Defence News
Smoking out Rohingya? Jammu and Kashmir BJP wants them kicked out, Centre backs plan
Taking a cue from Union home minister Rajnath Singh, who on December 8 called for a ‘J&K-like border protection grid’ in the five eastern frontier states to prevent a spillover of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh into India, Jammu and Kashmir’s deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh now says the Rohingya Muslims are a threat to national security and have to go.
Seldom known to speak without Delhi’s concurrence, Singh, who heads a group of four J&K ministers constituted to recommend ways for the state to deal with the problem of illegal migrants, said the Rohingya would have to leave the state.
He believes the refugees from Myanmar, who began arriving and settling in and around Jammu a few years ago, are a danger, being “prone to the designs of the terrorist groups” active in J&K.
Of the 40,000 Rohingya refugees officially acknowledged to be present in India, some 7,000 live in makeshift settlements outside Jammu city, Samba and other local areas.
Local BJP functionaries, who first raised an alarm after the party formed a coalition government with the People’s Democratic Party in 2015, now claim “the Rohingya population has swelled manifold since the trickle first began towards the end of 2010”.
Refusing, however, to share his government’s plans on how the refugees will be removed, the deputy chief minister said he was prepared to do “whatever is possible in the larger interest of the security of the state and the communal situation”.
Singh pointed out that the Centre had already taken a clear stand on the Rohingya issue. In fact, just four days before he asked the chief ministers of West Bengal, Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura to work on establishing a ‘border protection grid’ and a unified command structure, the home minister had sought a report from J&K on the steps initiated to prevent any further influx of the Rohingya.
Indications that something was afoot came after representatives of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) visited Rohingya settlements around Jammu in early December.
Residents said the representatives offered to facilitate their relocation to other states since “Jammu was no longer ‘safe’ for them”.
The distraught refugees, who have been able to find menial work and some semblance of stability in Jammu after fleeing Myanmar, are now reluctant to move elsewhere.
They are also discouraged by the dismal experiences of some 50 families who reportedly moved to Hyderabad under UNHCR supervision about a month ago.
Meanwhile, while BJP ministers like Nirmal Singh have quite openly articulated their collective loathing of the Rohingya presence in Jammu, coalition partner Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has remained conspicuously silent. There hasn’t been a peep from Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on the issue.
