Midnight's Borders: A People's History of Modern India by Suchitra Vijayan

Author:Suchitra Vijayan [Vijayan, Suchitra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Amir Hakim was not so lucky. Amir, now thirty, had spent most of his adult life incarcerated, and been shuffled from one prison to another in Assam. A decade ago, at twenty, Amir was convicted for illegally entering India by crossing the border under the Foreigners Act of 1946. He was arrested by the Paltan Bazaar police in downtown Guwahati and was sentenced to seven months. He had been hoping to make it safely to the small Rohingya community that had settled in Delhi.

After he had served his sentence at the Guwahati Central Jail, Amir was handed over to the Eighth Assam Police Battalion. From there he was sent back to the local police station in Guwahati for another month. When he demanded his rightful release, he got into a scuffle and was sent to the detention centre in Goalpara. He has been held at Goalpara since 16 December 2009.

Amir, like thousands of Rohingya refugees, first fled to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Cox’s Bazar had two government-run refugee camps—the Kutupalong camp, also called the world’s largest refugee camp, and the Nayapara refugee camp, home to refugees who fled Myanmar.4

Amir was born in Kansama, in Buthidaung district in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. In his letter, Amir writes:

Sir I had come to India from Myanmar to save my life.

As you know I am a Rohingya Muslim.

Army and Government are killing us so

when I come to India for save my life.

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