Surely the epigraph “Nothing human is alien…” is expansive enough to bring into humanitarian space the violently uprooted and dispossessed Rohingya refugees. Stripped of their citizenship rights in 1982 and made stateless by Buddhist-supremacist Myanmar, Shadiya Akhtar (23), Habis Abdullah (32) and Hameeda Begum (16) fled violent persecution at home, seeking the sanctuary of refugeedom to find themselves re-traumatised and at grave risk of indefinite detention and killing by systemic neglect.The United Nations recognises the Rohingya people as “the most persecuted minority in the world”, but Indian authorities spurn them and warn citizens against showing humanity towards these “unfamiliar, unknown people”. It denounces them as “ghuspatiya” (intruders). So dehumanised is the undocumented alien, the foreigner, that we disregard the persecution of illegal immigrants, whether Bengali or Rohingya refugees, condemning them to be incarcerated in hellholes, arbitrarily pushed back at the border, and abandoned at sea to swim back to Myanmar’s war zones. India rejects the UNHCR recognition of their refugee status, and denies Rohingya refugees protection of the fundamental principle of non-refoulement or no pushback to situations of risk. Rohingya refugees are subject to the legal precarity of an irregular alien who is branded a terror risk. This securitised discourse is used to justify the intolerant stance in public policy and the courts towards them. The securitisation of the Muslim Rohingya has been embedded in discourse through ‘speech acts’ of authoritative figures and quotidian performance of ‘administrative practices’ of biometric profiling, harassment and detention. Amplified by the media ecosystem, the securitisation discourse constitutes the base from which additional discrimination and harassment – founded on religion, anti-refugee sentiment, xenophobia and majoritarian politics – thrives. As the Rohingya Muslim refugee crisis escalated post-2017, following the brutal military crackdown in Myanmar, India significantly reversed its tradition of humanitarian care and protection towards refugees and launched a hard policy of mass deportation. Minister of State for Home Affairs, Kiren Rijiju, who happens to be a Buddhist, defended the controversial Ministry of Home Affairs order to round up and deport Rohingya refugees, saying: “I want to tell the international organisations [that] whether the Rohingyas are registered under UNHCR or not, they are illegal immigrants in India. As per law, they stand to be deported because they are illegal immigrants.” Also read: India’s New Immigration Law Leaves Refugees, Especially Rohingyas, in Legal LimboRohingya refugees are portrayed as a security threat. Links to extremist groups are alleged without evidence to support the charges. Police stations in areas of dense Rohingya settlements, such as Jammu, show no evidence of refugee involvement in law and order disturbances, leave alone terror links. But the absence of proof makes no impact on the default narrative, especially in moments of crisis. During the Pahalgam 2025 terrorist attack, dog whistle politcs led to suspicion of ‘illegal immigrants’: Bangladeshi ‘infiltrators’ and Rohingya refugees, despite no member of either nationality being linked to the attack. Prejudice was sufficient to justify a random round of detention and deportation of Bangladeshi ‘illegal immigrants’ and Rohingya refugees. Joining the logic of national security and public order is the overblown demographic and economic threat of the displaced. Currently, UNHCR registered Rohingya refugees [in India] are 23,300. The paltry numbers have no restraining impact on Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders’ alarmist cries about a “silent demographic invasion”. Opposition governments are upbraided for “openly inviting Rohingyas and bringing illegal Bangladeshi immigrants into West Bengal” and Jharkhand. In high-decibel electoral politics, the illegal immigrant/refugee is often weaponised, as seen during the 2025 Delhi election. Campaign manifestos and the political elite promised to free the city of these undesirable and expendable aliens. As a harbinger of discriminatory ethnic refugee exclusion, the Delhi government announced that Rohingya children would be denied the constitutionally guaranteed right to enrol in government schools, a right available to refugees. Not to be outdone, the MHA launched a brutal round of evictions, arrests, detention and deportations. The Rohingya issue is not framed as one of flight from persecution, but of illegality and criminality. And that becomes to basis to deny them the constitutional protections other ethnic refugee groups get. Ironically, in 2011-12, the MHA considered Rohingya refugees eligible for long term visas and humanitarian protection, similar to the Chin and Burman refugees from Myanmar. But since then, ideological considerations driving India’s policies of belonging and humanitarianism kicked in. The absence of a national legal framework for refugee protection makes refugees hostage to political or resource priorities of the executive and the vagaries of border administrations. Reinforcing the refugees’ precarity is that India is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention 1951 or 1967 Protocol. India’s relationship with UNHCR is ambivalent and circumscribed, although it sits on the body’s executive council. Refugees and the stateless fall under the omnibus category of foreigners: “non-citizens” under the colonial Foreigners Act, 1946. The Act empowers the executive to deport foreigners and imposes an onerous regime of entry and registration requirements and allows restricted work permits. Once, the liberal stream of Indian jurisprudence recognised the precatity of the refugee, in particular, as on a “different footing from a foreigner or any illegal emigrant” (Premanand v. State of Kerala, 1992). But the present narrative frames the Rohingya refugee as the stigmatised “illegal immigrant”, removing the possibility of invoking India’s history of jurisprudence to protect the refugee as a ‘persecuted victim’. In NHRC v. Arunachal Pradesh (1996), the Supreme Court upheld that constitutional guarantees of equality before the law (Article 14) and right to life and personal liberty (Article 21) extended to all individuals within the territory of India –thereby prohibiting forced expulsion.But in the last decade, courts have ruled that there was no obligation to follow non-refoulement, and allowed deportations (Saidur Rahman v. The Union Of Assam, 2017). Panic over mass detentions and deportations from Jammu sub-jail precipitated Rohingya refugee Salimullah to petition the Supreme Court (Md. Salimullah v. Union of India 2017). The Supreme Court in a benchmark ruling in 2021 upheld the deportations, persuaded by the argument of threats to internal security. A crucial caveat was added: deportation in accordance with “procedure established by law”. According to the Rohingyas for Rights (R4R) Initiative activist Sabber Kywa Min, 21 refugees were deported from India to Myanmar between 2018 and 2021. Hasina Begum (36), was the first of the 236 detained Rohingyas in Jammu to be deported via the Moreh border in Manipur. As her village had been burnt down in a 2017 genocidal attack, she was held in an immigration detention center in the Rakhine state of Myanmar. The deportation process was stymied by Myanmar authorities, who refuse to recognise the Rohingya as their nationals. Their detention still continued in India, and there was a geographical shift away from border states like West Bengal and Manipur to the interior regions of Uttar Pradesh, Jammu, Telangana and Delhi. Jails were repurposed as detention centres. Advocate Danish, legal counsel in refugee-related cases in Uttar Pradesh, remarked on the anomaly of refugees being treated as criminals. “Refugees who have committed no offenses nor posed any threat to public safety are incarcerated alongside serious criminals, in harsh conditions,” he noted. When administrative detention is conflated with punitive incarceration, the principles of proportionality and necessity under international law are undermined. The R4R report, titled “Mapping Detentions of Rohingya Refugees: 2025”, documents over 867 individuals detained across ten states, with Jammu alone accounting for 265 of htm. The majority are registered with the UNHCR. Some 654 refugees remain in indefinite detention, ranging from three to eight years, of whom 269 are men, 144 women and 69 are children. There is no uniformity in practice – crackdowns are ad hoc, refugees are randomly picked up, and release is just as arbitrary. West Bengal has the notoriety of holding 130 persons in indefinite detention, Uttar Pradesh records 200 such detainees, of whom 183 are in custody and only 17 have been granted bail, representing a 91.5% retention rate. In contrast, in Delhi’s Shahzada Bagh detention centre, of 81 refugees held since 2021, 77 were granted bail, leaving only five still in detention, including two women and a child. The arbitrary nature of detentions creates a pervasive state of fear and uncertainty. Say refugees: “We get panic attacks and hide when we see the police, terrified that we’ll be taken again.”Shadiya Akhtar’s story can help grasp how arbitrary and violative of human rights, and humanity itself, it is to detain people for unauthorised entry. Shadiya (23) survived war and genocide and traversed two geographies of precarity, Myanmar and Bangladesh, to reach Delhi in 2016. Her sister, Sabera Khatoon, had found slender refuge in the Madan Khaddar camp in the city.Shadiya was a model refugee. She promptly applied to UNHCR, got Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) biometric profiling done and regularly marked her presence with them. Married in 2017, she was still nursing her baby when on March 24, 2021, at 6 am, an official called and summoned her to sign some documents. She and five others were picked up that day and taken to Delhi’s Shahzada Bagh detention centre, pending deportation. Also read: ‘Dangerous Precedent’: Former Judges, Senior Lawyers Write to CJI Over His Remarks on RohingyasUnder the unhygienic conditions and systemic neglect in the detention centre, Shadiya like many others, fell seriously ill and might have become another fatality statistic but for Sabera petitioning the high court in 2023 (and subsequently Supreme Court) for her sister’s release from indefinite detention and gaining access to urgent medical attention. The apex court intervened, and an official joint inspection revealed appalling conditions of broken toilets and bathrooms, tattered blankets and mattresses, rotten food and deficient drinking water supply. At the repeated intervention of the Supreme Court, urgent hospital attention was secured. Shadiya was diagnosed with Hepatitis C and eventually cured. Not so lucky was fellow detainee Hamida Begum (16). She was a trafficked victim who, instead of being protected, was incarcerated. An investigative report in The Telegraph, London pierced the obscurity surrounding her death. Days before, Hamida had shrieked with abdominal pain, but the authorities delayed shifting her to the hospital, and she died. No post mortem report was given to the ‘relative’ who buried her. A medical note claimed she was taking medicines for seizures but a fellow detainee (since resettled in Europe) said that Hamida had shown no signs of illness previously. A flurry of petitions, including Sabera’s, challenged indefinite detention of the refugees, claiming that the procedure specified for “foreigners claiming to be refugees” was not followed. The FRRO was obliged to submit a foreigner’s refugee claim to the MHA within 30 days, and the MHA was required to respond within three months. In Shadiya’s case, she was detained in 2021 and the process to verify her refugee status was started only in 2023 – only to be summarily rejected. Further, as several Rohingyas were declared “de jure stateless”, they, like Shadiya, were pushed into a state of indefinite detention, which is inconsistent with their constitutional rights under Articles 14 and 21. Frustrated at the deportation exit blocked, ingenious officials experimented with casting 43 Rohingya detainees in the Andaman Sea to swim ashore to Myanmar. Security logics are used to justify the dehumanisation of Rohingya refugees making them unworthy of empathy and compassion in India. Whether in exile or in Myanmar where the junta enacts sham elections, there is no hope for the millions of Rohingyas. Rita Manchanda is petitioner in cases connected with Rohingya refugee rights. She is also the author of the forthcoming chapter “The Refugee, Seekers of Security, Stigmatised as Security Risks Demystifying Radicalisation of the discourse in India”.