Hyderabad: Rohingyas wait to find an anchor after years adrift

When stuck between the devil and the deep sea, rickety bamboo shacks on a flood-prone foreshore of Balapur lake in Hyderabad may have looked like a safer option to scores of Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

But on the night of October 14 last year, their little world—Camp Number 30—of 45 tenements turned topsy-turvy, with unprecedented rain in the catchment area pushing up the water level by almost 12 feet. Leaving their bamboo huts and sparse belongings, they rushed to the rooftops of two-storeyed buildings nearby.

“There was heavy rain, and within a few hours, we were all under waist-deep water.  The sudden gush of water was such that we thought we would all get drowned,” recalls Mohammed Kamaal, 35, who works as a mason.

Kamaal says the families—who stayed huddled on the rooftops for two days—were shifted to a marriage hall where they survived for the next few days on relief extended by NGOs.

Three months on, Kamaal and others are still in the process of settling down. They still rummage through the pile of the collapsed huts in the hope of finding anything that could be reused.

With civic authorities building pressure on them to shift to a safer place, they have been facing another challenge—to dismantle the bamboo huts and put them up at another place, a kilometre away. A good Samaritan, Omer, volunteered to rent out his open land to these families.

Like Kamal, others from Camp 30 are also busy these days, laying a floor of sand and cement, erecting bamboo poles and making a roof with old clothes and rugs and covering it with tattered tarpaulins.

“Each of these shelters cost us around ₹20,000.  The Confederation of Voluntary Associations (COVA), an NGO, has given us ₹10,000 each. We are mobilising the remaining amount,” says Mohammed Altaf, 40, who works as a tile layer.

Altaf and the rest of the families know they are running out of time. “The local authorities and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have asked us to shift. We have to obey them, if we have to live here,” he adds.

A constant struggle 

Flooding of the foreshore area is not the only challenge for these displaced and stateless refugees from Myanmar who have made Hyderabad their home.

They also have to find work to feed their families amid the constant fear and mistrust by locals.

Nazir, 42, a construction labourer, lays bare the complexities. The fact that the refugees are not entitled to ration cards—usually given to low-income families in Telangana—means they have to buy foodgrains and other essential commodities from the open market. “No Aadhaar card means no SIM card, no bus pass, no school admission for our children.”

But what hurts more, Nazir adds, is that somehow a narrative has been created that many of them have managed to secure these cards through fraudulent means.

“Barring the UNHRC card, we are not in possession of any other card.”

The conditions in the rest of the Rohingya camps—there are about 30 in Balapur, Barkas, Hafeez Baba Nagar and Kishan Bagh in Hyderabad sheltering about 4,000 refugees— are no better. There is neither any water supply nor a proper drainage system with rows of cramped bamboo huts separated by a narrow dusty common passage where bathing and cleaning of clothes and utensils take place.

Most of the men work as ragpickers, masons, construction labourers or run petty shops while some of the women try their hand as tailors.

Nobody’s children

Forty- five-year-old Mohammed Faisal uses a popular Indian proverb to describe their plight. “Our life is like dhobi ka kutta, na ghar na ghat ka (the washerman’s dog belongs neither to the house nor to waterside). We are basically nobody’s children.”

He recalls painful memories of how the Myanmar military hounded them out of their country. “We lost many of our near and dear ones in the violence unleashed by the military. Terrified, we travelled through Bangladesh, Delhi and Kolkata to reach Hyderabad. But people here do not treat us as fellow human beings in distress. We feel like we are not wanted anywhere. Yet we must live and move on.”

Every single family has harrowing tales about the brutal crackdown by the military, setting their houses on fire to stop them from coming back.

“We were forced to flee with our families and minimum belongings. We then travelled from village to village to escape relentless attack by the marauding military,” recalls Khurshida Begum (46).

For 35-year-old Rasheeda, Hyderabad also happens to be a place where her husband breathed his last. Just two months after the couple managed to reach Hyderabad, he succumbed to injuries received from the thrashing at the hands of the Myanmar military.  “He could not recover from the injuries. After his death, I managed to survive stitching blouses for women on a sewing machine bought on a loan from neighbours.”

The recent flood destroyed her sewing machine and now she has no money to get it repaired.

Pawns in political game

Apart from the subhuman conditions in which Rohingyas live, their misery is compounded by the constant vilification and politics, mostly because of their religion. They often end up becoming pawns in the Indian political game among warring parties, especially during every election. The recent Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) was no exception.

Telangana BJP president and MP Bandi Sanjay Kumar threatened to carry out a “surgical strike in the old city of Hyderabad, once the party wins, to drive away Rohingyas and Pakistanis”.

“Elections to the GHMC should be held without the presence of Rohingyas, Pakistanis and Afghans as voters,” he asserted, labelling them as “illegal voters”.

Interestingly, there was not a single complaint to election authorities about any Rohingya refugee casting an “illegal vote”.

The political blame game apart, one wonders what happened to India’s legacy of welcoming and accommodating stateless refugees on humanitarian grounds. Many want to know if India can give shelter to refugees from Tibet, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, why this prejudice against Rohingyas.

Why single them out?

According to Mazher Hussain, executive director, COVA, it is time India and other countries accept and accommodate refugees considering the persecution they face in the country of their origin.

On the allegations that some Rohingyas were in possession of fake Aadhaar cards, Hussain feels instead of criminalising the refugees, they should be issued Aadhaar cards.

“Aadhaar is not a citizenship card. So, why should the authorities worry if these hapless people are given the Aadhaar card?”