Shadows of Statelessness

One of the world’s most important and pressing refugee crises is currently occurring in Southeast Asia. At least 1.2 million Rohingya have been displaced and declared ‘stateless’ during violent and targeted campaigns led by the Myanmar military. Those who fled targeted persecution have sought refuge in countries such as Bangladesh, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, and India. Around 900,000 people live in camps in Cox’s Bazaar. The Rohingyas have been described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world who lack access to basic rights and services, including freedom of movement, healthcare, state education, and jobs.

As Bangladesh, Myanmar, and two major Indian states –West Bengal and Assam, with extensive borders with Bangladesh, are expected to hold elections in the next couple of months, the Rohingya crisis is bound to cast a long shadow in all these elections. In West Bengal, the Hindutva outfits have already whipped up the Rohingya refugee issue during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list. The NRC creation was mandated by the 2003 amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955. Its purpose is to document all the legal citizens of India so that the illegal immigrants can be identified and deported. NRC has been implemented for the state of Assam since 2013–2014. In 2021, the Government of India announced plans to implement it for the rest of the country.

Within a week of the SIR process, several deaths have been attributed to anxiety and fear over the citizenship registration. The Chief Minister of West Bengal and her party, AITMC, have strongly criticised the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Union government for harassing and hounding genuine Bengali-speaking citizens of the state by branding them either as Rohingya or illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The inhuman treatment meted out to a Bengali-speaking lady, Sunali Khatun, is a case in point. Sunali and five others were detained by Delhi Police in June 2025, identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, and “pushed into” Bangladesh. They were subsequently arrested by the Bangladesh authorities for illegal entry in August 2025 and imprisoned. Her parents’ names are on the 2002 voter lists. The Delhi Police allegedly did not verify their citizenship with local authorities in West Bengal before the deportation. At the time of her banishment, she was six months pregnant. The Calcutta High Court had on September 26 directed the Centre to ensure their repatriation within four weeks, setting aside the Centre’s decision to deport. On November 11, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court instructed the Centre to reply by the end of November on the status of bringing back to India Sunali and five others who are currently lodged in a jail in Bangladesh’s Chapai Nawabgunj.

In Tamil Nadu, the ruling DMK and its allies staged demonstrations across the state on Tuesday (November 11) against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) ongoing exercise of SIR. The parties alleged that the SIR was aimed at deleting the names of genuine voters, particularly those from minority communities and Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs). Absence of a coherent refugee policy of India, more than 90,000 (as on June 2024) Sri Lankan Tamils who live in 105 refugee camps in Tamil Nadu are practically ‘stateless’. They are denied long-term visas and pathways to dignity, even as other migrant communities gain rights.

Though it is claimed that SIR has no connection to NRC (National Register of Citizenship), the experience of the Rogingya people in Myanmar and the process through which over 1.9 million people in Assam were excluded from the final NRC list in 2019, indicate that negating the voting rights of any person is the first step to exclude a person from the citizenship register and subsequently declare him a ‘stateless person’. Fearing possible loss of citizenship and detention after exclusion from the list, scores of Bengali Hindus and Muslims have killed themselves since the process to update the citizen register started in 2015. In Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was updated in 2019, consists of people who could prove they came to the state by 24 March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan.

The method through which Rohingya people, who have been declared stateless by the Myanmar government, despite their continuous existence in the Arakan region of Myanmar for centuries, needs serious introspection to understand how the denial of voting rights can lead to the denial of citizenship. The Rohingya trace their history back to a kingdom known as Arakan in present-day Burma. In 1785, Arakan was overthrown by the Bamar, the dominant ethnic group in Burma. The Burmese occupation of Arakan was particularly oppressive. Thousands of Rakhine men were executed, and many were deported to central Burma. By 1799, as many as 35000 people fled to British Bengal to escape persecution by the Bamar. Around this time, one of the earliest recorded instances of the term “Rohingya” appears in British literature. It says, ”the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, call themselves ‘Rooinga’, or natives of Arakan… the other are Rakhing … who adhere to the tenets of Buddha.”. In 1823, Burma came under British rule after several wars. Under British rule, the Burmese Buddhist majority felt particularly unsupported and threatened.

Most Rohingya live in Rakhine State on Burma’s western coast. For centuries, they lived side by side with the Rakhine Buddhist community. Burma gained independence from Great Britain in 1948. In the years leading up to independence, the Rohingya played important roles in establishing Burma’s new government. Official documents, issued by the Burmese government, provide proof that the Rohingya had the same rights and legal standing as everyone else in the country. Burma’s first prime minister, U Nu, recognised the Rohingya as nationals of Burma in 1954. The Burma Broadcasting Service provided all ethnic groups, including the Rohingya, with airtime each week. After the military seized power in Burma in 1962, the government cancelled the Rohingya language program. Other ethnic groups could continue broadcasting.

The 1982 Citizenship Law deprived the Rohingya of citizenship in Myanmar (Burma). Under this law, full citizenship was primarily based on membership of the “national races” who were considered by the State to have settled in Myanmar before 1824, the date of first occupation by the British. Despite generations of residence in Myanmar, the Rohingya were not considered to be among the official indigenous races and were thus effectively excluded from full citizenship. The 1982 Citizenship Law marked the legalisation of a broader and ongoing national campaign to de-nationalise the Rohingya, which included removing them from Myanmar soil and destroying them as an ethnic group. Since October 2016, a series of genocides in Rakhine state has killed thousands of Rohingya people and forced over a million stateless Rohingya to flee their homeland.

Like the Rohingya people of Myanmar, the ancestors of the Bengali-speaking people of West Bengal and East Bengal have been residing in the undivided Bengal for centuries. After the division of Bengal on August 15, 1947, and the announcement of the Radcliffe Line on August 17, two days after the partition, the Bengali people became refugees in their ancestors’ land. No plebiscite was held, but the fate of their future generations was sealed by a handful of politicians and a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is a professor of Business Administration who primarily writes on political economy, global trade, and sustainable development