Eight organisations of the Chakma community on Tuesday submitted a memorandum to the Ministry of Home Affairs, pleading that the Chin refugees in India be given citizenship by further amending the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019.
The Bill is yet to go through the Rajya Sabha.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee that submitted its recommendations to the Centre after discussions with stakeholders rejected the request for citizenship to the minorities from Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The Bill seeks to fast-track the grant of citizenship to non-Muslims who had fled religious persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan and come to India till December 31, 2014.
The memorandum by the eight Chakma NGOs was made on the basis of a January 2009 report by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch. The report, ‘The Chin People of Burma: Unsafe in Burma, Unprotected in India,’ said there were an estimated 1,00,000 Chins in Mizoram, accounting for 20% of Myanmar’s total Chin population.
Manipur, too, has an unspecified number of Chins, who are ethnically related to the majority Mizos of Mizoram and the Kuki-Zomi groups in Manipur.
“The number of Chin refugees in India is at least 1.2 lakh over the years. In November 2017, about 1,600 Chins, many of them women and children, fled to Lawngtlai district of Mizoram following a military offensive against Arakan Army militants in Chin State of Myanmar. While some went back, around 1,440 have refused to return because of insecurity,” Dilip Kanti Chakma, president of the Delhi-based All India Chakma Students’ Union, told The Hindu .
About 4,000 Chin refugees are registered with the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in New Delhi, but in June 2018, the UNHCR decided to cancel their ‘refugee status’ with effect from August 1, 2018. The ‘cessation process’ would be completed by December 31 this year on the ground that Myanmar has become “stable and secure” for them to return home and, therefore, they don’t need “international protection.”
“We appealed to the Centre to further amend the Bill for including Myanmar in its ambit,” Mr Chakma said.
The Chakmas in Mizoram have been at the receiving end because of the Bill that the Mizo NGOs say will let the Chakmas from Bangladesh in. The Chakmas have a sizeable population in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. “It is a pity that some NGOs of Mizoram have never raised the issue of the Chin refugees while unnecessarily targeting the indigenous Chakmas who have an autonomous district council in the State under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution,” Mr Chakma said.
