Politics of Citizenship and International Migration: An Exploratory Study of Pak-Hindus at the India-Pakistan Borderlands

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Asian Immigrants, Citizenship, and Belonging

Abstract

Regions such as the borderlands attach a transitory status to people living there. The India and Pakistan border fall in the same category along with being highly militarised.I advance the concept of borderlands being ‘transitional zones’ with specific territorial and spatial facets.The present paper assesses citizenship struggles and displacement amongst Pak-Hindu migrants who reside in these contested spaces.The focus of the study is migration that has occurred across the international border of India and Pakistan post 1965 Indo-Pak war and continues till date.It is located in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, a city that has become an entry point for Pak-Hindus from bordering villages of Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh province.The tribal community considered the western borderland as their ancestral land that they once left behind and became ‘default citizens’ of Pakistan.The present ethnographic study attempts to understand the everyday lived realities,challenges and contestations of the Pak-Hindus.The flow that occurs physically is on account of the strong sense of belonging, ‘shared culture and tradition’ to the Indian side of the border.Memory of this lived experience is inclined more towards the geography and events of undivided India.Legal and social assimilation of Pak-Hindus who can also be considered as refugees involve complexities and negotiations vis-à-vis precarity of identity and everyday socio-cultural practices.The challenges,alienation and state’s proceduralism creates a category of non-citizens and is put forth with the support of oral narratives recorded at informal settlements and refugee camp sites in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India.Furthermore, none of the countries in South Asia have signed major international convention relating to refugees, nor have they enacted any national legislation to deal with issues of forced migration.India in particular is not a signatory to the 1951 Reugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol.The Pak Hindus are caught between the politics of the two nation-states negotiating law,identities and livelihoods.This paper tries to contest the dominant discourse and presents a people’s history to question policy adhocism of the government related to people’s flow across Indian borders as migrants, refugees or simply as displaced persons

Author

• Srishtee Sethi, Tata Institute of Social Sciences