The Rohingya crisis that has been going on is not something that is to be seen with a black and white and religious perspective as it has been done by the most because of either their ignorance or religious biases. There are multiple layers to the issue and way too many complications and you simply can’t have a clear and decisive opinion about it.
Rohingyas are a relatively small community of about two million people, of which majority are muslims. And over a million of them live in Rakhine state of Myanmar which shares it’s borders with Bangladesh. The crisis arose when Myanmar refused to give Rohingyas citizenship saying that they are actually illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. Myanmar has had a history of ethnic clashes and with a military dictatorship running things (military still has autonomy and control over home ministry and police in Myanmar) there was no sensible and humanitarian solution to the issue of Rohingyas and they ended up being a state less and oppressed community. And as it has been happening with persecuted minorities which majorly includes muslims, radicalization happened.
With the aid and brainwashing from terrorist groups of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic fundamentalism gave rise to militant Rohingya groups and terrorism began on the name of Jihad. This made the situation worse as now the military of Myanmar had a reason to crush and persecute Rohingyas. Then the “nationalist” buddhist militant (as contradictory as it sounds) groups came into existence and the violence intensified. The violence reached to the extreme when the army started the ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas from Myanmar in 2016. This resulted in huge influx of persecuted Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh. Bangladesh, being the poor and small country itself, is not being able to handle such huge amount of refugees and taking in Rohingyas have created a dangerous situation there with a great risk of giving shelter to the radicalized elements of Rohingya community. And with Bangladesh getting maxed out of its capacity to intake refugees, there is a pressure on India to provide refuge to Rohingyas.
This has put India in a tricky situation. While the nation is facing criticism from the human rights organizations from all over the world, you can’t really blame India for putting the issue of national security above humanitarianism. Because let’s not be naive and think that India should take a decision solely on humanitarian grounds. The authorities will have to see the issue objectively and make the decision which won’t harm the national interest in the long run. There are already 40,000 illegal Rohingya immigrants in the country. There are reports that they might get deported but the question is, where are we going to deport them to? Myanmar won’t be taking them back anytime soon and Bangladesh won’t accept them either as they too have their limitations. So most probably we will have to accommodate them. But many of those 40 thousands are found to be in possession of documents like Aadhar, Voter ID card and even Indian passport. So that raises as alarm that they are getting helps to get the forged documents. Because of the ties of Rohingyas with the Islamic terrorist groups of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, there’s a risk on the national security. And it needs to be dealt with cautiously and effectively. There are some doubts on the way and intentions of Indian government as the party in power is known to be anti-Muslim to a large extent. There can’t be any assurance that India will provide as much help as it could to the persecuted Rohingyas while looking out for themselves. So that’s more bad news for Rohingyas.
The whole issue got more complicated and worse because religion got tangled with politics. The biggest beneficiaries of this crisis are the Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist groups as they have got the chance to get more recruits for their terror activities on the name of uniting the Muslims all over the world.
This is first published on my blog : https://thelastpage.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/the-rohingya-crisis/