Stateless Rohingyas in India: Life in Protracted Refugeehood
摘要
The chapter examines the recent developments of the stateless Rohingya refugee crisis. Especially, after the global denunciation of the military crackdown in August 2017 and the United Nations accusing the country of ethnic cleansing and genocide making Rohingyas the most persecuted minority in the world. According to the estimates, approximately 1.9 million ethnic Rohingyas are refused nationality/citizenship and its foreseen rights leading to the massive exodus of people across the international border. Moreover, the absence of legal mechanisms and un-documentedness; often criminalize them as illegal economic migrants/immigrants; blurring the distinction between “forced” and “volition.” Thus, living incontinuous threat of detention, deportation, and forced relocation further tarnishing their identity between the man and the citizen; dumping them into a socio-legal limbo. Based on the ethnographic inquiry conducted among stateless Rohingya refugees living in semi-urban ghettoes of India, the chapter looks into the historical and political trajectory of exclusion, resistance, and counter-resilience of stateless Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar along exploring their refracted and displaced realities and complexities of “everyday life” in asylum and protracted refugee-hood in India. In doing so, it highlights how they try to negotiate to maintain their sanctity of religion, culture, and community as stateless refugees. Thereby paper attempts to raise the question of identity and citizenship and brings forth the wider debate upon issues of state and statehood, inclusion and exclusion, and rights within the nation-state paradigm.