Mubashir Naik
After anguish and mourning, a new feeling of dismay has gripped the Rohingya community after fifteen of their shelters were gutted in a mysterious ablaze in Jammu’s Maratha mohalla area during the intervening night of Sunday and Monday. “Nobody lives in that house, there is no electricity in the makeshift hut where the fire emerged from,” says a middle-aged Rohingya man who has been living in one of the many make-shift slum colonies by the persecuted Rohingya community.
A few weeks back the community that took refuge in various parts of India to escape the persecution from the majority Buddhists and the Government in Myanmar was in the news when at least 170 of their members after a Government order were rounded up and lodged in a Sub Jail of Jammu in the Hiranagar area. The arrests happened amid a heated nationalist debate of throwing out the Rohingya community whose 40,000 members have taken refugee in India. The Government insisted that the detained had illegally intruded the Indian borders but many of the arrested hold valid United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) refugee ID cards, which otherwise offer protection from arbitrary detention.
This recent fire incident has turned at least 15 makeshift houses into ash. Eyewitnesses say that there was no way that the fire could have started by an electric circuit or anything involuntary. “Nobody lives close to the hut where the fire started, around 1 AM, I heard cries of people, when I came out, around 15 make-shift houses were on fire, nobody came to douse off the flames for a long while, it was one local inspector, who later called the fire-services,” a refugee told The Kashmiriyat.
“Everyone was out with buckets of water, trying to douse off the flames, we do not know if anyone set ablaze the hut, but the Station House officer of Trikuta Nagar helped us,” said Aif ul Islam, a Rohingya while pleading they are innocent and they have not come to India to settle down here forever. “We will go back once normalcy returns to our country (Myanmar).
This is not the first incident of fire. In June 2019 Nearly 150 huts, including 41 of Rohingya refugees were gutted in a massive nocturnal blaze in the same Maratha Mohalla locality of the Jammu city. In April 2018 46 make-shift houses in the Rohingya camp in the Kalindi Kunj area on Delhi had been burnt to the ground. The first incident in the Kalindi Kunj camp in Delhi took place in 2012, The second one occurred in 2016. Another fire incident took place on the wee hours of a morning in 2017, when a tarpaulin sheet outside the residence of Johar caught fire.
Within an hour, they said, all fifteen homes withinside the Rohingya camp at the Martha Mohalla in Jammu city were burnt to the ground. Most households misplaced their belongings, which includes their documents.
As Abdullah, another Rohingya woke up, he ran from door to door in the Maratha Mohalla camp for Rohingya refugees, asking them to leave their homes quickly. “There were men running naked, as their clothes caught fire,” Abdullah told The Kashmiriyat. The Rohingyas claim that they could save nothing. “Our clothes, Money, essential belongings, or even our identity cards were burnt in the fire,” he said.
The Rohingya community has been fleeing Myanmar for the past several years, fearing ethnic cleansing by the Buddhist government in Myanmar. Before the military coup, the Government in Myanmar refused to grant Rohingyas citizenship and by the october of 2016, it launched a military offensive against the Rohingyas, under the disguise of targetting extremist groups.