Description
The Rohingya issue has today been reduced to a single-issue debate fixated on the security dimension largely concerned with issues of illegal migration, religious radicalisation and terrorism. An opaque process of separating the ‘good’ Rohingya refugees from the ‘bad’ ones has meant that a sizeable stateless population will remain in a heightened state of vulnerability faced with the prospect of an indeterminate wait. The paper will situate the Rohingya issue historically within Burma’s tumultuous engagement with modernity and dominant elite articulations in early twentieth century and the role that these played in the construction of a distinctly ethnonationalist imagination. It will, in particular, try to understand why the Burma Research Society, an ostensibly progressive intellectual idea, consciously chose to privilege a dominant Burman-Buddhist national identity. It is these elite visions, the paper argues, that would foreshadow the faultlines of future ethno-cultural conflicts in the country and have a direct bearing on the fraught debates over identity today.
