RTI indicates rail advisories about Rohingya influx only served BJP narrative
On 28 September 2018, Dharmendra Kumar, the director general of the Railway Protection Force, issued a confidential note to all zones of the Indian Railways. The operations of the Indian Railways are divided into 16 zones across the country, and these zones are further split into a total of 68 divisions. The RPF is a central body responsible for ensuring the security of railway passengers and property across these zones. According to the DG’s note, “input” indicated that “huge numbers” of Rohingya were travelling “in groups along with their families.” The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar. They were rendered stateless by the Buddhist-majority country’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against them.
The DG’s note said that members of the Rohingya community are boarding south-bound trains from “every corner” of north-eastern states in order to ultimately reach Kerala. It advised the zones to take “precautionary measures” in coordination with law-enforcement authorities to avoid “any untoward incident.” The note further asked the zones to sensitise the RPF and the railway staff about this input and put them on “maximum alert.” Soon, as the media caught wind of this advisory, news headlines had phrases such as “Rohingya refugee influx,” an “exodus to Kerala,” and a “move in large numbers towards the South,” and so on.
Between 26 September 2018 and 20 November 2018, the Indian Railways issued at least four such advisories to its zonal branches. This period coincided with election season in five states which were slated to go to polls at the end of that year. Among these were Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh—three major states in the Hindi heartland that the Bharatiya Janata Party ruled at that time.
On the election campaign trail, Amit Shah, the BJP president who is now the union home minister, vociferously targeted illegal immigrants. It was at a rally in Rajasthan on 22 September 2018 that he first said that illegal immigrants in India are “termites.” He reasoned that “they are eating the grain that should go to the poor, they are taking our jobs.” His verbal attacks against “ghuspethiye”or infiltrators, as he calls them, increased in number and aggression, creating a paranoia about the number of such persons entering India.
Less than a year later, in June 2019, the Indian government admitted that there is no “accurate data” on the number of Rohingya living in the country. Moreover, according to responses to a right-to-information application that I filed, at least 27 divisions of the Indian Railways had been unable to identify even a single Rohingya in their trains as of July 2019. These included divisions from four southern states.
While the advisories about the huge number of Rohingya aboard Indian trains helped strengthen Shah’s assertions, the RTI responses suggest that these did not hold water. “Apparently, it does look like the alerts were bogus,” Vikash Narain Rai, a former officer of the Indian Police Services who led the investigation in the Samjhauta Express blast of 2007, told me. “If such news was reported about Rohingyas’ movement in media then and your RTI information says that no Rohingyas have been arrested so far, even a layman would say that it was all fraud.”
According to the RTI responses, the 27 railway divisions that did not find a single Rohingya as of July 2019 were: Kota, Sonpur, Jaipur, Secunderabad, Kolkata, Trivandrum, Vadodra, Kharagpur, Adra, Chakradharpur, Ranchi, Shalimar, Guntur, Tiruchchirappalli, Salem, Ahmedabad, Vijayawada, New Delhi, Palakkad, Raipur, Guntakal, Samastipur, Moradabad, Danapur, Mumbai Central, Firozpur and Solapur. Some of these divisions even specified that the RPF had conducted searches regularly. Many other divisions such as Ratlam, Bhopal, Chennai, Mughalsarai, Lucknow, Jabalpur either said they had received no such advisory note or forwarded my request to another department within the divisions.
But the events that transpired between September and November last year complemented Shah’s narrative. On 3 October 2018, the Railway Board sent a note to the RPF in all the zones asking them to “furnish details of action taken to prevent infiltration of Rohingyas.” It provided a format in which all the zonal offices were supposed to collect data, regarding the train number in which Rohingya are traveling; number of checks conducted; place of checking; number of Rohingya detained and handed over to the police or the Government Railway Police, which functions under the state government and maintains security of the platforms; police case reference, if any; and a brief of the incident.
A day later, the Indian government announced that it had deported seven members of the Rohingya community to Myanmar after they were detained for illegally entering the country in 2012. The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch termed the deportation as a violation of “international legal obligations.”
Undeterred by international rebuke, that day, Shah reiterated his disdain for immigrants at an election rally in Rajasthan’s Sikar district. “Our government will identify each and every infiltrator and ensure they are out of the voters’ list,” he said. “In fact, we have started the process to deport Rohingya immigrants to Myanmar.”
Around a week later, news reports surfaced alleging that the Intelligence Bureau had submitted a report to the union home ministry, confirming that Rohingya were travelling in trains from the north-eastern states to the southern states. According to the reports, the IB report noted that an international terrorist organisation, Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, was trying to recruit Rohingya. These news reports further validated Shah’s electoral rhetoric.
The fourth alert, dated 20 November 2018, was different from the previous ones. Issued by the director general of RPF to all the zonal offices, the alert clubbed the details of the movement of Rohingya with that of some human traffickers and an armed separatist outfit. The note stated: “As regards to influx of Rohingya Muslims from Bangladesh to North East India, it is happening mostly from Sonai in Tripura district. After entering India, they fan out taking the railway route.”
Later that year, the BJP lost its three states in the assembly elections. Still, in the lead up to the 2019 general elections, Shah promised to render illegal immigrants in India stateless by implementing an exercise similar to Assam’s National Register of Citizens. At a rally in West Bengal, in April 2019, he said, “A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal.”
I spoke to Vibhuti Narain Rai, who was serving as the police chief of Ghaziabad district at the time of the Hashimpura massacre of 1987, about the advisories. Rai told me he did not believe the railways had even conducted a single search to identify members of Rohingya community. Within law enforcement agencies, Rai said, such alerts were understood to be issued for political purposes and not taken as a real threat to national security.
The responses to my RTI did appear to reflect that the railway authorities did not pay much heed to the advisories. At least three of the notes were addressed to all the zones, but many of the divisions said that they had not received any of them in response to my RTIs. While answering my question on identifying and deboarding Rohingya children from the trains, many divisions confirmed they followed no specific procedure. Only two divisions, from the zone of Southern Railways, gave a proper answer to the question. Palakkad division said that children are handled as per the guidelines of National Commission for Protection of Child Rights. The Trivandrum division said that “juveniles are being dealt according to Juvenile Justice Act.”
To ascertain if there is a procedure for identifying a Rohingya, I asked how the authorities distinguished a Rohingya Muslim from an Indian Muslim. Several divisions said, “No specific criteria (is) adopted to distinguish a Rohingya from an Indian Muslim citizen.” In its reply, the Guntakal division from the South Central Railway zone, said, “On suspicion and their appearance, the suspects will be questioned and verified their credentials.” Only a few divisions said that they would ask a suspect for documents, such as a voter card or an Aadhaar card.
None of the divisions had formed any separate squad to conduct the search for members of the Rohingya community, barring one—the Vadodara division said it had 12 squads for this purpose. Referring to the seeming lax response by the divisions to these alerts, Rai said, “Intelligence agencies keep issuing such routine alerts whose purpose is only to keep the government of the day happy.”