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For Rohingya refugee Hussain Ahmed, the hope that his children might receive a formal education to secure a better adulthood than his own was what “kept him going”. After fleeing to India from Myanmar in 2016, he began working as a construction worker in a country where he is not allowed to seek legal employment. Then he met with a new hurdle.
“For the last few years, I have been running from pillar to post, trying to get a local government-run school to enrol my 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. I cannot afford the fees of privately run schools, so the government ones were my only hope. But all of them turned my children down,” says Ahmed, who lives in the Khajuri Khas area of Delhi with his wife and four children.
Ahmed says he presented all the documents needed, including UNHCR cards and affidavits, according to what the authorities of five schools said they needed for enrolment of any refugee child.
“But eventually all of them refused to accept my son and daughter as students, saying that they cannot enrol any Rohingya student in their schools,” he says. “I am very anxious about my children’s future.”
The case of Ahmed’s children is not unique. In Khajuri Khas, where almost 40 Rohingya refugee families live in ramshackle tin-and-tarpaulin shanties, at least 18 children have been refused admission to local government schools in the past few years.
“There are some Rohingya children who are studying in government schools in Delhi but they all got enrolled before 2019,” he says. “The authorities have been refusing to take in Rohingya children for the past four years.”
More than 22,000 Rohingya refugees live in India, many of them having fled Myanmar in 2017 after a series of military-led massacres. Although India has not signed the 1951 UN refugee convention and views all Muslim Rohingya refugees as illegal immigrants, the community lived peacefully in the country for decades.
However, since Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party came to power in 2014, Rohingya refugees have faced an increasing number of obstacles in India. Although no police record has linked the refugees to any criminal activities, Hindu nationalist groups label the Rohingya as “terrorists” and “jihadists” and have for years demanded their expulsion from India. After Modi was re-elected in 2019, the anti-Rohingya campaign by the Hindu nationalist groups and the BJP-led federal government has grown shriller. In March, the government brought in a divisive citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslims, including Rohingyas.
Last month, the Delhi high court refused a plea to enrol Rohingya children from Khajuri Khas in local government schools. The petitioner, activist and lawyer Ashok Agarwal, argued that the Indian constitution mandated under its fundamental right to education that every child in the country, regardless of citizenship, was granted formal education free of cost.
The court, however, dismissed Agarwal’s plea, saying that Rohingya people were “foreigners” who had not been “legally granted entry” into India.
The Rohingya are denied education because they are foreign nationals who are Muslim, says Agarwal, who runs the non-governmental organisation Social Jurist.
“No refugee children in Delhi other than the Rohingya are refused education in this way,” he says. He previously successfully argued the case for the enrolment of Pakistani Hindu refugee children in Indian schools – a plea that was granted by the same court.
“The constitutional rights to equality, life and free and compulsory education are applicable with full force in the case of refugee children, too,” Agarwal says. “These provisions apply to all the children without any kind of discrimination. These are fundamental rights which are non-negotiable and cannot be compromised.”
The high court suggested that Agarwal approach the Indian home ministry, which handles refugee matters. On 4 November, Agarwal wrote to the ministry and is waiting for a response.
Activists in India say that denying Rohingya refugee children schooling will adversely affect not only their community, but also the countries they seek asylum in.
“If Rohingya refugee children are left uneducated, besides other obvious challenges like unemployment, exploitation and poverty, they will stay completely dependent on outside aid for basic resources,” says Rohingya activist Sabber Kyaw Min, who lives in India. “If denied schooling, Rohingya children will not be able to contribute to the economies in the countries that they live in as resettled adults. This would have a negative effect trickling beyond just the Rohingya community.”
The Indian lawyer Ujjaini Chatterji says educating new generations of Rohingya is also essential because of the persecution they face – including ongoing genocide in their home country of Myanmar.
“Amid a genocide, the Rohingya are struggling to preserve their language, which does not have a recognised script. Their traditions, memories and stories can only be preserved when the forthcoming generations are able to revive and develop their language, and document these memories,” she says.
“Therefore, education is a matter of survival for the Rohingya community that cannot be denied to them at any cost.”