How India secretly sent refugees back to the land accused of committing genocide against them

By Esha Mitra, CNN

New Delhi (CNN) — In the home he thought was safe, Mohammad Ismail pines for the daughter who was snatched from him and sent back to the country they fled eight years ago; a country where their community officially does not exist.

Mohammad and his daughter Asma ran from their village in Myanmar in 2017 as soldiers went on a state-sanctioned, weeks-long rampage of rape, arson and murder against the country’s Rohingya minority.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to squalid refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, but Mohammad and his daughter found safety and hope in India. He found work as a rag picker and Asma went to school in the dusty neighborhood in the capital New Delhi they came to call home. Last May, Asma, now 20, was supposed to get married.

But days before her wedding, she and 39 other Rohingya refugees living in the city were summoned by Indian authorities, ostensibly to provide biometric information for their new identification documents. Then they disappeared.

Three days later a series of desperate calls made on a borrowed phone more than a thousand miles away revealed their fate: they had been herded onto a plane, forced onto a boat and blindfolded by armed men before being pushed overboard into the Indian Ocean and told to make for the nearest shore.

That shore was in Myanmar, now in the throes of a civil war and ruled by the same military they fled in 2017 – which the United Nations said executed a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing, and the United States government has called genocide.

A CNN investigation built on testimony from India, Myanmar and Bangladesh and cross-referenced with flight and shipping data has found that India’s government secretly rounded up and deported 13 women and 27 men, without due process and in defiance of Indian laws, and sent them to a country where they are widely reviled.

CNN reached out to multiple Indian government departments and agencies throughout the course of this investigation but did not receive a response.

It’s been more than four months since Asma vanished and Mohammad has not heard from her. Surrounded by the clothes, jewelry and furniture he had bought for her wedding, he struggles to comprehend why she was taken that day and he wasn’t.

“I have never done anything wrong, I have just come here to seek refuge… How could they take my daughter from me? If they had to deport us, they should have deported us together.”

‘You have no country’

The nightmare began on the evening of May 6 when police came to Mohammad’s home in Shaheen Bagh, a working-class, mostly Muslim neighborhood nestled against the banks of the Yamuna River in New Delhi. They had a list of names of those they said needed to come to the local station to provide their biometric information. Asma and Mohammad’s sister were both on the list, he told CNN.

He didn’t hear from Asma until early the following morning, when she called with the disturbing news that the group had been told they were being taken to detention. Around 11 a.m. that day, she called again to say they had been told to change out of their clothes and put on identical uniforms.

A Rohingya man called John Anwar, who was detained the same day, corroborated those details. His account comes from the recording of a phone call he made to his brother after he had arrived in Myanmar, which his brother has shared with CNN.

Anwar told his brother that they were taken for “a medical checkup” after police took their biometrics. “We realized something was wrong because they have never done a medical check with biometrics before,” he said.

Shortly afterwards they were taken to an airport. The same claim was made in a separate phone call by another member of the group to his brother, Noorul Amin, whom CNN interviewed in New Delhi. Five of Amin’s relatives – his two brothers, sister-in-law and parents – were among those deported.

The flight lasted around three and a half hours, Anwar told his brother, and when they landed he glimpsed a sign that read “Port Blair” – the largest settlement on the Andaman Islands, also known as Sri Vijaya Puram, more than 1,500 miles to the southeast of New Delhi in the Indian Ocean, and roughly midway between India and Myanmar.

The roughly three and a half hours of flight time reported by Anwar matches those listed for regular commercial flights from New Delhi to Port Blair.

Flight tracking data reviewed by CNN shows that an Airbus A321-211 passenger plane left from Ghaziabad Airport just outside Delhi around 2:20 p.m. on May 7.

According to its flight log, it took off and landed in Ghaziabad with a total flight time of 7 hours and 37 minutes. CNN analysis of the data shows the plane flying in a southeasterly direction for around three and a half hours. The plane’s transmitter was switched off when it was positioned about 50 miles off the Andaman Islands. Around 50 minutes later, the transmitter was switched on again and showed the plane heading back to the Indian mainland.

According to the Flightradar24 tracking site, the plane in question is operated by the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), a wing of India’s Defence Ministry. CNN has contacted DRDO for comment on the flight but has received no response.

A stone’s throw from Port Blair’s airport is the main harbor that serves the Andaman Islands. Satellite data and publicly available records show the harbor has several jetties that serve military, coastguard and commercial vessels, including passenger ferries.

Anwar told his brother the group were boarded onto a “big white ship” with two decks shortly after they disembarked from the plane. He was unable to determine the name or model of the ship.

Between late afternoon on May 7 and the morning of May 9, 24 civilian vessels, including 12 passenger ships, exited Port Blair, according to Automatic Identification System (AIS) shipping data from VesselFinder reviewed by CNN. But the AIS data shows none of the 24 vessels traveled toward Myanmar – the closest coast of which is around 300 miles away – during that period.

AIS data for Indian naval vessels is not publicly available.

CNN has contacted the Andaman and Nicobar Command of the Indian military, which has responsibility for the area, and the chief port administrator for Port Blair. Neither responded to requests for comment.

On the ship the group was blindfolded and men with guns threatened to shoot anyone who lifted their heads, Anwar said in the call to his brother.

“One of the officers said, ‘Your life is of no value. You have no country. Even if we kill you no one will say anything to us,’” he added, in the call.

After several hours they were split into two smaller boats, and about four hours later, the boats stopped in the darkness, he said.

“It was very far away from the land but they had tied a rope to a tree on the land. They told us to get into the water,” Anwar said, in the recording. “Some of the elderly people especially were really struggling. It was physically very difficult but we somehow made it to shore.”

In other audio recordings obtained by CNN, the panic among the group is clear as they realize they have been sent back to Myanmar.

“We’re on an island. The Indian forces have left us and gone,” one young man, deported with his mother, says in a call to a relative.

“We are in the middle of the ocean… We are left on an island, completely surrounded by the sea… Please tell everyone. The army might arrest us and take us away at any moment.”

India’s crackdown

The roughly 20,000 Rohingya people that the United Nations refugee office estimates are currently in India have carved out a precarious existence. Though many have been verified as refugees by the UNHCR, including all 40 in the group deported to Myanmar, the Indian government has not signed the UN convention that prohibits returning refugees to a place where they may come to harm.

In several speeches, India’s Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah has vowed to expel Rohingya “infiltrators” and in May his ministry gave officials 30 days to verify the credentials of those suspected to be in India illegally from Bangladesh and Myanmar. If their documents could not be verified, they would face deportation, local media reports said.

CNN asked India’s Ministry of Home Affairs for comment on the Rohingya group taken back to Myanmar but has not received a response.

Kawaljeet Singh, a police officer and member of a specialist unit tasked with rounding up immigrants illegally in India from Bangladesh, confirmed that 40 members of the Rohingya community were deported to Myanmar on May 6. He told CNN the group had been deported “legally,” but would not give details on how that occurred, saying it was a matter of “national security.”

Singh directed CNN to contact the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) for a deportation order relating to the group. The office did not respond.

Asma and other members of the group were taken from their Delhi homes in the evening, but that may be in contravention of Indian laws which say that women cannot be detained after sunset or before sunrise except in certain circumstances. They also prevent detention for more than 24 hours without an appearance in front of a judicial magistrate. Multiple Delhi police officials did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

“The idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels is nothing short of outrageous,” said Tom Andrews, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, shortly after initial reports first emerged in May.

He added that “such cruel actions would be an affront to human decency” and a “serious violation” of international law, which prohibits nations from returning people to places where their lives may be under threat.

Dilawar Hussain, a Delhi-based lawyer, filed a petition with India’s top court for the return of the group in May. The Supreme Court, however, said that the reports of the deportation were unsubstantiated and that it would hear the matter along with ongoing cases concerning the Rohingya community. In a hearing on July 31 the court said it would determine whether Rohingya people should be considered illegal immigrants, or refugees and therefore a protected group. The case will be heard again in September.

CNN contacted Myanmar’s embassy in New Delhi to ask if it had been informed by Indian authorities that the deportations were taking place. It did not respond.

On May 6, the same day the Delhi group was detained, 103 Rohingya people in India were “pushed back” into Bangladesh, according to a source at the detention center they were housed in prior to deportation. A source in Bangladesh’s foreign ministry told CNN that it is in the process of identifying them and has contacted the UNHCR.

‘We are the most hated’

The exact whereabouts of the 40 Rohingya forced back into Myanmar is unknown.

Asma and the others were brought ashore in the southern Tanintharyi region in the early hours of May 9, according to one local resident who said they had briefly sheltered in his village. He requested CNN not reveal his name or the location of his village, for safety reasons.

“When I found them, they told me they had not eaten food for two and a half days,” he said. “All they had was life jackets and the clothes on their body.” They had to borrow a phone to call their families in India.

Amid the confusion, the Rohingya group was clear on one thing, he said.

“They begged us not to send them to (the) Myanmar military.”

That military is currently fighting a multi-sided civil war it unleashed when it toppled an elected government and seized power in 2021.

The top general behind that coup is the same man who ordered the brutal “clearance operations” that forced Mohammad, Asma and hundreds of thousands of other Rohingya people to flee in 2017. Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has declared the Rohingya identity “imaginary” – reflecting a widespread belief in Buddhist-majority Myanmar that Rohingya are interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh.

Rohingya are not among the 135 ethnic groups officially recognized by Myanmar and are denied full citizenship. They have long lived in what rights groups have said are apartheid-like conditions and can be jailed if they travel outside their home townships without permission.

Instead of being handed to the military in Tanintharyi, the 40 Rohingya were later passed on to a local armed group – one of the dozens that have sprung up across the country to battle the junta. CNN is not disclosing the group’s name due to safety reasons and the group did not respond to a request for comment.

However, Aung Kyaw Moe, the deputy human rights minister and the only Rohingya member of Myanmar’s opposition National Unity Government that is working to topple the junta, confirmed to CNN that the 40 Rohingya people arrived on May 9 from India and were being housed and given assistance by a military group in southern Myanmar.

David Sharif, whose brother-in-law, two nephews and their wives were among those deported, has spoken to them twice since they arrived in Myanmar, through the rebel group that is holding them.

But in a region being fought over by a patchwork of anti-junta rebel groups, the military and pro-military militia – and given the widespread distrust of the Rohingya – information on where exactly his family are, or what will become of them, has not been forthcoming.

“We are most worried because we are from a different ethnic group,” Sharif told CNN from the refugee camp he lives in in Bangladesh. “In Myanmar, we are the most hated people. What most people know about us is all from rumors and hearsay.”

“I told them (the armed group) we are worried… If needed they could charge us for the cost incurred in treating them. We have begged for their mercy.”

More than a thousand miles away in New Delhi, Mohammad waits for his daughter, powerless to save her for a second time from the horrors faced by their community in Myanmar.

“When we were running away from the genocide a lot of families got separated but I made sure we stuck together,” he said.

“(The Myanmar army) could not snatch my daughter from me… I went through great difficulty to bring her safely to India.”

“I thought we were safe here.”

Ross Adkin, Su Nandar Kyaw, Isaac Yee and Teele Rebane contributed reporting.

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