Rohingya families in Hyderabad remain stranded, seeking stability
In Hyderabad, uncertainty haunts Rohingya families beyond poverty
Hyderabad: In a narrow classroom in Hyderabad’s Old City, 19-year-old Anam* now teaches the same children she once sat beside. She scored 84 percent in her Intermediate exams and, for a while, the path ahead looked ordinary: college applications, plans, a future. Then, she said to Siasat.com, everything stopped. She did not expand on a single turning point — because there isn’t one that can neatly capture what it means to be a Rohingya living in India.
Anam holds a UNHCR refugee card, the slim paper that formally recognises her as an asylum-seeker. She does not have an Aadhaar or voter ID. India does not formally recognise Rohingyas as refugees and is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In practical terms, the UNHCR card offers neither legal residency nor protection from deportation. It proves she exists, without being able to say where she belongs. Officially, she belongs to nowhere.
Her family’s route to Hyderabad began when she was a toddler. They fled western Myanmar’s Rakhine State alongside roughly 700,000 Rohingyas who crossed into Bangladesh on foot through dense forest. Anam remembers little of that crossing. What stays with her are later stops: nearly two years in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, then a move to Delhi after a tip about the UNHCR card, and finally Hyderabad.
He left Myanmar in 2010 after completing Class 10, having watched successive military regimes tighten exclusion around the Muslim minority — a community he estimates at about 0.5 percent of the country’s population. What followed Aung San’s assassination and decades of military rule, however, was systematic exclusion: restrictions on education, jobs, and rights that should have been basic.
“Generations were deprived of what any citizen ought to have.” In Myanmar he once farmed land, growing paddy in monsoon months and vegetables, turmeric and other crops in the dry seasons. He and his wife, Fathima*, led their children on foot to the Bangladesh border. His parents did not make it to India; they remained in a government-run camp “deep inside the forest” in Bangladesh. “I have not seen my mother, and for a long time I had no idea where she is,” he said without theatrical sorrow. Men who carry long losses tend to ration grief.
When asked why neighboring Bangladesh — a Muslim-majority country — did not grant Rohingyas easier refuge, Muzaffar turned the question back. Bangladesh initially shut its borders, later setting up temporary camps that, officials say, are shelters only until conditions improve at home. For many Rohingyas, he says, improvement is not on the horizon.
He added a bitter recollection: “They asked us to convert to Buddhism. Those who refused fled the country; many who stayed were hacked and burnt to death.” The memory sits like a fracture line beneath daily survival.
Back in Hyderabad, the classroom’s chalk dust and children’s laughter are small, fragile counters to that history. For Anam and others, everyday life becomes a ledger of half-possibilities: teaching when she might have been a college student, building routines under legal invisibility, deferring longed-for milestones because paperwork, policy and prejudice conspire to postpone belonging.