NEW DELHI (Dispatches) – A massive fire has destroyed a Rohingya refugee camp in the Indian capital, New Delhi, leaving hundreds of people homeless.
The blaze broke out at about 11:30pm on Saturday and quickly spread through the camp, reducing 55 ramshackle shelters to ashes in the Madanpur Khadar area in the capital city’s south. No deaths have been reported in the fire – the second time the camp has been reduced to ashes since 2018.
The fire service department of the national capital said that it put 15 fire tenders into service and brought the blaze under control in about six hours. “We rushed to the spot quickly and started dousing the flames,” Sandeep, an operator at the Delhi Fire Service, told Al Jazeera by telephone on Sunday.
The fire tore through the camp, home to 55 families – filling the sky with plumes of smoke and flames as refugees scrambled to safety, crying for help.
Asif Mujtaba, a Delhi-based activist, told Al Jazeera that his group was one of the first to provide relief as soon as the flames were doused.
“We shifted those who needed medical attention to nearby hospitals, and arranged water and food for the refugees,” Mujtaba said, adding that he was reaching out to officials to help set up an interim relief camp for them, in the scorching summer heat. “We are also mapping out details of the families who suffered losses in the fire,” he said.
An estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees, many believed to be undocumented, live in camps across Indian cities, including Jammu, Hyderabad and Nuh. The United Nations refugee agency has provided some of them with refugee cards, which helps them to access some basic services and is supposed to protect them from police action.
More than 750,000 Rohingya took shelter in Bangladesh in 2017 after the Myanmar army launched a brutal crackdown on the Muslim minority, who have been persecuted by Myanmar authorities for decades. Bangladesh currently holds more than one million Rohingya in cramped and squalid camps along its border with Myanmar.
Large numbers of Rohingya have also taken refuge in neighboring Asian countries, including India and Malaysia.
The fire comes amid an Indian government crackdown on Rohingya refugees living in the country. In March, police in Jammu city and New Delhi jailed more than 200 refugees, saying they were living in the country “illegally”.
India’s Hindu nationalist government has said it will deport the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar in contravention of the principle of non-refoulement, which forbids a country from returning refugees to a country where they would face torture. Rights groups have warned against deporting the Rohingya to Myanmar, which also experienced a military coup in February.
For now, their deportation has been blocked by the Indian Supreme Court. But 300 refugees are still imprisoned.
In a latest development, anti-junta protesters and social media activists in Myanmar have launched a campaign to show solidarity with Rohingya Muslims who were persecuted and forced to leave their homeland of Western Rakhine state due to a military crackdown in 2017.
On Sunday, a large number of activists and civilians flooded social media to post pictures of themselves wearing black and flashing a three-finger salute of resistance, in posts tagged “#Black4Rohingya.”
“Justice must (be) served for each of you and each of us in Myanmar,” said prominent rights activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi on Twitter.