- Krishna Pokharel/The Wall Street Journal
- There are more than 80,000 Burmese refugees in India, most of them of Chin ethnicity. Above, a Chin refugee during a rally in New Delhi on June 20, 2011.
Three years ago, on an October morning, David Siang and his wife and two children fled their native town of Falam in Myanmar's western Chin state. After walking for three and a half days, Mr. Siang says they reached the northeastern Indian state of Mizoram from where they took a train to New Delhi. The journey took a total of eight days.
On Monday afternoon – the same day as India's foreign minister set off for a visit to Myanmar — he attended a gathering of more than 1,500 Chin refugees at New Delhi's Jantar Mantar to mark World Refugee Day. He recounted what drove him away from his home. "Life was not good in Falam. We could not stay there," he said. He says life under Myanmar's military junta was already harsh but it got more difficult after a constitutional referendum in May 2008. "They said military rule is good. You must vote 'yes.'"
"Chin people are not in favor of military rule," said Mr. Siang, 42 years old. "The army forces us to work in its farmland for free and arrests anybody it likes."
According to the Chin Refugee Committee in New Delhi, the Chins started coming to India after the failed students' uprising of 1988. The committee attributes the flight of the Chins from their homeland to the more than five-decade-long "systematic violation of human rights r [...]
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