08/26/2004

India hosts about 330,000 refugees, yet it has no national refugee law specifying the rights and governing the treatment of refugees. As a result, different groups get widely varying treatment. A national refugee law would improve treatment for refugees in India.

India’s refugee population includes as many as 143,000 Sri Lankans, 110,000 Tibetans, an estimated 52,000 Chin and other minorities from Burma, 15,000 from Bhutan, about 11,400 from Afghanistan, an unknown number of Hindus from Bangladesh, a growing but unknown number of Nepalese fleeing the Maoist insurgency, and more than 400 from other countries. (In addition, there are currently approximately 600,000 internally displaced people, mainly Kashmiri Hindus, in India).

Since there is no national standard for caring for refugees, protection is left up to the states. As a result, there are wide variations in refugee treatment, reflecting politics, personality and economics. Tibetans, for example, are allowed to run their own government in exile in India, because of New Delhi’s strong respect for their spiritual leader, the Dali Lama. However, the Burmese Chin often suffer discrimination and threats of expulsion from Mizoram State. Many, but by no means all, refugees receive health care and their children have a right to enter school.

Although India serves on the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, it has never signed to two fundamental international instruments of refugee protection—the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. Although the UNHCR operates in India, the UN agency’s work is sharply limited by the government. UNHCR’s main role in India is to make sure that refugees are not forced to return to the countries they have fled in order to escape persecution and danger.

India plays an important role in caring for refugees seeking political or religious asylum from other South Asian countries, but it has not signed the UN conventions protecting refugees because it does not want to be obligated to accept massive flows of refugees from politically unstable neighbors. Although India’s economy is developing and modernizing rapidly, it is still 124th on the UN Development Program’s 2003 Human Development Index.

The lack of national standards means that refugees in the same group often receive sharply different treatment. For example, about 60,000 of the 143,000 refugees, who are Tamils from Sri Lanka, where two decades of civil war has caused people to flee for their safety, live in camps in southern India and receive assistance from the Indian government through the state of Tamil Nadu. The assistance amounts to about $5.5 million a year. However, the Chin refugees are driven away from India., even though they share the same ethnicity with the people of Mizoram,

In 1997, India drafted a Model National Law on Refugees, but the proposal has never been considered by parliament. The proposed model law defines who a refugee is, specifies the rights and duties of refugees. The law would enshrine the principle of non refoulement and therefore protect refugees from being forced home to face unsafe conditions or persecution. It would also establish a Refugee Commission to monitor the treatment of refugees.

By conferring refugee status on those who have fled their countries to escape persecution, a national refugee law would give refugees identification cards, travel permits and uniform benefits. It would also make the protections permanent. In the past, some of the privileges and protections for Sri Lankan refugees have been abridged for political or security reasons. A national law would also limit interference by the home countries of the refugees who are seeking asylum in India.

RI recommends that the government of India:

• pass a national law for the refugees that will provide uniform treatment and regulation of all the refugees living in India.
• establish a central commission to oversee refugee affairs, even if the law gives responsibility to the state government to provide for refugees.
• should not misuse the law to stop the asylum seekers by dismissing them as economic migrants without due process.
• sign the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol and allow the UNHCR to play an appropriate role.