Rohingya crisis a great opportunity for India to set its house in order

If India fails to stand with the Rohingya today, will it be able to claim tomorrow that it is rightfully with the people of Baluchistan or Tibet?

If a nation’s resilience is tested by its response to the crisis in its surroundings, then India isn’t the super power it tries to project itself as. A superpower must have enough will to, as Uncle Ben suggested to Spiderman, take "great responsibility," and should not just assemble state-of-the-art artilleries to flex in its Republic Day parades.

India’s typical response to the Rohingya crisis shows that it still has to build a moral compass to navigate its foreign policy and its foreign policy has hardly changed since the 1990s, even superficially, in the manner in which it deals with urgent humanitarian crises in its neighbourhood and beyond. Like now, India, in the 1990s, had failed to defend the rights of the Bhutanese people of Nepalese origin when they were chased out by the royal government. It even gave tacit support to the Bhutanese royalty by ignoring several appeals by human right groups and activists.

The Bhutanese refugee crisis wasn’t an out of the blue thing but a build-up of a series of events since 1988 when Bhutan conducted its southern population census targeting its Nepalese population. With the census, Bhutan re-classified several thousands of its citizens as illegal migrants.

Going further, it introduced several repressive measures including its ‘One Nation, One People’, or Driglam policy, wherein the Nepalese population were forced to wear the northern traditional dress and adopt the culture of majority. It removed the Nepali language from the curriculum of schools. Bhutanese’s refugee activist Tek Nath Rijhal’s Torture Killing Me Softly is a grueling account of the period of his suffering in Bhutan’s prison for raising concerns over the plight of these Nepalese.

It must be noted that Bhutan doesn’t share its border with Nepal and when these refugees reached the Indian border, India ‘arranged’ trucks to see them off to Nepal. Since then, these refugees have been living in temporary settlements in south-eastern Nepal. In 2006, the process of the third country resettlement began, and by 2015, just about 20,000 refugees were left in the camps.

What is so unsettling about the whole crisis is that even when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and countries like the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Norway took reasonable interest in the crisis and its aftermath, India remained aloof. There were several rounds of talk between Nepal and Bhutan but India preferred to look the other way. Had India intervened immediately, the crisis would have long resolved. If it had refused to carry the refugees to Nepal, things would have been very different today.

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