For the past 13 years, the small Christian Rohingya community in Delhi—which numbers 150—has rented rooms to worship in three congregations each Sunday. The two pastors had been going through the Sermon on the Mount for the past six months.
They had reached Matthew 7 when the government began rounding up members of the community.
It began May 6, when police called 15 Christian and 23 Muslim Rohingya into police stations, claiming they needed to be fingerprinted due to a “failure in their biometric,” according to Sadeq Shalom, a church member whose brother was deported. The Rohingya complied, believing it was another routine check. Although the refugees have UN-recognized refugee status, India is not a signatory of the UN refugee law and treats them as illegal migrants.
Once the refugees reached the station, authorities moved them from one government office to another before transporting them by airplane and boat into international waters. Then, they ordered the refugees to jump into the ocean with life vests on.
David Nazir, another member of the church, said his elderly parents were also among those deported. On May 9, he received a phone call from them calling from inside Myanmar. They recalled their harrowing journey and the way Indian authorities had led them to believe they would be deported to Indonesia. Before throwing them into the ocean, the naval officers said they would soon be picked up, Nazir said, “but no one came.”
“My parents don’t know how to swim,” he said. “Those who could swim helped drag the others toward shore, but God only knew where they were going.”
Once they reached the shore, they realized they were back in Myanmar, the home they had escaped years ago.
The Christian Rohingya have been caught up in the Indian government’s crackdown on immigrants living illegally in the country. In February, Amit Shah, the minister for Home Affairs, began advocating for strict action against those who help illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants, claiming they are a threat to “national security.” Then, in early May, the government issued “revised instructions” to identify, detain, and deport illegal immigrants.
The policy has devastated Delhi’s close-knit Christian Rohingya community, as businesses are afraid to employ them and the refugees are struggling to support their families. They also fear the government will round them up and deport them back to Myanmar.
“Everyone is living in constant fear that they could be next,” said Nazir, who is currently on the run himself.
Yet the church continues. Three young men, including Shalom, have taken up preaching and pastoral care for the congregation. The past month, they secretly gathered in different homes for worship.
“We thought if the government wants to detain all of us, let them detain us from the church service,” said Shalom.
The Rohingya are an ethnic and religious minority group in Myanmar’s Rakhine state that has long faced discrimination from the Buddhist-nationalist junta. Before their mass exodus in 2017, the predominantly Muslim Rohingya made up an estimated 2 percent of the country’s population.
Fearful that Islam would take over the majority-Buddhist country, the junta stripped Rohingya of citizenship in 1982. In 2015, the government invalidated their temporary registration cards, eliminating their limited voting rights. Today the Rohingya represent the world’s largest stateless population.
In 2017, widespread violence by the Myanmar military forced more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Rohingya refugees now also reside in Pakistan, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Australia. An estimated 40,000 live in India.
Yet even before the genocide, Rohingya faced decades of severe persecution. Shalom remembers the desperate survival strategies people in his village developed as the Myanmar military began attacking his area in 2011. “All [the] villagers would gather in one person’s house,” he said. “Two to three people would guard the room at night, taking turns, and the rest of us would sleep peacefully there.”
Each morning brought fresh reports from neighboring villages that “people, including children and pregnant women, were slaughtered and killed and houses burnt with petrol,” Shalom said.
Although most Rohingya are Muslim, Shalom grew up in a Christian family. In 2004, some Rohingya came to Christ after missionaries from India’s Mizoram state arrived at Shalom’s village of Thaung Chaung and introduced villagers to the gospel. In addition to the persecution from the Buddhist authorities, Rohingya Christians also face discrimination from their own people group as Muslims do not allow them to fetch water from the wells or work alongside them, Shalom said.
In 2014, Shalom and other Rohingya families fled to India. Many have registered with the UN refugee office in Delhi, which offers limited protection but no legal residency under Indian law. While the government considers most illegal immigrants, a small minority were able to obtain long-term visas that need to be renewed annually.
When this group of about 150 Christian Rohingya arrived in Delhi, they started working as “rag pickers” collecting recyclables from Delhi’s streets. Yet families continued to prioritize their children’s education, Shalom recalled. Families would spread across the city at 5 a.m. to collect recyclables, then return home for evening study sessions. The community pooled resources to hire teachers for their children since local schools were often inaccessible, he said.
Nazir noted that their faith has helped buoy them through difficult times since arriving in India. The church became a support network.
“Our faith helped us rebuild our lives,” Nazir said. Churches “became centers of mutual support where families shared resources and information about jobs, legal issues, and safety concerns.”
Over time, about 20 of the children completed secondary (10th grade) or senior secondary education (12th grade) and eventually found work in private companies, including telecommunication, sales, and delivery services. Shalom became an educational content creator. Older members found jobs like pulling rented rickshas, farming leased land, or cleaning office buildings.
Yet things took a turn in 2017 when the Indian government ordered states to identify and deport all illegal immigrants and stopped renewing the Rohingya refugees’ long-term visas.
Since the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took control of India’s central government in 2014, Rohingya refugees have been targeted, according to media reports. Because Rohingya are predominantly Muslims, they have become targets of both physical assaults and verbal harassment as part of BJP’s broader pattern of anti-Muslim sentiment.
Recently, Shalom has became afraid that he and his family could be deported under the Foreigners Act. In May 2025, he decided to resign from his job, as he felt it was unsafe for him to continue to work. Others who employed Rohingya refugees let them go under pressure from the government.
“Our daily wages helped us survive each day, but now that is gone,” Shalom said.
To cope, the community adopted an “early church” approach by sharing their limited resources. “For example, I had a bag of rice, and I distributed [it] to the people who didn’t have,” he said. “This is how we have been surviving, but I don’t know now what we can do, for we are left with nothing to share.”
At the same time, they worry about their own personal safety.
Nazir first sensed that the Indian authorities were preparing to take action when the police began visiting Rohingya homes for address verification and taking community members to the police station in the early hours of February 26. Nazir was also taken and remembers authorities assigning each refugee a prison number and detaining them for several hours before letting them go.
Then came the roundup on May 6. From the police stations, the 15 Christians were taken to a hospital for medical exams before being moved to a detention center.
A Christian Rohingya told The Wire that police took him in while his wife was in the hospital recovering from a miscarriage. “They asked me to take off all my clothes and beat me repeatedly,” he told the publication. “After that they made me sit in a squatting position and beat me on the thighs.”
Shalom said that when the police couldn’t find a refugee they were looking for, “they threatened his wife despite her having no knowledge of his whereabouts,” and “police encouraged local passersby to join beatings, telling crowds that the Christians were Pakistani terrorists involved in the recent Pahalgam [Kashmir] attacks.”
On May 7, Shalom received a 17-second call from his brother, John Anwar, from an unknown number. Anwar told him the refugees were being taken to the airport and would be deported back to Myanmar.
According to media reports, the Indian authorities took the refugees on a military aircraft to Sri Vijaya Puram (formerly Port Blair) in the Indian-owned Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Upon arrival, authorities confiscated their UN-refugee identity cards, money, and personal possessions before forcing them aboard Indian naval vessels.
Shalom’s brother told him that the naval officers blindfolded them and tied their hands tightly together. After hours in the same position, Anwar’s wrists began to bleed. He also said that an officer beat him when the man learned he was a Christian.
The officers then offered the refugees a choice between deportation to Myanmar or deportation to Indonesia. Desperate to avoid Myanmar, the refugees chose Indonesia. Finally, on May 9, the officers took off their restraints, gave them life jackets, and ordered them into the water. As the refugees swam toward shore, they discovered they had been deceived. Local fishermen confirmed they had reached Myanmar, not Indonesia.
Several of the refugees struggled from health conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, and two women were recovering from recent miscarriages. Nazir noted that his mother faints due to her diabetes and said, “It scares me to death that they are both without their daily medicines and prescription.”
Legal challenges to India’s stringent immigration laws continue with limited success. According to media reports, a May 8 Supreme Court hearing provided no immediate relief, as the court refused to issue directions stopping deportations. The case has been scheduled for a hearing in July, leaving the community in limbo.
For Nazir and his three other brothers, the uncertainty about their parents’ survival has left them wavering between despair and faith. “I don’t know how they are being treated in Myanmar. How will they survive? How will they earn, and who will take care of them?”
As the community fears deportations and struggles with what to do as food dwindles, they continue to hold on to their faith.
“I don’t know what we will do and what our future step is,” Nazir said. “Death seems to be better than the life I am facing now. But thank God that I have Christ, and because of that I have hope that God will do something and make a way.”
