Citizenship and the Remains of Partition(s) in South Asia (original) (raw)

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.

Precarious citizenship: detection, detention and 'deportability' in India

Citizenship Studies , 2022

In 2019, India made the unprecedented move of listing 1.9 million people in its northeast state of Assam as illegal migrants from Bangladesh in a new National Register of Citizens before passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which overtly discriminates against the country's Muslim minority. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the reality of precarious citizenship under India's increasingly anti-migrant regime, particularly for Bengali-speaking Muslims. Going beyond the predominant notion that illegal migrants acquire documentary citizenship through fraudulent means after crossing the porous border between India and Bangladesh, this essay reveals a reverse scenario: those living with citizenship rights and in a regular social world are subjected to the gradual process of detection, detention and 'deportability' in India. This paper employs the concept of precarious citizenship to unravel this complex and oscillating world of legality and illegality, citizenship and noncitizenship, and the predicaments of life as a Bengalispeaking Muslim in India.

Histories of displacement and the creation of political space: "statelessness" and citizenship in Bangladesh

2011

In May 2008, at the High Court of Bangladesh, a ‘community’ that has been ‘stateless’ for over thirty five years were finally granted citizenship. Empirical research with this ‘community’ as it negotiates the lines drawn between legal status and statelessness captures an important historical moment. It represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. The thesis argues that in certain transition states the construction and contestation of citizenship is more complicated than often discussed. The ‘crafting’ of citizenship since the colonial period has left an indelible mark, and in the specificity of Bangladesh’s historical imagination, access to, and understandings of, citizenship are socially and spatially produced. While much has changed since Partition, particular discursive registers have lost little of their value. Today, religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘pur...

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.

India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act: A Throwback to Debates around the ‘Long Partition’

2021

My paper examines the prehistory of India's controversial new Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 ('CAA'), which expedites citizenship procedures for non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Through looking at a longue durée examination of British India's Partition, I argue that the Partition's dislocation conflated the otherwise oppositional categories of 'citizen' and 'refugee' in the formative years of the Republic. Through examining Constituent Assembly and parliamentary debates, judicial precedents and archival files and file notings between 1947-65, I demonstrate how taking responsibility for non-Muslims in Pakistan went hand in hand with ring fencing Muslims at a point where the relationship between the state, citizenship and nationality was abruptly prised open. Rather than an aberration, therefore, the CAA is the culmination of a strand of ideas and decisions that have informed Indian citizenship since Independence, which perhaps a refugee law could go some way to ameliorate.

COLOURING WITH THE SAME BRUSH: REVISITING UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION IN SOUTH ASIA

Undocumented cross-border migration is an active agent of the state indeed. The inflow single-handedly affects the state policies and bilateral relations with the source country. In this process of interaction, these movements get altered reciprocally. In a heterogeneous society like South Asia, recurrent tension persists between groups and even the States. As a result, the region remains vibrant in territorial and communal disputes. South Asia witnessed mass exodus and constant illegal migrations across the borders that shaped the politics in the region. The paper is developed with two particular aims in design. Firstly, it intends to analyse the internal and external factors that respond to the inflow of people in South Asian countries. The analysis is contextualised within the affairs of the state and the historical experiences of South Asian countries. Secondly, it investigates the obscurity prevailing towards undocumented migrants and ambiguity towards specific refugee communities in India by evoking the country's rich and diverse refugee experience. The uncertainty regarding immigration and the absence of a proper legislative framework exclusive to South Asia results in administrative ad hocism.

BANGLADESHI IMMIGRANTS IN ASSAM: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A FORCED ‘OTHER’

GRFDT Research Monograph Series, 2016

The politics of immigration manipulation in Assam has witnessed a gradual transformation from its economic roots, an aspect that has been often neglected in the quest for forming a historical trajectory of immigration instead. Further, the change in the debate from economy to polity as seen from the vantage point of a top-down approach also necessitates a deeper exploration in the context of ‘othering’ only a subset of the total immigrants to the state. The Hindu-Muslim divide has come under renewed focus with the question of citizenship rights to the Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, a direct result of the changing ideology of the power holders. In such a context, the debate on open versus closed borders have been relegated to the backdrop, and the idea of returning to one’s homeland that characterizes one of the crucial constitutive factors of a diaspora have not borne fruit.

Romola Sanyal Reviews "Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border" (Penn Press) in Antipode

Antipode, 2022

Geographers, and particularly political geographers, have long been interested in questions around borders, boundaries, sovereignty, territory, and citizenship. The work on borders has evolved considerably within our discipline, with diverse methods and concepts used to analyse them. Scholars are attentive to the performativity and social production of borders, to their porosity, the practices of sovereignty outside the state, and the varied nature of borders and bordering across the world (Megoran 2012; Paasi et al. 2022). It is not only a violent site of state formation, but also a space where lives are lived, upended, and reshaped through shifts in social, political, cultural, and economic practices. Malini Sur's book, Jungle Passports, is a bold text that explores and expands on these themes through an exquisite biography and ethnography of the India-Bangladesh boundary along the Northeastern Indian states of Assam and Meghalaya. The partition of 1947 that

GJ #2015, 3, The Political Exclusion of (Illegal) Bangladeshi Immigrants in Assam, by Jeemut Pratim Das

The main focus of this paper lies in explaining the hypothesis that the exclusion of the (illegal) Bangladeshi immigrants in Assam has been the outcome of a continuous historical process undertaken by the political leaders of the state, rather than as a result of any particular mass uprising from 'below'. This push from a top-down perspective changed the issue from one of economic consequences to a more religious nature, also culminating in a failed project to assert a unique indigenous 'Assamese' identity in relation to the 'other', all the while relegating the more usual aspects of open versus closed borders that figure in immigration discourses to the background.