The Betrayal of South Asia’s Persecuted Minorities in India

The Betrayal of South Asia’s Persecuted Minorities in India

India as a natural home of persecuted minorities in South Asia has now become an effective political narrative regurgitated on the national arena and infinitum. Politicians and other authorities have often stressed that the nation had a moral obligation to provide refuge especially to the Hindus,(Minorities in India) Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians who were escaping Islamic majority countries, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. That story came to a head with the enactment in 2019 of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), sold as a revolutionary measure to save non-Muslim minorities who are the victims of religious persecution in these fellow states.
The Act was supposed to help these people have an easy time getting Indian citizenship thereby doing what many political leaders referred to as the civilizational duty of India. On the books, this law identified India as a bleeding-heart generous donor, a promised land where desperate, harassed minorities would escape to, to gain shelter, belonging and dignity. However, beyond this noble appearance hides an ugly and painful reality, namely that the very minorities that India boasts of saving are entrapped in a highly flawed and unconcerned system where they have become mere political pawns and are subject to ignored, exploited and even killed.
The grisly instance of Sanjay Kumar and Sapna Kumari, Pakistani Hindus who belong to Sindh and took refuge in India only to be discovered murdered in Mumbai, is a bloodcurdling reminder that even in so called sanctuary, protection is never at hand. The way they were killed raised dreadful memories of another unsolved crime the mysterious deaths of 11 Pakistani Hindu migrants in Jodhpur in August 2020, where the shadow of mass murder continues to hover unaddressed. They are not individual aberrations but indicators of a sickening trend, and show how India, in assuming the self-image of defender of the persecuted, conceals an ugly truth of neglect, risk, and violence.
Refuges in India are supposed to be secure, but they end up living in fear, criminal activities, exploitation, and social bias. And even those who manage to survive this hazardous living conditions, life in India is poles apart of the dignified stable future promised to them. The existing number of Pakistani Hindu migrants living in temporary camps and settlements spread out in the northern part of India is more than 80,000 people in such states as Rajasthan, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, and others. These camps are not the humane shelters that can be imagined during the political speeches or the governmental plans on paper, those are squalid ghettos where the most basic needs of life are absent. It has no clean drinking water, no sanitation facilities, no electricity and no access to healthcare.
The settlements are crisscrossed by open drains and corners are heaped with garbage which breeds disease and desperation. Children are the ones who ought to be in school building their future but they are turned away due to lack of the necessary legal documentation by their families. The consequences of this are that a whole generation of refugee children are doomed to live in ignorance, poverty and stagnation; a harsh betrayal of the promises their parents had heard when they left their homes in Pakistan behind. The highly hyped CAA has done nothing much to ease this suffering. However, whereas much is touted to have been opened to the citizenship doors to the oppressed minorities, the effect of this law has been outrageously minimal.
Of the tens of thousands of refugees waiting in limbo, only 4,300 actually received Indian citizenship between 2014 and 2015 a drop in the ocean. By 2015, only 36,000 have received long-term visas, which is not an ideal and long-term solution as it places the refugees in a position in which they cannot integrate fully into the society and enjoy the rights and services they need so badly. Life represents a continuous sequence of uncertainty, bureaucratic red tapes and thwarted expectations to the greatest majority. This condition of extended abandonment has broken the dreams of protection and hospitality that originally took these families over the line. In a magnificent and heart wrenching turn of events hundreds of Hindu refugee families have taken the unthinkable step of returning to Pakistan, the country they previously fled in terror.
Almost 800 families went back across the border into Pakistan in 2021 alone, choosing the familiar risks of religious discrimination and social persecution to the slow death of despair, poverty, and hopelessness in India. Their choice is very eloquent regarding the scale of their disillusionment. What will make people go back to a place where their temples are desecrated, their daughters abducted, and their religion criminalized willingly? The pressure of the broken promises and the failure of the system must have been unbearable to make refugees take such a decision. Their homecoming is a revelation of the harsh reality of the Indian refugee policy: that its apparent kindness is not grounded in the pure humanitarian approach, but in the jaded political reasoning.
CAA and the bigger minority protection narrative are designed not as a rescue narrative but as a domestic political tool, one that would mobilize Hindu nationalist sentiment, unite voters around it, and create an image of a concerned Hindu-majority state. The sufferings of these minorities are flaunted in front of the electorate when elections are near; their misery is exploited as an emotional resource to keep the communal unity burning and the ideology of the ruling party afloat. Yet after the political capital is mined and the headlines have died away, the refugees are forgotten-left to languish in poverty without citizenship, rights or protection. In fact, it seems that the actual role of the CAA and the supporting rhetoric is not so much about offering actual sanctuary but rather strengthening the internal politics of India.
The speeches and policies invoke minorities who are escaping persecution as an excuse to make discriminatory laws targeting Muslims, to demonstrate an ideological commitment to Hindutva ideology, and to impress the global community with the assumption of moral authority. Yet these very minorities are not accorded any real protection or integration when they enter India. They are stateless and unseen, only good to be used as a symbol but expendable in reality. The system does not provide them with any avenue to becoming citizens, does not give them any hope of settling permanently, does not offer them any way out of poverty.
Their camps are permitted to wallow in squalor; their children are not provided with schools; their families are kept locked in the circular desperations of forms and vows that lead to nothing. The Indian acceptance of minorities is thus an empty one, the acceptance that rubs shoulders with on one side and persists to reject on the other. It is banditry camouflaged as asylum, a politics of image not content. The governmental promises about the safety, dignity and citizenship remain a mere illusion, broken on the ground of indifference, inefficiency and brutality.
Such a tendency of systematic exploitation suggests a darker and more distressing reality of the present political situation in India. Refugees are not taken as new citizens but are used as an instrument of ideological score. Their plight is manipulated to cause fear of the Muslim other, to legitimize majoritarian policies and to form the basis of national identity that is based on religious exclusion. The real welfare of the refugees does not matter in this story, but rather their symbolic usefulness in the bigger cultural and political conflict. Once they have something to say, once they come back to Pakistan in protest, once they perish or die in silence in their camps, no one wants to hear their stories anymore because they do not fit the narrative anymore.
The truth is that the noble actions of India offering shelter and protection are contrasted with dark and bloody and uncompassionate systematic-system where helpless minorities are enticed with the offer of protection and then left in a twilight world where they are neither citizens nor foreigners, neither welcomed nor at liberty. The outcome is a silent humanitarian catastrophe, occurring in the back alleys of the political drama that is India, where the minorities are made to suffer twice; once in their countries of origins and once more in the land they believed to be their saviour.
The issues surrounding the so-called embrace of the persecuted minorities of South Asia by India are a hazardous myth, thus concealing the reality of negligence, betrayal, and political game-playing. Instead of doing grand promises of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the policies related to it, tens of thousands of vulnerable refugees have been stuck in miserable conditions with no expectancy of citizenship or integration. The sanctity of life does not allow the deaths of Sanjay Kumar, Sapna Kumari and the 11 migrants in Jodhpur to remain aberrations, but indications of a more deep-rooted, systematic abdication.
The fact that hundreds of families are going back to Pakistan, although it is dangerous there, shows the overwhelming burden of disappointment and hopelessness that lies with these refugees. India, instead of being a land of refuge, turns out to be a sort of purgatory to the people who had believed in its promises- a place where they are exploited, thrown aside and forgotten. Using these minorities as a vote bank is a betrayal of not just the refugees but also of the principle of justice, compassion, and humanity that India purports to follow. As long as this vicious circle of exploitation continues, the Indian accommodating nature towards minorities will be fake as it will be a sad story of hope transformed to despair, of salvation transformed to destruction.