The Rohingya Question
In a world that’s fast becoming mean and selfish, we desperately need a lesson in humanity and compassion
1. September skies
I hadn’t spent a September at home in a long time and, not sure what kind of weather to expect, I prepared myself for the worst. August, Papa always says, is the worst month in Punjab, hot and incredibly muggy. My sister was born in August and so Papa remembers the sticky heat well. It’s the kind of weather where even if you’re sitting still, the sweat keeps dripping down along your ribs and your stomach, until you press the t-shirt to your skin to soak it in.
But this August end and the first week of September have been surprisingly pleasant. There are the occasional hot, breezeless days, but by and large the weather is bearable; even enjoyable. There is rain, but not too much; just enough to keep the crops going, the trees washed and the canals flowing full. And to settle the dust and rinse the horizons clean for some truly incredible sunrises and sunsets which alone would have kept me going, but then as if my appreciation had goaded it on, we were even granted impossible views of the unbelievably distant hills, tiny and blue against a sliver of peach sky!
And then every few days the sky becomes overcast with dark clouds swirling themselves into furious shapes, the wind makes the trees dance madly, their heads tossing this way and that, and then the rain lashes down. I’ve always found rain delightful; whether it was getting drenched in the rain with my sister or relishing a cup of steaming green tea with my friend who would just sit in the window smiling out at the rain.
Yes, there is rain, but not too much; nothing like the devastating floods of Assam and Bihar or even the annual disasters of our metros. Though the latter probably results from badly managed sewer systems that fail year after year the relentless test of the monsoon, the former is harder to explain — or assign blame for — and is thus more heart-rending. But I’m no expert on floods and as much as I would like to blame dams or “multi-purpose projects” for them, by somehow having tampered with the natural ecology of the rivers, I must confess that my knowledge on the subject is limited. (Though anyone who’s ever travelled along a river with their eyes open or lived on the banks of even a moderate-sized stream for a whole year and seen it shrink and grow and leave squelchy silt and slush where a month ago tall grasses grew, can tell you that flooding is part of the natural rhythm of a river, and it is foolhardy — even downright silly — to believe that one can control it. I’ve always believed that we should be humble when dealing with the natural world, and dams have always seemed like a presumptuous outrage, to say nothing of an attempt to link rivers. A river needs space to breathe, and no one and nothing can stifle it. Hopefully.)
Meanwhile, on the ground, hundreds of people lost their lives to the floods and tens of thousands more were forced to flee before the remorseless waters, while millions were affected, their homes and livelihoods washed away. And all this while I was enjoying my lovely September skies. How can I lounge with a book under the shade of a tree with a dog who loves me for company, relishing the weather while there are people wading to safety, carrying their meager belongings bundled up on their heads? How does one deal with that? Send money to the prime minister’s or the chief minister’s relief fund, or maybe clothes and books and toys to help ease the suffering of the displaced? Would that allow me to sleep better and then relish the sunrise in the morning or will all my dawns be scarred by a distant sorrow, all my sunsets bruised with a mellow grief?
And what if, god-forbid, the people wading through the water, carrying their children and their elderly, and all their worldly belongings upon wiry bodies weary with exhaustion, are fleeing not from a mindless unrelenting force of nature but from organized persecution, from pathetically justified and thinly disguised retribution, meted out by the armed forces of what they thought was their own country? And what if your country, your government, your representatives on your behalf, denied them sanctuary, denied them a place to shelter from the storm that they’ve fled? How can you ever justify that to yourself?
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2. Cloak and dagger
Of course I’m cycnical and I mistrust all politicians, and yet somewhere a little bit of my heart got chipped off, when I learnt that Aung Saan Suu Kyi, the calm, composed face of resistance that seemed unfazed when confronting the military junta had nothing to say for the Rohingyas except call them terrorists.
I realized on my very first trip to the northeast, from talking to the people, from things I saw and from reading Sanjoy Hazarika’s, Strangers in the Mist, how mind-bogglingly complex a place it is. I also realized how seamlessly conflicts seemed to flow across the borders, and how little people’s lives and emotions actually meant. My parents could’ve told me that, having lived through the worst years of Punjab’s dark times, but I guess I had to see it for myself in a place where the scars were still fresh.
ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) started out riding the wave of public resentment against Muslim immigration, an issue that quickly fell by the wayside once they were forced to seek shelter in neighbouring Bangladesh, where the migrants were purportedly coming from. It was a trend started by NSCN (Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland), when they first sought help from Pakistan and China, their leaders fleeing to East Pakistan in the face of a crackdown; an enemy’s enemy is a friend. Both the NSCN and the ULFA had dealings with KIA (Kachin Independence Army), across the border in Myanmar, from whom they got arms as well as training in exchange for money.
Then at some point, the support from KIA appears to have mysteriously stopped and the Indian government, at the behest of Aung San Suu Kyi began to pressurize the military junta in power in Myanmar to release her from house arrest and to hold free and fair elections. If national politics is strange and repulsive, international politics is a whole different ball-game altogether.
When on his visit to Myanmar a few days back, Prime Minister Modi shook hands with Aung San Suu Kyi, it was obvious that a lot had been going on behind the scenes, yet I couldn’t help but think of them as accomplices in a crime of conscience, their smiles sinister. They talked business and other important matters that I’m sure are extremely important for the greater wellbeing of the two countries and for the region as a whole; matters that are larger than mere individuals and make economic and political sense; matters where morality seems to have no role to play. And they were extremely circumspect about the developments in Rakhine.
With journalists being kept out, it is clear that no one knows the absolute truth, the ground reality in Rakhine. Not that we ever get the real truth anyway. All current evidence, however, suggests that something really really bad is going down. You would have to be blind to the misery of the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to not realize that.
And the PM’s visit comes days after his Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju, said that they planned to deport all Rohingyas who’d managed to make it to India, since we, an over-populated and over-burdened country could not possibly be expected to support any more “illegal immigrants”.
Can a decision like this allow one to stand as straight, with the pride in one’s country undiminished, when the national anthem plays before the next movie that we go to watch?
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3. The outsider
My friend, Neelam, has an organic farm near Tezpur, in Assam. It is hard to find a more perfect farm, a place where everyone works hard and sleeps well. He has fisheries, vermicomposting units, paddy fields, a dozen cows, ducks and dogs (more dogs than cows), and employs a lot of people from his village who, having little or no land of their own, would otherwise find it very hard to make ends meet.
But in the village, changes in recent years have been causing palpable tension. And this is most obvious when the call for prayer goes out from the mosque that came up a couple of years back. The population of Muslims in the village has been steadily increasing. Neelam grudgingly admits that they are hard workers and so they manage to buy up the land from the locals who are too lazy or too drunk to work the land and instead end up selling it piecemeal as and when they need some money. And now he finds his farm surrounded by land-holdings of these outsiders. They are not well liked.
Muslim immigration has been an extremely sensitive issue in the state ever since its inception and subsequent restructuring, leading it into decades of confused violence that lost its bearing before eventually coming to an inconsequential end. The legacy of those violent times is still very much alive in the popular imagination.
In Assam and the neighbouring hill states, the Muslim immigrants are called bangladeshis, irrespective of where they come from, until the word has become a cussword. Just like bhaiya — a word that means brother — for the farm workers who come from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in Punjab, bihari in Bombay or Delhi, or okie in California during the Dust Bowl era when ecological disaster and the great depression drove millions of migrants from Oklahoma and the neighbouring states west. They’re all derogatory appellations, used with contempt by a dominant community for outsiders.
Fact is, we don’t like outsiders. Especially when they come in numbers, and when they’re needier than we are. We feel threatened. We’re living our lives in our own land, so why should anyone come and disrupt the rhythm of our lives? What right have they? And it’s even worse when they speak a different tongue and worship a different god.
I understand that immigration is a tricky issue, and though migrations have been happening as far back in history as we care to look, (and in fact the migration out of Europe in the latter half of the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century would dwarf most movements of people before or since) they are now being frowned upon. Especially since the latest trends mostly show waves of the dispossessed weak washing up against the bastions of settled ‘civilized’ society. And we talk of immigration as a serious issue only because, unlike in the past, the migrants are unable to force their way in; if they could, we would be talking instead of invasions.
Not all immigrants may be refugees, but they represent shades on the same spectrum. In fact, we all lie on the same spectrum. If you’ve ever moved to another country, another state, or another city even, you could well trace a continuum from yourself to a refugee who flees to your country. We’re all moving, and we all want to get to a better place. I don’t know whether Proudhon was right or wrong when he said that all property is theft, but I think there are some very pertinent questions that the statement throws up that each of us must find our own answers to: How long should one have lived in a place to call the land their own? How long before they won’t be evicted? And how long before they can keep others out?
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4. Morality
The mountaineering courses that I attend every couple of years get a good cross-section of society, finding representatives of almost all strains of thought. And so recently, spending a snowy afternoon in the tent talking of this and that, one of the guys suddenly piped up about why after all these years we should still have an image of Gandhiji on the bank notes, especially since he wasn’t all that important in the freedom struggle anyway; and he slept with his nieces to boot. Maybe someday his opinions will get him killed, but for now we just decided to disagree on that one.
Personally, I find great solace in that image of a bespectacled Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the banknotes. (You can at least point out the irony of it as you bribe someone with the note. But seriously,) What other country can boast of a moral rationalist and a champion of non-violence as a “Father of the Nation”? That, more than any fundamental duties or principles, is what we can strive to emulate should we choose to. And we desperately need a role model like that to find our way out of the moral vacuum that we find ourselves in toady, where our diets are supposed to reflect how compassionate we are and some misplaced sense of nationalism dictates our code of conduct.
Without him as a precedent, it would seem so silly to expect someone to change just by showing them the error of their ways. He inspired people to fight against injustice using nothing more than a sound argument. He made them believe that if you dragged what was morally wrong out into the light of truth, it would wither away and die
And so here I am, stating the obvious: It is morally wrong to deny admittance to someone who comes in peace, seeking a better life, fleeing persecution. It is wrong to turn your back on helpless people being forced to flee their homes who turn to you for help; people whom chance and the historical artifacts of lines drawn upon paper have rendered aliens, foreigners. It may not be the case of sugar being added to a glass brimming with milk, but nonetheless, we must let them in.
Of course we are an overpopulated, over-burdened country and it does affect the quality of our lives. It is obvious when you watch the people on the streets, their nerves taut with stress, their emotions dulled from overexposure, their tempers bristling raw from having been rubbed the wrong way way too often. And it does make you wish for a quieter, more easy-going place with fewer people around. Sure. But that does not justify a decision deliberated behind closed doors and taken in cold blood to forsake our humanity as a nation, to collectively give up on compassion once and for all! What kind of a directive is that to the people of this country? And how will we ever live down the guilt and the shame of it, of this breach in our morality?
If overpopulation is our real problem, then it is high time steps were taken to curb it, rather than parading it out every time we want to evade any real issue, be it economic inequality, illiteracy, rampant pollution, or in this case, immigration. And the very resource crunch that India has cited to deport the Rohingyas will come back to haunt us sooner or later as it gets harder and harder for us to get visas to go abroad. And we will want to go abroad, because we are nowhere near the top of the ladder. There may well be people below the glass floors that we walk upon, but there’s no doubt that we too live beneath a ceiling of shatterproof glass.
The bottom-line is that migrations are an inevitable part of our world today and they are not going to stop anytime soon. The EU is facing a migrant crisis, with its members unable to see eye to eye on how to deal with it. It has contributed to the rise of far-right parties in all the major countries of Europe. And it was the single most important issue that led to Brexit. Most European countries, North America, and Australia have all had extremely discriminatory immigration policies that India has often denounced. Well, this is an opportunity that India can use to show that it can lead the way in this time of crisis, that we can come up with some truly enlightened immigration policies. How immigrants are dealt with is as much a moral issue as it may be an economic or a social one and we must strive to come up with a morally sound response to it. We must rise above mean and selfish concerns and set an example in kindness and humanity, not just for other nations around the world, but also for the people of our very own country.
Migrants are people: living, feeling, human beings just like you and me, who love and laugh and hurt and bleed. People who would love to enjoy their sunrises and sunsets and lounge with their loved ones beneath brilliant September skies, given the chance. The decisions that our government takes about their fate will determine the kind of future they have, if any; for deportation may well be a life sentence for many.
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