Imphal: Five days after a “surprise inspection” by the Manipur Human Rights Commission (MHRC), around 75 inmates of the central jail in Sajiwa, all Myanmar nationals, were shifted to a nearby Foreigner Detention Centre (FDC) Wednesday, Jail Superintendent S.K. Bhadrika told ThePrint.
“The 30 female refugees at Sajiwa detention centre will soon be shifted to another centre near Imphal Central Jail,” he said, adding that one pregnant women has been admitted to the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences in Imphal.
Last Friday, a two-member team of the MHRC — chairperson Justice U.B. Saha and member K.K. Singh, accompanied by a law officer — met with cries of help as they inspected the Manipur Central Jail in Sajiwa, Imphal East district. The desperate pleas were echoed by Myanmar citizens lodged at the detention centre nearby.
This comes at a time when the Manipur government is collecting the biometrics of “identified illegal immigrants” from Myanmar. The exercise began with Chandel district, and was carried out in the border district of Tengnoupal earlier this week. For the last four months, Manipur has been in the grip of ethic clashes between the tribal Kuki and non-tribal Meitei communities. The violence has claimed around 180 lives and displaced tens of thousands of people. Over the last 48-72 hours, eight more deaths have been reported.
Friday’s inspection was ordered by MHRC chairperson Saha on 28 April, emphasising that jail authorities should immediately release Myanmar inmates once they have completed their sentence and deposited the fine, so they can be “either deported to their own country or sent to the foreigner detention centre”.
But during the inspection, the MHRC team found that some of the prison inmates had been “illegally detained” at the central jail even after completion of their sentence. One Myanmar national was found serving a sentence since 2018, several others since 2021.
An advocate based out of Imphal told ThePrint: “From the state government’s perspective, they are illegal immigrants, and hence lodged in jail. State cannot treat them as refugees as they were convicted under the Foreigners Act, 1946, but they have already suffered their sentences for six months. They have to be released from jail and kept in the detention centre till their deportation.”
The FDC inspected by the MHRC is the same centre where a 32-year-old Myanmar national died in January, prompting appeals from rights groups to secure refugee rights. Lamkhochon Guite, from Sayarsan village of Myanmar’s Tamu Township, was kept in detention along with 70 other Myanmar nationals who were arrested on 27 January from the Moreh sub-division of Tengnoupal district.
Most of the Myanmar nationals at the detention centre were found to have entered India in search of livelihood, some came before the Covid-19 pandemic, and many had run away from junta atrocities since the February 2021 military coup that unseated Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government.
At the time of the MHRC visit, there were 105 Myanmar nationals at the detention centre, of which 75 were male and 30 female, including six children. Those in Manipur are mostly from the Sagaing Region, Chin State and Magway region of Myanmar, and largely belong to the Kuki-Chin-Zomi-Mizo tribe, bound by ethnic and kin ties.
Having fled military raids in Sagaing, the Myanmar nationals of Tamu enter India through Moreh, taking clandestine routes along the international border with Manipur. Chin State is bordered by Mizoram to the west and Manipur to the north.
India and Myanmar share a boundary of 1,643 km in the four states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. The two nations have a Free Movement Regime (FMR) that allows people living along the border to travel 16 kilometres into each other’s territories without a visa. Manipur has a shared boundary of 390 km with the neighbouring country.
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What the MHRC team found
During their visit, the MHRC took stock of the amenities provided at the detention centre and the central jail, including food, accommodation and healthcare.
At the time of the visit, the detention centre was under the charge of a “caretaker jailer” of the central jail, which was found to be “inappropriate” by the state human rights body, it is learnt.
A total of 26 males were lodged in one of the rooms at the detention centre, while 30 female shared another section nearby. Two pregnant women and an infant were also among those detained. Folded blankets were kept on floor mats in the rooms. Each room had two attached toilets.
A doctor visits the inmates every weekend, and the two pregnant women have been prescribed folic acid and calcium tablets, ThePrint found while interacting with the women at the detention centre. The pregnant women said they need baby clothes and healthy food.
Most of the inmates complained about the food served at the detention centre — rice, which they said was “half-cooked” at times, dal and boiled cabbage.
“Breakfast is served at 8 am that includes tea and roti, lunch at 10 am and dinner at 3.30 pm,” one of the inmates told the MHRC team. Asked about the same, the caretaker said food has to be served before the gates are locked at 5 pm under “instructions”.
Justice Saha then said, “How can you lock them at 5 pm? It is not a prison, but a detention centre. You cannot take their basic rights to food and healthcare, even if they are convicts or under trial prisoners.”
Jail superintendent Bhadrika however told ThePrint that these steps were taken in view of past events — in January, three Myanmar nationals had escaped from the “temporary jail” in Churachandpur district.
‘Came to India to find work’
It has been four months of detention for 26-year-old Jenny from LunMual village in Myanmar’s Chin State. She had crossed the border in Mizoram to enter India, and headed to Pune, Maharashtra.
“I came to India to find work. I was working at a restaurant in Pune, and I thought of returning home through Manipur. I was detained at the Imphal airport in January,” she told ThePrint.
Winbo, 40, had entered India in 2018 while 52-year-old Aung Kya Woo crossed the border into Manipur’s Churachandpur in 2021. Speaking to ThePrint, they said they were among 80 Myanmar nationals who travelled to India territory “without documents” to work at a weaving centre. Winbo said that their minor children are still at the central jail in Imphal with their mothers even after completing their prison sentences.
Earlier in January, the court of the judicial magistrate in Moreh, Sarungbam Mangaleibi, had observed that 71 Myanmar citizens arrested by the Manipur police on 27 January did not enter India as “illegal immigrants”, but as “refugees” who had “no option to return to their country for the time being”. The court then sent the accused to the FDC at Sajiwa.
The court had quoted the definition of ‘refugees’ from the 1951 Refugee Convention or the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines a refugee as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion”.
While acknowledging that India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the court had pointed out that “India is very much a party to the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948), particularly Article 14, which declared that “everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution”.
In April last year, the Supreme Court stayed an order passed by the Manipur High Court in May 2021 that allowed safe passage to seven Myanmar citizens to travel to New Delhi to get the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The apex court was informed by the solicitor general that the concerned persons are “not traceable”, and that they had “illegally” entered India and taken shelter at Moreh.
At the Manipur Central Jail, apart from the Myanmar detainees, the prisoners are from Manipur, Assam and even Gujarat. Most of them were arrested in connection with carrying narcotics and contraband, a government official told ThePrint.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)
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