Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
4 - Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Global Transformation of Borders and Mobility
- Section I Experiencing Borders in South Asia
- 1 Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border
- 2 Border Layers: Formal and Informal Markets Along the India-Bangladesh Border
- 3 Experiencing the Border: The Lushai People and Transnational Space
- Section II Mobility in and Beyond South Asia
- 4 Of Insiders, Outsiders, and Infiltrators: The Politics of Citizenship and Inclusion in Contemporary South Asia
- 5 Renegotiating Boundaries: Exploring the Lives of Undocumented Bangladeshi Women Workers in India
- 6 ‘The Immoral Traffic in Women’: Regulating Indian Emigration to the Persian Gulf
- 7 The Journey to Europe: A Young Afghan’s Experience on the Migrant Route
- 8 Hardening Regional Borders: Changes in Mobility from South Asia to the European Union
- Section III Representations of Borders and Mobility in Diaspora
- 9 The Borders of Integration: Paperwork between Bangladesh and Belgium
- 10 Disordering History and Collective Memory in Gunvantrai Acharya’s Dariyalal 229
- 11 Fragmented Lives: Locating ‘Home’ in the Poems of Sudesh Mishra
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Abstract
South Asia serves as a unique site of inquiry for understanding the complexities surrounding citizenship and belonging today. South Asia's already complex migration landscape is further complicated by rapid urbanization, political Islamophobia, and inadequate policies on migration and citizenship. Nowhere is this complexity thrown into sharper focus than the porous borderland where India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal meet, where refugees and stateless persons from Nepal and Bhutan regularly join economic migrants from Bangladesh and newer refugee streams from Myanmar. They move with relative freedom across unguarded swathes of terrain, into Indian tribal and urban ethnic Bengali communities that are targets of Islamophobic rhetoric and communal violence. The unresolved histories of shifting borders have led to decades-long territorial disputes and depatriated populations in this region, and most South Asian countries lack opportunities for long-term and permanent legal migration. This chapter explores the emerging migration realities in the northeastern corner of South Asia as a case study of unauthorized migration in regions with limited-to-no migration management infrastructure. Ultimately, the chapter considers what citizenship and belonging mean in a global era.
Keywords: citizenship, refugees, Myanmar, Bhutan, India, globalization
Introduction: South Asia in an Age of Global Migration
Shyam Rai entered Nepal on the flatbed of an Indian lorry when he was four years old. He was hemmed in on all sides by a sweating forest of knees and thighs, one among the estimated 90,000 people who were expelled from the Kingdom of Bhutan over the course of half a dozen years in the early 1990s. Stripped of their Bhutanese citizenship in 1989, coerced or tortured into conceding to ‘voluntary emigration’, the Nepali-speaking Hindu people known as the Lhotshampa (‘southerners’) to the Buddhist Bhutanese, crossed into India as refugees, the women smuggling Bhutanese passports in their bras in the hope of reconciliation and a return home. India then deployed its army to the border under strict orders to remove the refugees, which they did by piling them into Tata trucks without medicine or provisions, let alone seating and safety belts, and driving them to the Mechi River that divides India from neighbouring Nepal.
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- Information
- Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond , pp. 101 - 122Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018