Abstract
The global nature of trans-national migration, refugees and statelessness in the contemporary world has brought the sincere and painstaking attention of academia to the problem. Every region of the world has experienced trans-national migration differently. Accordingly, trans-national migration presents a different picture in the South Asian region. Partha Ghosh’s book presents an admirable description of the level of shock and human sufferings due to migration in this area.
The author, having done a voluminous review of literature available on the theories of migration, asserts that the literature related to migration has predominantly been western in its outlook and lacks a South Asian perspective. Western literature considered the South Asian region migration as a sub-continental indentured labour migration during the colonial period, and skilled and semi-skilled labour migration to West Asian countries in recent times. Ghosh censures western scholarship for being ignorant about the post-Partition exodus and another kind of refugee movements in South Asian region.
The marvellously designed book consists of eight chapters including an introduction which deals with the theoretical and methodological study of the problem. Ghosh starts explaining the circumstantial problem of migration under which a person is forced to migrate across borders and becomes a refuge.
In the first chapter, ‘Mapping the South Asian Scene’, Ghosh argues that the no region of the world has witnessed such a massive inter-state migration and refugee movements as South Asia has in the last sixty years. He pegs the numbers at 50 million migrants, refugees and stateless and backs this with forceful evidence. While accepting the problem of categorising any huge population, he tries to categorise this number around three events—the Hindu/Sikh–Muslim migration after the partition of India, the Bengali refugees influx into India in the wake of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees arrival in India from 1980 onwards—which mark the agenda of nation-building in these countries.
Ghosh lists the reasons for the problem of migration and refugees especially in South Asia as partition-related uncertainties, failure in nation-building, inter-ethnic conflict, open or virtually open borders, war-related qualms, developmental and environmental effects, statelessness or virtual statelessness and intra-regional and extra-regional military interventions.
In the second chapter, ‘The Political Connection’, Ghosh unfolds how migrants and refugees have started playing a crucial role in the domestic politics of the country. He also reveals how the host country acceptance at the first instance wears off with time and their suspicion over the refugees and migrants surfaces. Ghosh takes the notion ‘demography as destiny’ of August Comte to a further level and asserts that politics and migration go hand in hand. The politics arises due to concerns, such as pressure on civic amenities and scarcity of resources, in the host countries. Moreover, politics of migration affects the host society by the direct and indirect everyday engagements of refugees. The Shiv Sena’s opposition towards Tamil settlers and illegal Bangladeshi migrants or the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s recent tirade against migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are illustrative of this trend. In most cases of refugee or migrant arrival, there are strong underpinnings of communal and ethnic sentiments which further complicate domestic/regional politics. Ghosh gives a detailed analysis of how the refugee factor helped the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Pakistani Islamic nationalism; as also problems of Nepalese migrants in India, the caste dimension and the growth of leftism in West Bengal.
In the third chapter, ‘The Security Variable’, Ghosh argues that most of the time relations between the sending countries and host countries have been affected by the presence of refugees themselves: so the creation of Bangladesh can be explained through the unprecedented arrival of refugees from East Pakistan into India which accelerated the security concerns of India. Since insurgencies, ethnic and religious persecution are almost always linked, the connection between security and migration becomes inevitable.
In the fourth chapter, ‘Relief and Rehabilitation’, the author talks about how South Asian hosted millions of refugees without having any proper legal framework. A subsequent chapter, ‘The Legal Dynamics’, addresses the question of a regional refugee regime replacing the emerging system of handling the problem through a national legal mechanism. However, the South Asian experience for relief and rehabilitation of the refugees and migrants in a limited resource of the host countries has been commendable. Moreover, this situation has been observed only in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh since Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka are not the receivers of migrants and refugees.
In the sixth chapter, ‘Cultural and Psychological Dimension’, the author discusses the two-way interaction between migrants and refugees, on the one hand and host countries, on the other. Ghosh asserts that researchers on migration have so far ignored this dimension. He argues that migrants influence the host and in turn get influenced by them. He also explains how music, literature, dramas, movie and Bollywood have taken up the issue of migrants and refugees.
In the last chapter, ‘Making Sense’, the author confirms that despite the huge problems the region faces, it has not lost its humanitarian spirit. Sympathy and empathy are always there for refugees and migrants even if there is no possibility of any direct action. There are many ways through which synergies get established between nations in this region.
Ghosh stresses the need to understand the basic nature of the migratory process. He has argued that migration is not a modern concept without any history. At one point, he remarks that his DNA may reveal where he came from, as it happened in the case of a New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, who was shocked to discover that he had black ancestry. Ghosh observes that human beings are perpetual wanderers who initially used to move freely just like the birds, animals, winds and river that do not know any kind of restriction. It is the rise of the nation-state which puts lots of restrictions on movement through policies like passport, quota system etc. According to the World Migration Report 2013, there were 232,000,000 international migrants. Migration has become a regular phenomenon due to political, economic and security reasons.
The book is going to be helpful for scholars and academicians as well as policy-makers who are working in the area of migrants, refugees and stateless persons. The author has provided ample examples which will help readers to compare patterns of world migration vis-à-vis movements in South Asia. This meticulously researched work which covers many aspects like legal, security, relief and rehabilitation of a trans-national population flows in the South Asia is a valuable source. Though the author does deal with the economic security of refugees and migrants, a more comprehensive discussion of livelihood issues, which is missing, would have added to the overall strength of the book.