Rohingyas calling us

Date: 23 Jul 2012

Rohingyas calling us

The global media, by and large, and the so-called international community has so far turned its face away from the persecution the Rohingya Muslims have been facing at the hands of Myanmarese majotity. Thousands have been brutally murdered and burnt alive. A saga of a small Muslim community historically persecuted in that country by the ‘peaceable’ Buddhists is finally culminating in hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas being displaced, thrown out of their home and country.

Close to 800 Rohingya Muslim families, who fled the pogrom, have reached Jammu, perhaps believing that they are in India’s only Muslim majority state. So far, they are apparently huddled in a small piece of land in the outskirts of Jammu city, petrified and helpless.

Kashmir’s own history is a long narrative of political persecution and brutality and Kashmiris have for long rightly complained about lack of global solidarity. It is said that an oppressed understands another oppressed the best. Now, the severely oppressed Rohingyas are at our doorstep and they are not a large number.

While the state may or may not do what is expected of it in a moral paradigm of secularism. We, as a people must understand our responsibility towards the hapless Rohingyas presently caught in a wilderness in Jammu. For them it is no less than a disaster, a catastrophe. And, they need and deserve all our help.

We can do it. We have done it in the past. When a massive earthquake struck this land, we mobilised at a large scale and mitigated the difficulties of people badly hit in north Kashmir. It was heartening and timely.

Now, the 800 odd families who have managed with great difficulty to reach our state, we must organise in the same manner and raise the much needed help for the Rohingyas. It is a responsibility we cannot and must not run away from.

We at Kashmir Reader believe in the idea of all encompassing accountability of every one of us to an imagination of a moral order. If we fail in extending our moral and crucially important material solidarity with the persecuted Rohingyas among us right now, we will lose the right to ask for any solidarity of any kind in the future from anywhere.

Since we are in the month of Ramadan, a good time for charity, solidarity, prayer and introspection, let us take this opportunity to display in practice all the meanings of this holy month and reach out to the Rohingyas in Jammu. 

(editorial-Kashmir Reader-July 24, 2012)