India should come out of its policy bottleneck where every act of its generosity is for immediate self-aggrandisement rather than long-term gain.
If India fails to stand with the Rohingya today, will it be able to claim tomorrow that it is rightfully with the people of Baluchistan or Tibet?
If a nation’s resilience is tested by its response to the crisis in its surroundings, then India isn’t the super power it tries to project itself as. A superpower must have enough will to, as Uncle Ben suggested to Spiderman, take “great responsibility,” and should not just assemble state-of-the-art artilleries to flex in its Republic Day parades.
India’s typical response to the Rohingya crisis shows that it still has to build a moral compass to navigate its foreign policy and its foreign policy has hardly changed since the 1990s, even superficially, in the manner in which it deals with urgent humanitarian crises in its neighbourhood and beyond. Like now, India, in the 1990s, had failed to defend the rights of the Bhutanese people of Nepalese origin when they were chased out by the royal government. It even gave tacit support to the Bhutanese royalty by ignoring several appeals by human right groups and activists. The Bhutanese refugee crisis wasn’t an out of the blue thing but a build-up of a series of events since 1988 when Bhutan conducted its southern population census targeting its Nepalese population. With the census, Bhutan re-classified several thousands of its citizens as illegal migrants.
Going further, it introduced several repressive measures including its ‘One Nation, One People’, or Driglam policy, wherein the Nepalese population were forced to wear the northern traditional dress and adopt the culture of majority. It removed the Nepali language from the curriculum of schools. Bhutanese’s refugee activist Tek Nath Rijhal’s Torture Killing Me Softly is a grueling account of the period of his suffering in Bhutan’s prison for raising concerns over the plight of these Nepalese.....READ MORE
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