Why India cannot afford to keep the Rohingya Muslims

New Delhi, Dec 23: Several Rohingya Muslims have said that they do not want to return to Myanmar. Many have made India their home, but the government says that illegal immigrants have to return.

There are an estimated 40,000 Rohingyas who live in India and all of them had fled Myanmar following the violence that broke out there. The question is whether India can afford to keep them.

It is nothing but a ticking time bomb and amidst the huge humanitarian crisis involving the Rohingya Muslims, there is a lurking danger which India must now start taking very seriously.

The links to terror outfits, hawala transactions among others have often been quoted by our Intelligence Bureau on several occasions. A recent incident that took place in Jammu has only raised concerns about the kind of dealings that the Rohingyas are into and how they have become a front for illegal activity.

The police had in August, picked up three members of a Rohingya family for questioning after Rs 30 lakh in cash was recovered from them. The cash was found at a jhuggi in the Channi Himmat area of Jammu city. Investigations have shown that the cash belonged to Ismail and Noor Alam, who had left for Bangladesh last Monday.

The duo to whom the money belonged to had been living in Jammu for the past six years without valid documents. Investigations have also revealed that this money was parked with the Rohingya family with an intention of using for a nefarious activity. The family was unable to explain the money, but sources say that they would have eventually got orders to pass on to some terror group or a member of a drug cartel.

The writing has been on the wall and the killing of Chotta Burmi in Kashmir clearly indicated the close association that the Rohingya Muslims have with terror groups. Burmi was killed in an encounter along with a commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammad. It was Burmi who was part of the Rohingya terror group, Aqa Mul Mujahideen who once shared the dais with Lashkar-e-Tayiba chief Hafiz Saeed.

The Lashkar-e-Tayiba had decided that it would launch the Rohingyas in Jammu where there is a huge settlement. They are easy preys and all attempts have already been made to install an Islamic ideology into them. Incidents such as the one at Bodhgaya are all attempts to show solidarity with the Rohingyas and lure them into terror groups.

On the Rohingya issue, terror groups such as the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, Students Islamic Movement of India and the Lashkar-e-Tayiba work in tandem. While the JuMB is tasked with ensuring that recruitments take place in camps at Hyderabad, West Bengal and Assam, the SIMI focuses on the northern cities including Delhi. The focus of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba has been primarily Jammu and it sees the overall operation.

The Lashkar-e-Tayiba has been espousing this cause since 2012 when it launched the Difa-e-Musalman-e-Arakan conference in Pakistan to highlight the issue. Following this. Saeed sent two of his men- Shahid Mahmood and Nadeem Awan to establish contacts with the Rohingyas. As part of this exercise, the target was the Jammu camp.

An Intelligence Bureau official tells OneIndia that this is a ticking time bomb and action has to be taken. There are several issues and the main one is that most of these persons are not documented, which makes tracking them extremely difficult. Take the case of the Jammu incident, the two persons lived in the country illegally for six years and easily slipped out without any documents. They even managed to leave behind a huge chunk of cash meant for nefarious activities, the officer further adds.

While relying on Intelligence Bureau reports, the Centre says that "it has been found by the Central Government that many Rohingyas figured in suspected sinister designs of ISI
which has been responsible for spreading terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of the country.

The Centre also said that the Rohingyas have also been mobilising funds through hawala channels and procuring fake and fabricated Indian identity documents for other Rohingyas and also indulging in human trafficking.

"Many of them have managed to acquire fake and fraudulently obtained Indian identity documents like PAN and voter cards," the Centre also says.

"With serious security concern already in existence, more disturbing part is that there is an organised influx of illegal immigrants from Myanmar through agents and touts facilitating illegal immigrant Rohingyas into India via Benapole-Haridaspur and Hilli (West Bengal), Sonamura (Tripura), Kolkata and Guwahati," the affidavit said and stressed that situation is seriously harming national security of the country."

The Centre also said that the number of illegal Rohingyas is around 40,000 and their continuance in India has serious national security ramifications and threats.

"India has open and porous borders with Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar etc and had an easily navigable sea route with Pakistan as well as Sri Lanka making it vulnerable to a continuous threat of an influx of illegal immigration and resultant problems arising therefrom," the Centre also said.