Munawar Zaman
Press TV, New Delhi
As the winter draws near, relief material starts pouring in for destitute Rohingya refugees in India. But their biggest worry is schooling and educational material for their children.
Despite the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child irrespective of nationality, faith or ethnicity, the majority of Rohingya children continue to be deprived of any formal education.
Several thousand Rohingya Muslims have been camping in parts of India for more than a decade with nothing more to share rather than horror tales of a violent past. In almost all refugee camps, children would usually be seen spending time in dirt and filth raising fears of disease and infections across the camps.
Regardless of the refugee crisis the world has witnessed since last decade, this particular community continues to be the unseen victims of violence, yet ignored or perhaps abandoned.
Estimates suggest more than 40,000 Rohingya refugees live in India after fleeing a brutal crackdown in Myanmar. The UN refugee agency responsible to support them is of insignificant help, they say.
Rights activists have time and again appealed to the Indian government to lend all possible support to the community despite the fact they face threats to their life back in Myanmar.
Minority Rohingiya Muslims have for decades fled to neighboring Bangladesh and other countries including India, escaping genocide in their country which the UN has described as ethnic cleansing.
New Delhi has a long history of hosting refugees from many South Asian nations, but it has never endorsed any framework to safeguard the interest of these refugees.
Now calls are growing for a concrete refugee policy without a political agenda and irrespective of the faith or ethnicity of the refugees.