Indian police on January 3 took a Rohingya Muslim family of five to the border by bus, readying to deport them to neighbouring Myanmar as the second such group expelled in four months during a crackdown on illegal immigrants.
India’s Hindu nationalist government regards the Rohingya as illegal aliens and a security risk. It has ordered that tens of thousands of the community, who live in small settlements and slums, be identified and repatriated.
The husband, wife and three children comprising the family set to be expelled on Thursday had been arrested and jailed in Assam in 2014 for entering India without valid documents, police said.
“These five people are now at the border gate in the adjoining Manipur state and we are waiting for Myanmar officials to hand them over formally,” Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta, Assam’s additional director general of police, told Reuters.
Jails in Assam held 20 more Myanmar nationals, all arrested for illegal entry, he added. But it was not immediately clear if all were Rohingya, a largely stateless Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Source: BT
