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.