Kill us, but don't send us to Myanmar: A walk into the life of Rohingyas in Delhi

"What have we done to India that we are now being considered a threat?", that is the first question Ali asked me when he finally agreed to speak. Ali, belonging to the Rohingya community came to India in 2010.

Amidst the debate surrounding the Rohingyas, whether they should be allowed to stay in India or deported, Oneindia reached their camp in Delhi's Okhla to get a glimpse of their daily life.

A muddy lane, littered with garbage, led us to the small camp that houses nearly 50 Rohingya families. The men work as daily wage labourers, women do the household chores, except for some and their children go to local schools.

To earn a living, some have opened small tea shops and grocery stores.

A glance at the place makes it clear that cleanliness and sanitation don't top the list of their priorities at the moment, and the NGOs claiming to work for them also don't seem to be bothered about that. There are two bathrooms for the entire camp, and women are clearly the biggest sufferers when it comes to sanitation.

UNHCR does provide them with sanitary napkins to take care of their menstrual health, but three packs of sanitary napkins arrive every six months, clearly clothes are the convenient alternative for these women. Child births don't take place in hospitals, but in their crammed up shelter in the camps by 'dai maas'.

However, with life and security at stake, the Rohingyas are clearly not worried about health and sanitation.

Fatima, who also works for her husband's grocery store and tea shop told Oneindia, "India is good the way it is, at least pregnant women are not being cut open. Here we are not thrashed and kicked by police. We are allowed to leave a peaceful life and we don't want to go back.

Cut us, shoot us but don't send us back to Myanmar, humanity does not exist there,"
She also asked that why the Indian Government feels Rohingyas are a threat to the national security. she asked, "We work and we eat from what we earn, we are not causing any trouble to India. Our children don't even know about Myanmar, they study here, know India as their country, what threat can we cause when we ourselves have escaped terror?"

When Oneindia went inside the camp to get a sense of the way the Rohingyas have been living, most of the quickly ran into their homes and completely refused talking to us, even when the cameras were turned off. Fatima, who by that time got comfortable with u said that they cannot trust the media.

She said, "Earlier we used to talk to everyone from the media, but they just come here and take our photo and don't show what we said. She play our visuals and call us terrorists. It hurts us. We now don't talk to the media no matter how sweet they re to us,"

We at Oneindia, promised them that we will not let them down by twisting what they said and hence forth, we will let the pictures speak for themselves.

OneIndia News