Being Stateless and Surviving: The Rohingyas in Camps of Bangladesh

Abstract

Forced migration across the borders in South Asia is often conflated with “economic migration”, thereby blurring the distinction between “forced” and “volition”. A migrant in need of asylum often gets branded as an “economic migrant” or “illegal immigrant”. In a similar context, this research would unveil the exclusion, counter-resistance and self-resilience of stateless Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar, that emanated as a post-colonial fallout spanned between the murky borders of Myanmar–Bangladesh–India, but is now a widely discussed global and transnational phenomenon. The chapter will focus on the experiences of the Rohingyas in camps of Bangladesh and explore their survival strategies, economic activities, and how they are using transforming their identities and changing them with time and context as a means to survive. I aim to look into predicaments of life in dire vulnerabilities, a statelessness, yet a life, that is resilient and looking beyond the victimization of the Rohingyas as refugees, which remains a poignant truth. In this chapter, I have referred to two periods of my field work, the first in 2015 and the second, in 2019. A massive change in the stance of the Bangladesh government on the issue of the Rohingyas has changed within these two periods. While following a massive influx of Rohingyas in Bangladesh from August 2017, the government was welcoming, and it supported almost 1 million Rohingya refugees; however, patience appears to be wearing thin. Bilateral talks with Myanmar to repatriate the Rohingyas have failed attempts to look into their agency from invisibility to being audible globally and desperate bid to survive against all odds and addresses the following questions: Way forward for the Rohingyas? How do the Rohingyas perceive themselves? Do they consider themselves as stateless? Is there a way forward?