Asia's minority rights
crisis is getting worse
On Monday, the Indian
government announced a decision that may render millions of people stateless.
When authorities published the final draft of the National
Register of Citizens for the state of Assam, situated in the country's
northeast, they left an estimated 4 million people off the list, meaning
that their proof of citizenship was rejected by the government as it
updated the state's rolls. Assam is on the front line of India's battle over illegal
immigration, with politicians grandstanding over the threat of
“infiltrators” from neighboring Bangladesh. Over the decades, the state has
experienced bouts of bloody interethnic strife.
Residents left off the list still
have time to appeal the government's decision, and my colleague Annie Gowen noted that there
are no mass-deportation plans in place. “But the draft does raise the
question of where migrants will go after the numbers are finalized;
Bangladesh’s government does not acknowledge them as citizens,” she wrote.
“I’m worried about my future,”
Saleha Begum, 40, who was born in Assam but was not on the list, told The Washington Post. “My parents
were born here. We have all the documents. Still, my family’s names are not
on the list. I’m scared.”
In an echo of Myanmar's treatment of stateless Rohingya
Muslims, top officials in India's Hindu nationalist government cast a
whole swath of Muslims in Assam as an alien menace. Now, analysts fear
looming chaos as India's prime minister courts votes ahead of upcoming
parliamentary elections.
“Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules the state, has insisted in the past
that illegal Muslim immigrants will be deported. But neighboring Bangladesh
will definitely not accede to such a request,” explained the BBC's Soutik Biswas.
“Chances are India will end up creating the newest cohort of stateless
people, raising the specter of a homegrown crisis that will echo the
Rohingya people who fled Myanmar for Bangladesh.”
A
Rohingya woman and child wait to collect aid at a camp in Bangladesh on
July 21. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images)
But in Asia, home to the majority
of the world's population, these politics are all the more volatile and
risk even larger explosions of violence. From India to the Philippines, a
host of Asian countries that emerged from the wars and empires of the last
century boast ostensibly democratic, multiethnic societies. But that
pluralism is being sternly challenged by a deepening
majoritarianism.
In Myanmar, the Rohingya have long
been the scapegoats of the powers that be. The
country's new civilian leadership has remained in lockstep with its
overweening generals, pandering to the Buddhist nationalism of its majority
while systematically depriving the Rohingya of the same rights as their
compatriots.
Following last year's campaign of
apparent ethnic cleansing by Myanmar's military and affiliated vigilante groups,
more than 700,000 Rohingya remain in squalid refugee camps in eastern
Bangladesh. The arrival of summer monsoons over the past two months has
created “a sanitation nightmare,” my colleague Vidhi Doshi reported, and
helped spread diseases such as diphtheria. Meanwhile, Myanmar's government
has stymied a U.N.-supervised process of
repatriation by refusing to grant citizenship to many Rohingya refugees
seeking the right to return.
Beyond the growing pool
of stateless people in Asia — potentially numbering in the millions —
there's the even more widespread issue of trampling minority rights. In
Indonesia last week, the country's Constitutional Court rejected a petition from members of the
oft-persecuted Ahmadiyah sect of Islam to revoke a long-standing blasphemy
law (similar laws are on the books in other Muslim-majority countries like
Pakistan). The law has been invoked to jail a prominent ethnic Chinese Christian
politician on charges critics say are politically motivated.
“The government’s refusal to seek
the law’s revocation raises troubling questions about its commitment to
human rights for all Indonesians,” noted Human Rights Watch in a statement.
“Indonesia cannot claim to be a tolerant Muslim country while continuing
religious discrimination and rights violations enabled by its blasphemy
law.”
A recent column in the Economist noted that
“wealth inequalities and ethnic divisions make South-East Asia fertile
ground for his style of majoritarian populism,” pointing to the growing
clout of would-be demagogues in countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and
the Philippines.
Ethnic
Uighurs take part in a protest march in Brussels on April 27. (Emmanuel
Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)
Uighurs in exile allege that tens of thousands of their compatriots have
been consigned to “reeducation camps,” which both “disappear” potential
dissidents and seek to indoctrinate them according to Communist Party
ideology. Chinese authorities justify their policies of repression by pointing
to the threat of Islamist terrorism.
“Rights groups say the government’s
crackdown amounts to the collective punishment of millions of people over
the actions of a handful,” Rajagopalan wrote after speaking to
numerous Uighurs living overseas. “Every person interviewed for this
article said state security operatives told them their families could be
sent to, or would remain in, internment camps for 'reeducation' if they did
not comply with their demands. It was a campaign, they said, that aimed not
only to gather details about Uighurs’ activities abroad, but also to sow
discord within exile communities in the West and intimidate people in hopes
of preventing them from speaking out against the Chinese state.”
This may reflect the extreme
measures that only of one of the world's most powerful authoritarian states
can implement. But in an age of combustive nationalism, China's stance is
far from the exception.
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