On the evening of May 8, a young Rohingya refugee in Delhi got a phone call from Myanmar – the country from which his family had fled to escape against their community.

It was his parents on the phone line. “My parents told me that they had been dropped in the middle of the sea,” he said.

Just two days before, he had seen them disappear from their home in Delhi when the police detained them along with 41 others. They now recounted to him the ordeal they had been through, which had culminated in Indian authorities forcing them off a navy vessel in the Andaman Sea and making them swim into Myanmarese territory with nothing but life jackets.

After they made landfall, they managed to borrow a phone from a local fisherman to call him. “They were afraid that the Myanmar army might arrest them and take them away at any moment,” the young man recalled.

But they were lucky – they had swum ashore on a stretch of land controlled not by the Myanmar army, which is hostile to Rohingyas, but by the National Unity Government of Myanmar, the country’s civilian government that has been operating in exile since the 2021...