Why the ‘good’ refugee is a bad idea

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Indian Muslim mass protest rally during a protest against the persecution of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority in Kolkata, India, September 11, 2017. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.There is something surreal about the
photo-op of a smiling Rohingya refugee family heading back to conflict-torn Myanmar. In a
similar case of mixed signals, Myanmar’s social welfare minister Win Myat Aye’s visit in April to the Rohingya
refugee camps in Bangladesh spoke a language of resettlement but its message
was a deeply unsettling one.

He announced that his country would
take back only those Rohingya refugees who could furnish a proof of residency
in Myanmar. In the complex game of political signals all nations play, this was
as clear a warning shot as any, of trouble ahead. But one wonders how many in
the Indian policy establishment heard it at all, given its increasing
tone-deafness to both nuance and subtext.

Could this misplaced complacency
arise from the fact that Myanmar’s securitised narrative on the Rohingya issue
is a lot similar to that of the Indian state? If this is indeed the case, what
Delhi has deluded itself into believing is that a shared language translates into
a shared understanding. If anything, Myanmar’s securitised narrative on the
Rohingya issue will potentially affect India’s interests in damaging ways. For
instance, the verification process will no doubt involve an opaque process
of separating the ‘good’ refugees from the ‘bad’ ones.

This means that, as and when the
full-fledged repatriation takes place from Bangladesh to Myanmar, several
thousands of the one million refugees will not make the cut. What is also
sobering is that their right of return is seriously jeopardised by the
fact that only an estimated 7,548 out of the one million Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine state hold national
verification cards.

When you add to this the fact that
the fleeing millions did not exactly have the time to pack their bags with the
necessary documentary proof, what are the chances of their right to return in a
land where they are totally unwelcome? What this will mean is that a
sizeable stateless population will remain next door to India in a heightened
state of vulnerability and faced with the prospect of an indeterminate
wait. Where will they end up? Could India become ‘the refugee capital of the world’ by its own acts of omission? 

Framing the challenge

How Indian diplomacy addresses this
crisis of credibility and governance will depend a lot on how it chooses to
frame the problem. Ironically, while the Centre categorically defines the
Rohingya as the problem, this could well be a case of not knowing what the
problem is. India’s Rohingya narrative appears to be caught in a double vision,
suspended between political opportunism and a squandered opportunity. 

One would have thought that given its
experience of historically managing complex population movements in South
Asia, India would have been a shaper of the larger global discourse on
refugee protection from the point of view of the Global South. But it has
curiously chosen not to shine a light on the reality of such ‘mixed
flows’ and to lend intellectual and political heft to non-western
approaches and experiences.

Ironically, it is its own policy
fetters that prevent India from utilising the array of intellectual
and political tools at its disposal to respond to the regional crisis that the
Rohingya issue represents. Part of this inaction is due to its own fixation
with the opportunistic logic of seeing the Rohingya issue as an ‘internal’
issue. Intriguingly, it has cited economic costs as a factor while making a
case for deportation of the 40,000 Rohingya refugees from India. In its affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court in September 2017, the Centre
argued for deportation citing ‘diversion of national resources’. It is an
incredible argument for the world’s fifth-largest economy to make, given that
even in 1971 when India hosted 10 million refugees, it did not make such an argument
despite the fact that its economy was then virtually on the verge of collapse.

Back then, among the measures it
adopted to cope with the financial burden, was the rather innovative postal tax
called the Refugee Relief Tax priced at 5 paise that it levied to help raise revenues. What any
talk of economic costs at this juncture will certainly do is to bring serious
credibility costs for India. 

What India could do instead is to
begin a regional conversation to unpack the definition of the refugee to
include the diverse categories of those seeking protection. It could help draw
up a list of the most vulnerable such as women-at-risk, unaccompanied children,
environmental migrants and victims of trafficking among others. It is only by rendering
the displaced millions more visible in this fashion that the state, be it in
India, Myanmar or Bangladesh, can be held to account to provide protection. And
the more diversified this list is, the more it will be in India’s interests as
well as those of the returnees. Doing so can also help India strike the
much-needed ‘balance between human rights and national interest’ that the Supreme Court had
referred to in one of its hearings on the Rohingya issue.

But if India instead chooses to
peddle the good refugee/bad refugee categorisation that all refugees are
potential terrorists, it will only end up swelling the ranks of the stateless
in the region. Reducing the Rohingya narrative to a single-issue debate
fixated only on the security dimension would ironically end up creating an even
more intractable security nightmare not just for India but for the
region.  

If India is willing to imaginatively
reframe the Rohingya narrative in the coming days, it could tick several
political boxes at once: from offsetting centrifugal forces, strengthening
regional stability to salvaging its own image as a leader with the influence
and incentives necessary to shape the discourse on rights and
responsibilities.