Refuge seekers prefer India over neighbouring countries as they find that it offers better facilities and rights. However the fact is there is no policy framework to deal with refugees and asylum seekers writes RIDHIMA MALHOTRA.
As salaam u alai kum,” the children spoke in cho-rus, excited at seeing a stranger walking to-wards their homes. They didn’t stop greeting aloud unless each one of them got an individual reply. “Walekum As salaam”. The children, all of them between two and four years of age, had big smiles on their muddy faces as they played barefoot with stones and pieces of wood. They were soon joined by a few older children who had returned from classes at a nearby madrassa. Their parents couldn’t afford to get them enrolled in elementary schools.
“None of these kids can speak Hindi. Only Arabic is taught at the madrassa. We don’t really care much about their education. It’s their stomachs that we have to fill first,” said Ali, holding his infant son suffering from a fever.
Set up five years ago in Madanpur Khadar area on the banks of the Yamuna in New Delhi, the refugee camp is home to around 50 families of Rohingyas, natives of neighbouring Myanmar who were forced to flee in the face of ethnic persecution. The camp is a slum of mostly double-story shanties put together with planks of wood, cardboard and tarpaulin.
At a tea stall run by Mohammad Haroon, a middle aged man who has been living in India for the past 12 years, a group of Rohingya men narrated their ordeals. Some of them recalled how they had to walk continuously for days on a hilly terrain to escape the tyranny of their own countrymen. “We barely managed to save our lives and flee with our only belongings being the clothes that we were wearing. Some of us had to steal a boat and go to Bangladesh via the four-km-long stretch of sea between Burma and Bangladesh. After spending a few months there, I had to bribe middlemen on both sides of the border to cross over to India,” said Haroon.
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