'West Bengal will send relief to Bangladesh for Rohingyas'

[Shorisrip]

will be updated once English version comes out. Joy Bangla!

‘বাংলাদেশে আশ্রিত রোহিঙ্গাদের জন্য ত্রাণ পাঠাবে পশ্চিমবঙ্গ’

কয়েকজন স্থানীয় ব্যক্তি রোহিঙ্গাদের জন্যে খাবার নিয়ে আসেন। সেই খাবার পেতে ভিড় জমায় অনেকই। ছবি: আনিসুর রহমান

কলকাতা প্রতিনিধি

রোহিঙ্গাদের সাহায্য করতে বাংলাদেশে ত্রাণ পাঠাতে চান পশ্চিমবঙ্গ রাজ্য সরকারের দায়িত্বপ্রাপ্ত প্রতিমন্ত্রী সিদ্দিকুল্লাহ চৌধুরী। তিনি বলেন, মিয়ানমার সরকার যেভাবে রোহিঙ্গা মুসলিমদের উপর নির্যাতন চালাচ্ছে বিশ্ববাসীর ঐক্যবদ্ধ হয়ে এখনই এর প্রতিবাদ করা উচিৎ। রোহিঙ্গাদের নিয়ে ভারতের কেন্দ্রীয় সরকার নীতিরও নিন্দা করেন তিনি।

১১ সেপ্টেম্বর সোমবার কলকাতায় রোহিঙ্গাদের উপর সামরিক নির্যাতনের প্রতিবাদে বিক্ষোভ কর্মসূচীতে হাজার হাজার সংখ্যালঘু সম্প্রদায়ের মানুষের সঙ্গে সমবেত হয়েছিলেন কলকাতার সাধারণ মানুষ, রাজনৈতিক দলের শীর্ষ নেতৃত্বও।

মিছিলের আয়োজক পশ্চিমবঙ্গ সংখ্যালঘু যুব ফেডারেশন হলেও তৃণমূল কংগ্রেস, বামফ্রন্ট এবং কংগ্রেস এই প্রতিবাদ মিছিলের সমর্থন জানায়। বাম-কংগ্রেসের শীর্ষ নেতৃত্ব মিছিলে হাঁটলেও তৃণমূলের কোনও প্রতিনিধিকে এই মিছিলে পাওয়া যায়নি। প্রতিবাদ সমাবেশে পশ্চিমবঙ্গের আরও কয়েকটি সংখ্যালঘু সংগঠন যুক্ত হয়েছিল।

গতকাল মঙ্গলবার দুপুরে রানী রাসমনি অ্যাভিনিউ থেকে মিছিল শুরু হয়ে বালিগঞ্জ মিয়ানমার উপদূতাবাসে গিয়ে শেষ হওয়ার কথা থাকলেও পুলিশ মিছিলের মুখ ঘুরিয়ে দেয়। মিছিল পূর্ববর্তী প্রতিবাদ সমাবেশের বক্তারা অবিলম্বে রোহিঙ্গা নির্যাতন বন্ধের দাবি এবং বিশ্ব নেতৃত্বকে মানবিক সংকট নিরসনে আহ্বান জানান।

পশ্চিমবঙ্গ রাজ্যটির সংখ্যালঘুদের অন্যতম বৃহত্তম সংগঠন জমিয়তে উলেমা হিন্দের রাজ্য প্রধান প্রতিমন্ত্রী সিদ্দিকুল্লাহ চৌধুরী সভায় বক্তব্য দিতে গিয়ে বলেন, “এই মানবিক সংকটের প্রতিবাদে আমরাও পথে নামবো। বাংলাদেশে আশ্রিত রোহিঙ্গা শরণার্থীদের জন্য ত্রাণ সামগ্রী পাঠানোর ব্যবস্থা করবো।”

পশ্চিমবঙ্গের বিরোধী দল নেতা সুজন চক্রবর্তী বলেন, “নরেন্দ্র মোদি যদি রোহিঙ্গা শরণার্থীদের পুশ ব্যাক নীতিতে অবিচল থাকেন তা হলে তাকেও মানুষ পুশ ব্যাক করবে।”

প্রদেশ কংগ্রেস সভাপতি অধীর চৌধুরী বলেন, “রোহিঙ্গা মানবিক সংকট, রাজনৈতিক ইস্যু নয়। ভগবান বুদ্ধদেবের অহিংস নীতিতে বিশ্বাসী কোনও দেশের সরকার কিভাবে রোহিঙ্গাদের উপর এই নির্যাতন করছে- তা ভেবে অবাক লাগছে। যারা মিয়ানমার ছেড়ে পালিয়ে আসছেন তারা তো মাংস-পোলাও খেতে আসছেন না। প্রাণ বাঁচতেই পালিয়ে আছেন। তাদের সুরক্ষার দায়িত্ব আমাদের সবার।”

ফুরফুরা শরীফের পীরজাদা তাহা সিদ্দিকি মিয়ানমার সরকারের বিরুদ্ধে হুমকি দিয়ে বলেন, “ইচ্ছা করলে আমরা (প্রতিবাদকারীরা) মিয়ানমার দূতাবাসের দুটো ইট খুলে নিয়ে আসতে পারি।”

প্রতিবাদ-বিক্ষোভের আয়োজনকারীর সংখ্যালঘু যুব ফেডারেশনের সম্পাদক কামরুজ্জামান বলেন, ভারতের মানুষ মানবিকতার নীতিতে বিশ্বাস রাখেন, মানুষের নীতিতে বিশ্বাস রাখেন। নরেন্দ্র মোদি আপনি দয়া করে আপনার গরু-নীতি এই দেশে চালাবেন না।

বিক্ষোভকারীদের মধ্যে দশ জনের একটি প্রতিনিধি দল কলকাতার মিয়ানমার উপদূতাবাসে গিয়ে তাদের প্রতিবাদপত্র তুলে দিয়ে আসেন।


source: http://www.thedailystar.net/bangla/...োহিঙ্গাদের-জন্য-ত্রাণ-পাঠাবে-পশ্চিমবঙ্গ-83788

 

[Mage]

Great. Thank you Mamata. Can we send a portion of our refugees to WB?

 

[acetophenol]

I could not understand whats written, but is it possible? I mean, external affairs being in the union list..

 

[Mage]

I could not understand whats written, but is it possible? I mean, external affairs being in the union list..

Siddqullah Chowdhury, a deputy minister of WB govt said that WB will send for Rohingyas.
11th September, thousands of people protested the oppression against Rohingyas in Kolkata including leaders of political parties. An opposition leader Sujon Chakrabarty stated if Modi wants to push back Rohingya refugees then Modi himself would be pushed back. Some minority youth federation secretary Qamruzzaman urged Modi not to follow his cow policy. Eventually 10 representatives of the protest went to sub consulate of Myanmar in Kolkata and presented their protest letter.

That's pretty much what it says.

 

[Shorisrip]

Related news: Huge Rally In Kolkata By Muslim Outfits Demands Justice For Rohingyas

KOLKATA: On a day the Indian government was "deplored" by UN agencies for planning to deport some 40,000 Rohingyas who have been sheltering in India for years a dozen organisations - most of them Muslim - took to the streets of Kolkata to protest what they called the genocide of Rohingyas in Myanmar.

At least 25,000 to 35,000 protesters marched from Park Circus to Rani Rashmoni Road - a distance of about 5 km - and paralysed traffic. The slogans, banners and posters condemned Aung Sang Suu Kyi as strongly as Prime Minister Narendra Modi for visiting Myanmar last week but failing to raise the plight of the Rohingyas with the Nobel laureate.


"Mr Narendra Modi is destroying the Indian culture of sheltering helpless people. He wants to deport Rohingyas when they are being killed in their homeland. We will not allow it, we want to tell Mr Modi that," said Md Kamruzzaman of the All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, one of the main organisers of Monday's mega rally.

The rally ended in a mega meeting at Rani Rashmoni Road where the event took on a further political twist. Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury arrived and sat on the dais, as did CPM MLA Sujan Chakraborty. There was no one from the Trinamool.


One of the organisers of the meeting, Pirzada Toha Ali Siddiqi, claimed Trinamool MP Mukul Roy had been invited but did not show up. Mr Roy, as a matter of fact, spent the day at the CBI for the Narada case.

Mr Adhir Chowdhury told NDTV, "We are here to protest against the atrocities being perpetrated by the Myanmar government on Rohingyas. And the Centre's total insensitivity about the violence on the people."

Mr Sujan Chakraborty said, "Mr Modi did not raise the Rohingya issue with Aung Sang Suu Kyi deliberately. He is practicing divisive politics."

The Kolkata Police's Facebook page said "a religious procession" was causing a slowdown of traffic in many parts of the city. Asked if it was a religious procession one, Md Kamruzzam said, "This is a political rally. There is nothing religious about it. We want justice for Rohingyas."

A team of protesters went to the Myanmar consulate in Kolkata to submit a memorandum of demands.

The rally was held on a day BJP chief Amit Shah was in Kolkata to try and invigorate his party to take on Trinamool. He was at a closed door meet all day a few kilometres from the rally site. The meeting began before the rally did and Mr Shah did not feel the brunt of tangled traffic.

 

[Banglar Bir]

Forgotten history: Like the Rohingya, Indians too were once driven out of Myanmar
Shoaib Daniyal
Published at 02:42 PM September 12, 2017

For most of Burmese history, Indians suffered bigotry for their ethnicity. Yet, India is now abandoning the persecuted Rohingyas.

In 1855, as the British were annexing parts of Burma to add to the Indian Empire, Henry Yule, an English civil servant, wrote of his travels in the South East Asian country. In this fascinating account of Burma, Yule also described the racial superiority the Burmese felt with respect to their dark-skinned, eastern neighbours:

“By a curious self-delusion, the Burmans would seem to claim that in theory at least they are white people. And what is still more curious, the Bengalees appear indirectly to admit the claim; for our servants in speaking of themselves and their countrymen, as distinguished from the Burmans, constantly made use of the term ‘kala admi’ – black man, as the representative of the Burmese Kola, a foreigner.”

This is probably one of the first written references to the Burmese racial slur “kala”. Later, as the Raj annexed all of Burma and made it a part of British India, Indians streamed into the region, where the local Burmese would often refer to them as “kala”.

Today there are very few Indians – defined as tracing their origin to British India – in Burma. But the term “kala” survives. It is used to racially target the Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority living on the western coast of Burma who have been described as the most persecuted community in the world. But Rohingyas and Indians in Burma have more in common than a shared racial slur. Like the Rohingya today, Indians in Burma were also the target of racial discrimination and driven out in large numbers in the country between 1930 and the 1960s, a process that continues today with the forced expulsion of the Rohingya from Myanmar, who are considered foreigners in the country.
Browns in Burma
In 1826, the First Anglo-Burmese War was won by the British, giving the Raj control over much of what is now Northeast India as well as parts of the modern Burma. With it, Indians started to stream into Burma, a process that greatly accelerated with the complete annexation of the country into the British Indian Empire in 1885.

Indians had a significant presence in Burma and dominated commerce in what was then a province of British India. This included big merchants from the Chettiar, Marwari and Gujarati communities. Then, there were the Bengali babus. Like they spread West from Bengal under the aegis of the British Empire, they also spread East (Myanmar borders the Bengal delta). Among the more famous Burmese Bengalis, writer Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, the author of Devdas, worked as a government clerk in the South East Asian country. The third and largest group consisted of labourers – Indians working as coolies, servants and mistries. In George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, for example, memsahibs in Burma rarely knew Burmese, but did need to speak “kitchen Urdu” in order to direct their mostly Indian domestic staff.

By 1931, Indians made up 7% of Burma’s population. They were also extremely prosperous and controlled large parts of the economy. Indians owned so much property that, for example, during the 1930s, they paid 55% of the municipal taxes in Rangoon – the capital of British Burma. The local Burmese, on the other hand, paid only 11%.

This same migration also brought at least a part of the Rohingya population into Burma from Bengal’s eastern-most district, Chittagong. Currently, this fact is fiercely contested politically since it is being used by Myanmar’s administration to paint the Rohingya as Bengali and hence non-Burmese, given that their citizenship laws – absurdly – are based not on birth but on race.
Anti-Indian sentiment
The racial animus that is driving the mass killings of Rohingyas today rose first against Indians in general in 1930, as Telugu and Burman dockworkers clashed in Rangoon, sparking widespread anti-Indian violence. Much larger anti-Indian riots followed in 1938, a year after Burma was separated from British India (but still remained under British rule). Like with the Rohingya violence today, 1938 was simultaneously religious as well as racial – it was sparked off by a book written by a Muslim which was said to be critical of the Buddha, but almost immediately exploded into racial violence directed at all Indians in Burma.

In 1941, there was more violence as the Japanese attacked Burma during World War II. As the Japanese advanced into the country, the British began to withdraw. Without the protection of the British Indian Army, Indians feared attacks from both the Japanese as well as the local Burmese. This resulted in the first major exodus of Indians from Burma. Many Indians, in fact, trekked all the way from Burma to India, with thousands dying in the tropical forests on the way.
Institutionalised racism
In 1948, as Burma gained independence from the British, Indians had to face even more xenophobia as the new state defined itself in racial terms. The population of Burmese Indians had numbered more than a million before World War II – a number that dropped to around 700,000 in the mid 1950s. Between 1949 and 1961, out of 1,50,000 applications for Burmese citizenship by persons of Indian origin, less than a fifth were accepted.

In 1962, Burma saw a military takeover of its government. The dictator Ne Win followed an aggressive racial policy which affected every minority group. All property was nationalised, severely affecting rich persons of Indian origin. White collar Indians were expelled from the country. Between 1962 and 1964, more than 300,000 Indians were forced out of Burma.

In 1982, Burma passed a new citizenship law that created a strict racial definition of citizenship. This rendered the Rohingya and most persons of Indian origin stateless. While the plight of the Rohingya has – deservedly – caught the attention of the world due to the genocide they face, these laws mean even people of Indian origin in Myanmar are discriminated against heavily even though they have lived there for generations. One estimate holds that 500,000 people of Indian origin living in Myanmar are stateless.
Forced Burmanisation
Since then, faced with a Hobsons’ choice, persons of Indian origin have Burmanised – several government policies are aimed at making non-indigenous communities adopt Burmese norms, including language, religion and culture – rapidly in order to reduce the hostility that they faced. The Burmese language has replaced the various languages people of Indian origin spoke and even names have been Burmanised. Yet, this hasn’t entirely solved matters. Hindus and Muslims of Indian origin are not allowed any public celebration of religion and face racism.

In the 1960s, the Indian government was criticised for not helping its diaspora in Burma as they faced bigotry and were being expelled. In sharp contrast, China came to the aid of its Burmese diaspora (who were also targeted racially).

Little has changed today. The Rohingya are the victim of the same structural racism in Burma that persons of Indian origin faced. In the latest surge of violence between the state and Rohingya people who took up arms last year, more than 3,00,000 Rohingyas have fled the Rakhine state in Myanmar where they stay, most of them seeking refuge in Bangladesh.

However, the Indian government, rather than take up the cause of the disposed, is talking of pushing the few Rohingya migrants that have taken shelter in in India back to Myanmar – where they would face genocide.
This article was first published on Scroll.in
http://www.dhakatribune.com/world/s...history-like-rohingya-indians-driven-myanmar/

 

[Nilgiri]

Great. Thank you Mamata. Can we send a portion of our refugees to WB?

Nope. Praise be to BSF and it being federally controlled.

 

[Tshering22]

I knew it. This hag of a woman will do these things.

Hope that Gorkhaland state comes to be true.

This deranged lunatic will ruin east and northeast India.

 

[Shorisrip]

I knew it. This hag of a woman will do these things.

Hope that Gorkhaland state comes to be true.

This deranged lunatic will ruin east and northeast India.

Lol, Gorkhaland kokhonoi hobena. Jani apni Bangla Bhujhen.

 

[Mage]

Nope. Praise be to BSF and it being federally controlled.

Mamata will love them tho.

 

[Tshering22]

Lol, Gorkhaland kokhonoi hobena. Jani apni Bangla Bhujhen.

We'll see.

That's okay. We'll deal with Mamta instead.

Our problem is that lunatic.

 

[Shorisrip]

We'll see.

That's okay. We'll deal with Mamta instead.

Our problem is that lunatic.

Anyways, a different question....during any crisis facing Nepal for e.g., wouldn't the Gorkhas in India be sympathetic to the despair of the Nepali people?

Why is it really surprising when the "opar Bangla" is feeling for the "epar Bangla"?

 

[Mage]

We'll see.

That's okay. We'll deal with Mamta instead.

Our problem is that lunatic.

Mamata isn't going out anytime soon either.

 

[Tshering22]

Mamata isn't going out anytime soon either.

Let's see.

She's the last hope of your jihadi activities in India.

Anyways, a different question....during any crisis facing Nepal for e.g., wouldn't the Gorkhas in India be sympathetic to the despair of the Nepali people?

Nepalis don't create problems here the way your kind do. They don't go stone-pelting rioting and usurping lands in waves.

Also India and Nepal have Open Borders treaty with equal status; they are free to work here and we are free to work there.

Nothing of this sort exists between India and Bangladesh.

 

[Shorisrip]

Let's see.

She's the last hope of your jihadi activities in India.



Nepalis don't create problems here the way your kind do. They don't go stone-pelting rioting and usurping lands in waves.

Also India and Nepal have Open Borders treaty with equal status; they are free to work here and we are free to work there.

Nothing of this sort exists between India and Bangladesh.

"People of my kind" lol. Says the guy who's from a state called Paschim Bangla.

I'd be walking in Kolkata, and speaking Bengali and would be like a local there, while people would think you're some security guard, and you'd be the other. Actually, I have pre-partition relatives still left in Kolkata, so I can blend in even more.