The tea house buzzed with life, tucked within the sprawling Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. Over cups of Myanmar-style milk tea, residents gathered to exchange news and stories of survival. It was here in 2019 that I first met Mohammad Arfat, an outspoken and determined Rohingya human rights defender and refugee.
Mohammad Arfat was deeply connected to the refugee communities in both India and Bangladesh—he had lived in both places. He immediately supported our work at Fortify Rights, helping us meet with newly arrived refugees and document serious abuses. We met Rohingya refugees who shared credible accounts of beatings, threats, systemic harassment, and arbitrary detention by Indian authorities—experiences that ultimately forced them to flee.
After our first meeting in 2019, Mohammed Arfat became not just a trusted human rights defender but a friend. He is humble, quick to smile, and deeply committed to serving his people, despite the immense challenges he faces as both a refugee and a genocide survivor.
A year after the meeting, after being threatened in refugee camps because of his human rights work, Mohammad Arfat left Bangladesh to return to India, where he had previously lived as a refugee. Shortly after his return, in December 2020, Indian authorities arrested him in Assam State, physically assaulted him, and convicted him of immigration-related offences, even though he was a registered refugee with the U.N. Refugee Agency in India.
He served his sentence, but after the completion of the sentence, Indian authorities continued to detain him—arbitrarily and indefinitely—in a series of detention facilities across the country for more than four years.
He should never have been detained.
Even during his detention, he continued his human rights work, advocating for his fellow Rohingya detainees to be freed. “I pleaded with them [the Indian jail authorities] to release me and other Rohingya refugees. I continued to try to help my community,” Mohammad Arfat told me after his release.
In May 2024, Fortify Rights filed a complaint on Mohammad Arfat’s behalf with the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. In March 2025, the Working Group issued its opinion: Mohammad Arfat’s detention was arbitrary and violated international law. The U.N. Working Group called for his immediate and unconditional release, and for Indian authorities to work with the U.N. Refugee Agency to ensure his protection, including the possibility of resettlement to a third safe country.
Amid global headlines of India and Pakistan’s military conflict, authorities have forcibly transferred Rohingya refugees to both Myanmar and Bangladesh. Instead of protecting Mohammad Arfat and other Rohingya refugees and following the Working Group recommendations, over the last month, Indian authorities forcibly returned him to Bangladesh, where he now remains in hiding.
India’s treatment of Mohammad Arfat is not an isolated case; it reflects a broader history of abuse against Rohingya refugees and anti-Muslim sentiment by the Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the BJP, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads.
Even before he was elected prime minister in 2002, Modi was implicated in one of the worst episodes of anti-Muslim violence in India’s modern history, when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat State. Following the burning of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims, Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims in coordinated, state-enabled attacks. Modi was never held accountable, but the evidence of his involvement was so clear that the U.S. government put him on a visa ban list for years, until his election as Prime Minister.
Today, as Prime Minister, Modi continues to leverage anti-Muslim sentiment for political gain. Those who suffer the brunt of his repressive policies are vulnerable communities like Rohingya refugees, as well as some Indian Muslim communities who have had their citizenship in India questioned.
It is time for the Indian government to stop treating Rohingya refugees as pawns in its domestic anti-Muslim campaign. Rohingya refugees have not been implicated in any acts of violence or terrorism in India, and instead of treating them as criminals, India should recognise the genocidal killings they have fled in Myanmar, stop locking them up, and provide them with the refugee status they deserve. Instead of deporting Rohingya back to danger in Myanmar and Bangladesh, India should work with the U.N. to help resettle those most at risk to safer third countries.
John Quinley is a director at Fortify Rights, an international human rights organisation. Follow him on X: @john_hq3
