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‘Becoming visible’: India’s first female Rohingya graduate
Tasmida Johar, India’s first woman graduate from the displaced Rohingya community, says she is going through a “conflicting feeling” these days.
“I feel happy about these headlines, ‘first this, first that’, but at the same time, it also makes me sad. I am happy because this is my achievement, of making it this far,” she told Al Jazeera as she sat in a public park in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of capital New Delhi.
“But it makes me sad that I am the first one to do when so many Rohingya women wanted to come to this position but they could not.”
The Rohingya, a mainly Muslim minority from neighbouring Myanmar, are a persecuted community that saw a brutal military crackdown in 2017, which the United Nations said was conducted with a “genocidal intent”.
ALSO READ THIS: MORE THAN 180 ROHINGYA MUSLIMS ARRIVE BY BOAT IN INDONESIA’S ACEH
Most of the Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, turning its Cox’s Bazar district into the world’s largest refugee camp with more than a million refugees living in cramped makeshift homes made of bamboo and tarpaulin.
Nearly 20,000 Rohingya are registered with the United Nations as refugees in India, some of them arriving even before 2017. More than a thousand of them live on the outskirts of New Delhi.
Since 2014 when a Hindu nationalist party came to power in India, the community has also faced hate speech and attacks, with the government last year saying the Rohingya will be held in detention camps until they are deported back to Myanmar.
India is not a signatory to the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, nor does it have a national refugee policy in place.
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