Rohingya Muslims are illegal immigrants, deporting them not against law: Rajnath

Rohingya Muslims are illegal immigrants, home minister Rajnath Singh said on Thursday, stressing they are not refugees who had applied for asylum in India

Addressing a seminar organised by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), he wondered why some people were objecting to the deportation of Rohingya Muslims when Myanmar was ready to accept them.

The home minister also said that India would not violate any international law by deporting Rohingyas as it was not a signatory to the UN Refugees Convention 1951.

The home minister’s comments came after the government told the Supreme Court recently many Rohingya immigrants had links with the Islamic State and Pakistan’s spy agency ISI, as it sought to win legal backing to deport tens of thousands of them for being a “serious security threat” to India.

The government had also said if allowed to stay, the Rohingya refugees would exhaust natural resources meant for Indians that could culminate in hostility towards them and lead to social tension and law and order problems.

Faced with criticism over the mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi said on Tuesday she did not fear global scrutiny over the crisis, pledging to hold rights violators to account and to resettle some of the 410,000 people who have fled army operations in her country.

But she offered no solutions to what the UN calls “ethnic cleansing” in Rakhine state, where army-led operations have burned Muslim Rohingya from their homes, and refused to point the finger at the men in uniform.

Rights group Amnesty International said the Nobel peace laureate was “burying her head in the sand” over documented army abuses and claims of rape, murder and the systematic clearing of scores of villages.

(With agency inputs)