By late afternoon, the narrow lanes of a particular Rohingya settlement in Ukhiya begin to fill.
Children move between shelters patched together with bamboo, corrugated metal, plastic and tarpaulin. Women sit near doorways, sorting vegetables or talking across the alleys. Men return carrying rice and other provisions or linger beneath the low roofs.
Beyond the settlement, the larger Rohingya camps spread across the hills of Cox’s Bazar in dense, improvised layers, a township of displacement built by people who crossed the border from Myanmar.
Yet this small cluster feels set apart.
The families here are Rohingya, but they are Hindu. They fled many of the same villages, crossed the same frontier and entered the same refugee system as their Muslim neighbors. But they live largely among themselves, a small minority folded inside one of the world’s largest refugee settlements.
In a crisis defined by mass displacement, they are easy to miss…refugees among refugees.
Inside one of the shelters lives Aashish Shil, 25, from Nakpura in Myanmar. He moves carefully now. One of his legs is gone.
He was shot during the fighting in Myanmar and reached Bangladesh wounded. Doctors later amputated his injured leg. The shelter in which he now lives was not designed for someone with his disability, and ordinary movement has become difficult.
“I lost my leg after being shot by the junta forces,” he told Daily Waadaa. “I came to Bangladesh with a gunshot wound. My leg had to be amputated while I was being treated at the hospital.”
He has asked aid agencies for a new shelter better suited to his condition.
Around Aashish are other versions of the same rupture: a Hindu goldsmith who no longer has a workshop; families dependent on ration cards; parents asking for schools while insisting they still want to return home; older refugees who remember leaving Myanmar in groups, abandoning houses, land and professions on the other side of the border.
Nearly nine years after the mass Rohingya exodus of 2017, the Hindu families of Ukhiya occupy an unusual place in the story of displacement from Myanmar. Their numbers are tiny beside the overwhelmingly Muslim Rohingya population.
But their experience exposes another layer of the crisis: how a minority within a persecuted minority can become visible when geopolitics finds it useful and then largely disappear from attention.
For a time, their suffering was invoked by governments and competing political narratives. Myanmar pointed to Hindu victims of Rohingya militant violence. In India, their religion made their plight politically resonant. Bangladesh had to protect them while resisting efforts to divide a much larger displaced population along religious lines.
Then the attention moved elsewhere. The Hindu Rohingya remained.
In 2017, their first refuge looked markedly different from the sprawling camps occupied by Muslim Rohingya. About 500 Hindu refugees were housed separately in an area inhabited by Bangladeshi Hindus; at one point, a chicken farm was cleared and converted into a dormitory-like shelter.
Their physical separation reflected genuine concerns about security. It also anticipated their position within the crisis. They belonged to the displaced Rohingya population but were never quite absorbed into its public image.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Chittagong puts the registered Hindu Rohingya population in Bangladesh at 528 and estimates another 700 to 800 may be unregistered.
The researchers noted that Hindu Rohingya have received comparatively little national and international attention, in part because of their small numbers.
Community estimates are higher, particularly after renewed fighting in Myanmar sent another wave across the border. Sumanta Krishna Baishnab, a leader of Hindu Rohingya who arrived in 2024, says roughly 230 families, comprising around 1,300 people, came during the latest influx.
A profession now has been replaced by a ration. His wife, Sumi Bala, 25, said food was available but medical care remained a concern. “We are getting food,” she told Waadaa, “but healthcare is not good.”
Documentation creates another hierarchy. Kisma, the wife of Nickel Rudra, said her family had not received its own data card. They use her mother’s card to obtain rations, leaving them uncertain about future access to food and other assistance.
For parents, there is another problem…time.
Chinu Bala, the wife of Milton Shil, wants a school for their children. She also wants to leave. “My husband died a few months ago. My life has gotten harder since then,” she said, “I am tired of living here as a refugee.”
“Soon” has survived remarkably well in the Rohingya camps.
Families who crossed the border in 2017 have now spent almost nine years waiting. Children have been born in Bangladesh who know Myanmar largely through stories told by their parents. Families have acquired routines, ration cards and neighbors here while continuing to describe another country as home.
The Hindu Rohingya arrived in Bangladesh through several episodes of violence, but 2017 remains the rupture around which their recent history turns.
After attacks on Myanmar security posts on August 25, 2017, the military launched operations across northern Rakhine. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled into Bangladesh.
Modhu Ram remembers crossing as part of a group large enough to resemble a fragment of a village in motion.
“We fled to this country because of persecution by Myanmar’s military junta,” Modhu told Waadaa. “Twenty-five families came together with me. We are now taking shelter in the Hindu Rohingya camp.”
The Hindus carried with them a story more complicated than the religious categories through which the Rohingya catastrophe was increasingly understood.
Before the violence, Hindus and Muslims had lived beside one another in villages in northern Rakhine. Contemporary accounts from refugees described generations of coexistence, despite the discrimination and poverty that shaped Rohingya life.
A Muslim refugee from Fakirabazar told the Dhaka Tribune newspaper in 2017 that Hindus and Muslims in his village had lived together for more than a century without religion becoming a source of conflict. After reaching Bangladesh, he said, he encountered a former Hindu neighbor in Kutupalong bazaar; the two men embraced and cried.
But the 2017 violence also exposed brutality within the Rohingya population itself.
Hindu survivors initially gave journalists conflicting accounts of who had attacked their villages. Some described masked men dressed in black without identifying them. Some accounts blamed Myanmar's military or Rakhine Buddhists. Others later blamed Rohingya militants.
The changing testimony generated suspicion that traumatized survivors had been pulled into a contest over responsibility for the wider violence.
The uncertainty surrounding those early accounts should not obscure what was later established. Amnesty International concluded in 2018, after conducting its own investigation, that fighters from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, had massacred scores of Hindu civilians in northern Rakhine, including killings at Kha Maung Seik in August 2017.
The finding complicated any simple account of the Rohingya solely as victims of state violence. A persecuted population could contain victims and perpetrators of other atrocities at the same time.
It also made Hindu suffering politically useful.
Myanmar could point to murdered Hindus to emphasize the threat posed by Rohingya militants while its own military faced mounting accusations of atrocities against the wider Rohingya population.
India publicly expressed concern for the Hindu victims. Refugees in Bangladesh, meanwhile, found themselves giving interviews in which the identity of their attackers became part of a larger geopolitical argument.
In reporting from the Hindu camp in 2017, online portal The Record Nepal described them as a “minority on the chessboard.” A Rohingya man interviewed by the outlet at the time put it more directly: “I believe the Rohingya Hindus are used here like pawns.”
It was an uncomfortable description, but an accurate one.
Their religion made a small group of refugees disproportionately important to the competing stories being told about Rakhine. Myanmar had an interest in separating Hindu victims from the predominantly Muslim Rohingya population.
Some Muslim refugees saw that distinction as an attempt to divide a community whose central grievance — denial of belonging in Myanmar — was shared.
For the Hindu refugees themselves, the immediate concern was simpler… where could they live safely? Some initially looked toward India.
In 2017, several Hindu Rohingya told reporters they did not trust Myanmar enough to return and wanted to go to India instead. One woman said she believed she would “feel at peace in India.”
That expectation was understandable. India presented itself increasingly as a potential refuge for persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spoken publicly about India as a natural destination for persecuted Hindus abroad.
But India never became an answer for the Hindu Rohingya. The contradiction became sharper with the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA.
The law offers an expedited route to Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India by the statutory cutoff. The Indian Home Ministry describes it explicitly as relief for members of those six communities who came from those three countries after facing religious persecution. Myanmar is absent.
This means a distinction is necessary. Hindu Rohingya do not, under the CAA as written, have a legal right to its citizenship route. A Hindu fleeing Rakhine after 2017 falls outside the law both because Myanmar is not one of the three covered countries and because of the cutoff date.
But that legal exclusion raises a broader political question.
If the moral argument for the CAA is that India should provide refuge to persecuted religious minorities in its neighborhood, why should a Hindu persecuted in Myanmar be categorically different from a Hindu persecuted in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan?
“It’s a tricky question, and largely understudied,” Shahab Enam Khan, a professor of international relations at Jahangirnagar University, told Waadaa.
What Hindu Rohingya have told him, Professor Shahab said, is that they can feel reasonably comfortable in either Bangladesh or Myanmar because their central vulnerability is not simply their religion.
“Their problem is the Rohingya identity itself, which is what keeps them expelled,” he said.
Shahab pointed to the limitation of the Indian law. “India’s CAA applies to minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who arrived before December 2014. Myanmar is absent from it, so a Hindu fleeing Rakhine in 2017 qualifies for nothing.”
India’s wider policy toward the Rohingya has been shaped primarily by immigration and national-security concerns rather than by distinctions within the community.
Indian authorities have deported Rohingya to Myanmar, and their legal status remains contested. In 2025, India’s Supreme Court was considering fundamental questions about whether Rohingya should be treated as refugees or illegal entrants and what protections, if any, follow from their status. Court proceedings have continued around detention and deportation.
Maung Zarni, the Burmese rights activist, argues that this produces an unusual contradiction. In theory, he told Waadaa, Hindu Rohingya might seem natural candidates for protection under the political logic behind the CAA. In practice, Indian politics has increasingly treated “Rohingya” itself as the disqualifying identity, irrespective of religion.
There is a bitter symmetry to that predicament.
In Myanmar, Hindu Rohingya could be distinguished from Muslim Rohingya when the distinction served the state. In India, their religious identity has not been sufficient to separate them from a Rohingya population treated principally as an immigration and security issue.
Bangladesh, by contrast, is where they remain.
Myanmar has periodically sought the return of Hindu refugees. Its government said 444 Hindus were among those verified for repatriation and repeatedly referred to their desire to return.
But separating Hindus for an early return created another problem. Repatriating one religious group ahead of the larger Rohingya population risked turning religion into the organizing principle of a displacement crisis rooted fundamentally in citizenship, security and the right to return.
The larger repatriation process has repeatedly stalled because Rohingya refugees have demanded guarantees that returning to Myanmar will not simply recreate the conditions from which they fled.
Hindu Rohingya face the same question.
Research among the community suggests that many want to return. But return, to them, does not simply mean crossing the Naf River. It means citizenship. It means security. It means the right to their homes and land. It means the ability to work and travel.
It means returning as people who belong to Myanmar rather than as a population that can again be administratively reclassified, confined or expelled.
In the meantime, Bangladesh has acquired a complicated meaning. It is not their country, and Bangladesh has not offered them citizenship. Yet it has become the place where the mechanics of ordinary life continue.
There are ration cards and neighbors. Children are born. Meals are cooked. Religious rituals are observed. People complain about healthcare, inadequate shelters and registration — complaints that are themselves evidence of a refugee emergency becoming a long-term existence.
“Our hearts long for our homeland,” Kishna Dhar, a 22 year old Rohingya refugee said, “I wish my daughter grew up in our homeland. But it seems we are stuck here forever.”
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