Histories of displacement and the creation of political space: "statelessness" and citizenship in Bangladesh (original) (raw)
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Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Conceding Citizenship in Bangladesh†
University of Toronto Law Journal, 2010
For close to forty years, tens of thousands of Urdu speakers in Bangladesh did not exercise their rights as citizens, which they held in law but which were not recognized in practice. The roots of their marginalization were deep, stretching back to Indian independence and the creation of East and West Pakistan in 1947 and specifically to the divisions within Pakistan that existed at that time and were hardened during the Bangladesh struggle for independence in subsequent years. From the creation of the state of Bangladesh in 1971, this community lived in camps and settlements, without a legal identity and the associated rights to be educated, to work, and to participate in public life. The recognition by the government of Bangladesh in 2008 of their right to be registered as citizens was a significant human rights achievement. This essay tells the story behind this remarkable development and, using the framework for analysing the determinants of public choices advanced by Michael Tr...
Citizenship, abandonment & resistance in the India and Bangladesh borderland
Drawing on ethnography in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh, this paper explores a multifaceted yet enduring relationship between citizenship, abandonment and resistance. Following the partition in 1947, the enclave residents’ citizenry was enacted like other Indian or Bangladeshi citizens’ disregarding these enclaves’ trans-territorial reality. This paper will demonstrate that enclave dwellers did not live in the ‘citizenship gap’, the difference between rights and benefits of citizenship, rather they lived without any citizenship rights. Life in these enclaves was highly complex and experiences in the enclaves challenge the usefulness of citizenship as a universal framework of analysis for the people who are ranked as citizen but never have it. In this context, a combination of the reverse conceptualisation such as citizenship and Agamben’s conceptualisation of abandonment not only allows for these dimensions of lived experiences to be addressed and explored, it also focuses on the temporal aspect of citizenship implicated in politics. Finally, the paper calls for widening the consideration of the empirical study on everyday citizenship practices and experiences around the globe to extend and intensify the citizenship literatures.
Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh
Drawing on conceptualization of statelessness and ethnographic research on crucial insights of rightessness, this paper investigates how the politico-geographic-legality constructs statelessness in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprise 80 per cent of the world's enclaves. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years. In this period of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. This paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, conceptualization of statelessness not only applies to the refugeehood or de-territorialization of people but also relates to the process of constructing transterritorial stateless people. Second, this paper will discuss the condition of statelessness constructed in a politico-geographic-legal trap. And finally, the paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness.
The Hindu as Other: State, Law, and Land Relations in Contemporary Bangladesh
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2016
Depeasantization and victimization are active elements in the process of [exclusion,] […] Not only [are] the Muslim peasants depeasantized, pauperized and lumpenized on their arrival in India, the Hindu peasantry of Bangladesh is cynically and most systematically robbed of land on communal considerations in the villages of Bangladesh and this [results in] peasants […] [being] forced to flee. The catalyst in this case is the enemy (vested) property laws (Trivedi 2007).
Re-bordering Camp and City: ‘Race', Space and Citizenship in Dhaka
The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City
Re-bordering Camp and City: 'Race', space and citizenship in Dhaka The relationship between 'race', space and citizenship has been a central feature of urban sociology since the studies of African-American urban segregation at the end of the nineteenth century (Du Bois, 1899; Haynes, 1913). It is typically associated with the study of the 'ghetto' or 'ethnic enclave' and with immigrant communities rather than displaced people or refugees. With a few notable exceptions (Sanyal, 2012; 2014) interest in forced migration on the other hand has been more commonly associated with refugee studies and development studies, than urban studies or sociology. As such it has tended to consider citizenship through the lenses of ethnicity and nationalism rather than 'race' and class. In this chapter I bring some of these disparate literatures together to examine how the urban refugee camp, much like the ghetto or ethnic enclave, racializes residents and configures claims to citizenship in the city, but also how the everyday movement and mixing characteristic of urban space reconfigures those claims in complex and unexpected ways. I argue that when we look at the refugee camp through its relationship to the city, particular features of the camp that have been otherwise neglected are brought to the fore. In recent years with growing scholarly interest in transnational phenomena, population movements from South Asia have attracted considerable attention. The emphasis in this field of research however has been on those who migrated to the West, overlooking far greater movements of displaced within the South itself. These 'other' south-south diasporas have been comparatively ignored by western academies. The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent in 1947 generated what is now regarded as one of the largest involuntary migrations in modern history, much of which took the form of internal movement to
Showcase citizens: Citizenship in the making along the borders of post-colonial South Asia
Citizenship Studies , 2022
Drawing on newly incorporated citizens' experiences, interviews with numerous state officials, and field observations in the former border enclaves of India inside Bangladesh after their exchange in 2015, I contend that the state of Bangladesh took extraordinary measures to incorporate its new citizens. Such exceptional measures resulted in a category of citizens that cannot be fully grasped by the existing citizenship vocabulary. In this paper I therefore offer the concept of showcase citizens. Showcase citizens represent an exceptionally treated group of citizens who became subjects to special attention from the state in certain spaces at a specific time. The key to our understanding of such 'exceptions' and the unique response from the Bangladesh state, I argue, lies in placing the enclaves within the broader context of post-colonial South Asia, specifically in relation to the imagination of nation and territory, sovereignty, (performative) governance, and state-making. As such, showcase citizens becomes both an analytical tool-which links the imagination of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship in postcolonial South Asia-and a technique of performative governance that combines the formal with the informal.
This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram’s post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I examine Dahagram’s past(s) as narratives of postcolonial belonging: to fragmented conceptions of state and nation, to surrounding areas, and to the enclave itself. I focus on the overlapping tensions between national and local struggles to ‘claim’ Dahagram as Bangladeshi or Indian territory, and uneven processes of political inclusion within and around the enclaves and within the Bangladeshi State. I use ‘belonging’ as a double-entendre, as these tensions are all intimately linked to possession of land/territory, goods, and access to markets. The notion of belonging(s) helps to illuminate Dahagram’s historical and contemporary cultural politics and political-economy, as well as its articulations with broader events in postcolonial South Asia. Yet, belonging is also an analytic for understanding how history is remembered and articulated as a claim to territory, rights, and membership in unstable places.
'Glocal' Citizenship and the Bangladeshis in Diaspora: Preliminary Considerations
Citizenship in the era of globalisation has moved beyond the four walls of the nation state. People on the move who have left their homeland in search of employment aspire to new identities and rights in their host countries which they strive to conflate with the rights and identities they were born into. This paper examines this new form of 'glocal' citizenship that seeks to combine the global and the local, with reference to the Bangladeshi diaspora.
State and Statelessness: Plight of the Rohingyas and the Biharis in Bangladesh
While much of the contemporary literature on 'nation-states' critique the earlier correspondence between nations and states-'nations' are now often conceived as socially constructed in many different ways. Increasing connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history and identity are all problematized; as a result of which renewed conceptions about nations without states and older diasporic nations comprising of a host of new transnational communities come into view before our eyes while older ones disintegrate. Nations have become more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before. It is in this context, one needs to understand the issue of 'statelessness' that challenges the conceptual rubrics of the 'nation-state' in a significant way.
2016
This paper examines how a legal doctrine sanctioning land appropriation from a Hindu minority in Bangladesh, the Vested Property Act, constitutes and regulates space, meanings, and subjects. Foregrounding relations of property ownership, I show how the appropriation of private property, embedded in contingent social, political, and cultural relations, shape the making of place, security, and subjectivity. I argue that relations of social inclusion mark minority identities and suggest that the marginalized are directly and indirectly targets of state action. Thus, relations of inclusion are consequential for how rights claims are enacted literally, on the ground, to shape subjects, forms of subjection, and the materiality of lived space. Two spatial scales are noteworthy: the construction of majoritarian regimes, and the contingent practices of rule and subjection. I support this argument with evidence from court records and interviews collected over the past 15 years.