A Rohingya refugee camp in Delhi caught fire on Saturday night. The fire occurred close to Kalindi Kunj metro station which left about fifty-five families homeless. Although no casualties were reported, around 300 Rohingya refugees have become homeless overnight.
Some of these refugees had fled their camp from Jammu two months back where their camp was set ablaze in April, this year. In about an hour’s time, all of their camps were reduced to rubble.
As indicated by the police and a local group of firefighters, this incident occurred inadvertently and spread quickly in Rohingya refugee ghettos. They further added that they got information about this at around 12 o’clock in the night.
As soon as the information was received, numerous firefighting apparatus including many firefighter workforces arrived at the spot and lit stifling the fire.
The vast majority of the camps in the slum were made of plastic and tarpaulin because of which the fire spread quickly and engulfed almost all the camps located close by. There were, additionally, a few occurrences of domestic gas cylinders blast during the flare-up.
Whereas the opinion of the residents (Rohingya Refugees) differs from that of the police. While speaking to The Kashmiriyat, a few residents expressed, they speculate that the fire was schemed by bigoted Hindutva groups, supported by government viability.
The refugees have alleged that Hindutva fanatics would threaten them to leave every week and that if they did not leave, they will have to suffer consequences. The refugees said that they had a four-member team that would patrol the camp every night, on a rotational basis.
Unfortunately, they missed the patrolling yesterday and their camp was set on fire. All of their goods including their refugee cards have been burnt in the fire.
For the past several years, the Rohingya community has been fleeing the Rakhine state because of the fear of ethnic persecution by the Buddhist government in Myanmar. Myanmar has refused to grant Rohingyas citizenship.
This is the second time the settlement has been entirely burnt down after April 2018. Prior to 2018, the Rohingya settlements had caught fire almost three times, of which the 2017 fire was mysterious.
In the wee hours of a morning in 2017, a fire was spotted in a tarpaulin sheet outside the residence of Johar, who is a human rights activist too. The tarpaulin was not near any source of fire or electricity.
Over the most recent couple of years, it has also been seen that the Dhobi Ghat Slum located just a short distance away from this fire-influenced region, had likewise burst into flames and a couple of months after that occurrence, a declaration was given to the occupants to evacuate the spot. The issue is as yet confronting the legal preliminaries.
This is yet another instance of systemic violence against the Rohingya refugees, who were not only arrested in Jammu, earlier this year, their camp was set ablaze, too.
Albeit the police have named these charges as outlandish, yet what is to be seen is whether this time likewise last time, the declaration of evacuation will be given to the residents or not?