maryam and her daughter Maimoonah become success🐬 stories told and retold for years within the community.
Two months ago, Maryam, along with her husband, daughter Maimoonah, three sons and her mother-in-law were resettled in San Diego, California. Maryam suffers from acute dissociative disorder and her husband from a speech disability. Her daughter Maimoonah is brilliant ♔and was one of the few girls in the refugee settlement who was in middle school and trying her best to pursue higher education despite state enforced barriers. Maimoonah would come to our women’s centre for educational support, but we knew that if she stayed in India, she wouldn’t be allowed🃏 to study at a university as the government authorities restrict refugees from enrolling in higher education.
Today, Maimoonah is waiting to enrol in her 10th grade in California. She worries if she will be able to catch up and perform well in a new country. I ask her if she misses India or Myanmar, both or none? She says: “Whe🅺n I came to India, I was a little girl. I don’t remember any other country. India is the only home I know,” she pauses, as though carefully thinking through what she’ll say next. “But India never accepted me then. Will it ever accept me in the future? Maybe someday I’ll return to India as a US citizen.”
(All names have been changed to protect identities)
Priyali Sur is the founder and executive director of the Azadi Project that works for women from marginalised and refugee communities
(This appeared in the print as 'People From Nowhere')
