1. Introduction

The year 1947 marked the heralding of a new beginning for the two fledgling nations of India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) to come to terms with their independent existences along with the baggage of their colonial past. One such difficult reality was the religious divide among the Muslims and Hindus of the erstwhile British India, which when translated itself in the historical certainty of two different states emerging from one, rendered huge number of population as refugees. The immediate aftermath of the partition of British India was the 15 million refugee flow across the borders; refugees who poured across the hastily drawn borders to regions completely unfamiliar to them, which had transformed its alien nature almost overnight and became a new homeland. Aiming at providing solution to the problems of ethnic conflict, the partition proved to ‘stimulate strife’ rather than ending it.[i] But the new homeland they chose, often out of compulsion, posed an immense humanitarian problem for the nation state. This paper seeks to understand the question of the huge refugee flow on both sides of the Indian border, east and west and the role of the government in tackling this alarming situation. The paper will look at the ethnographic studies to understand the experiences of the refugees from the then east and west Pakistan who struggled for existence and lived through the trauma of refugee hood in India while also touching on the issues of those rendered as refugees across the border. The paper will end with the emergence of the minority problem and the ensuing crisis in Kashmir (that were a direct legacy of the partition) thereby proving how forced migration induced by partition is a continuing process rather than its product.

The traditional Partition historiography has largely tried to look at the causes of India’s Partition and the ‘high politics’ behind it. In contrast, the ‘new partition historiography’ aims at highlighting the experience of the common people who had gone through it[ii].. Historians wrote academic tomes based on archival research, explaining why and how the politicians failed to save the unity of India. Those with a more literary sensibility wrote books based on interviews, capturing the voices and sentiments of those who lost homes as well as loved ones in 1947.[iii] However, this paper shall not deal with the historiography of partition.

Joya Chatterjee calls the partition ‘a messy long drawn affair’ which did not tidily  end with August 1947. The product is still unfinished today.[iv] (jstor) Forced migration resulting from partition creates a paradoxical situation. The refugees of partition seeking a safe haven arrives to a new ‘homeland’ often being forced to chose it as they fearing persecution if they remain behind. The partition of British India largely forced the muslims of India and the hindus of Pakistan to seek a new ‘home’ in an alien region. Though largely a painful experience of being uprooted, partition is combined with optimism and pessimism. As Ranabir Samaddar has pointed out in “Divided countries, Separated Cities”, it is optimistic as it is a dream of   ‘sovereignty fulfilled’, yet at the same time it is a partially fulfilled dream.[v] The partition of British India created memories and oral narratives that explored the tense conflict of loss and recovery and determined ‘that the experience of partition defying the violence and death it summoned, appealed to life as its only refuge.’[vi]

2. Partition of India and the question of refugees: A question of numbers

The partition of India left both India and Pakistan overwhelmed by the large scale violence in pockets across the subcontinent and left an unprecedented number of people as homeless or dead as the process of partition had claimed many lives in the ensuing riots. Many others were raped and looted. Women, were specifically used as instruments of power by the Hindus and the Muslims. Not only was the country divided, but so were the provinces of Punjab and Bengal; divisions which caused catastrophic riots and claimed the lives of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike.  Pakistan had to face the separation of Bangladesh in 1971. India and Pakistan went to war twice since the partition and are still in a deadlock over the issue of Kashmir, which still persists today.[vii]

Individual suffering and loss occurred on both sides of the border. There exists many accounts of the exact number of people affected by the partition. Gyanendra Pandey in an article talks of huge disparities in the estimate of the affected people. He writes:

“By the time the rape and loot and migrations were finished, two researchers have said of the violence of 1947, "about eight to ten million people had crossed over from Punjab and Bengal and about 5,00,000-10,00,000 had perished."17 "Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate)", writes another, "but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. The former, Menon and Bhasin, choose half-a-million to a million; the latter, Butalia, "somewhere around a million". Other scholars do the same. Mohammad Waseem accepts a figure of "about half a million". Wolpert settles for approximately one million.”

 Papiya Ghosh’s seminal work, which was reproduced in Refugee Watch, issue 29.[viii] brings out the nature of the migration and she details how by December 1951, 6,597,000 refugees had moved from India to West Pakistan, and 7,94,127 refugees moved to what was then East Pakistan. She offers statistics of the Indian Muslims too who headed for Pakistan during 1947-­48. It is learnt that 95.9% of the migrants from Assam, West Bengal and Bihar moved to East Pakistan and 3.2% to Karachi. “According to the 1951 census, 66.69% of the migrants in East Pakistan came from West Bengal, 14.50% from Bihar, 11.84% from Assam and 6.97% from other places in India.[ix] A passport and visa scheme was introduced only on 15 October 1952. But travel documents were not even required until 1953­54, several years after India and Pakistan became two separate countries”.  An interesting observation she makes is that several government employees opted for Pakistan, although some changed their minds later and returned to India. Following riots in Khulna and Calcutta in January 1964 and as a reaction, in Jamshedpur and Rourkela in March 1964, there was a yet another spate of migrations in both directions.  The destination of migration changed from Pakistan to Middle East, ‘which had emerged as an alternative.’

3. The ‘crisis’ to be solved: The Indian government’s response to the refugees

Ranabir Samaddar in his article ‘Power, Fear, Ethics’ has pointed out how power structure in democracies makes groups of people as its victim, which can include the displaced people. He terms it as a question of ‘democratic deficit’. Since international organisations have no legal authority to enforce the state to observe the human rights, this democratic deficit translates into humanitarian deficit too. Though there is a need for the universality of the ethical language of care and justice, there is no unilinear approach on what the ethical principles and practices should be. To develop this ethical language, there is a need for a dialogical understanding between the giver and the recipient of this care. Refugees formed such groups needing care. But the Government of India’s approach towards these groups were a question of numbers – a disaster of humanitarian nature. What was needed was a combination of comprehensive approach which combined the rights based approach and the humanitarian approach to rehabilitate the victims of this mass displacement. It cannot be denied, however, that for any fledging state, this massive numbers of refugee migration would have been a daunting task and so was it for India and Pakistan too.

In an era when the nation-state is considered as the highest expression of any community, the refugees ‘disrupt this tidy view of nation, narration, and belonging’.[x] In ‘The Marginal Nation’ Ranabir Samaddar speaks of the how human rights abuses occur when people abandon their homes out of a feeling of (perpetual) threat to their existence. When such population, on the move is denied shelter and sustenance as the state’s perspective of security human right abuses are compounded.[xi] The Boundary Commission was set up to draw a border to separate India and Pakistan. Instead of resolving tension by clearly separating religious groups, the Boundary Commission may actually have contributed to the upheaval, albeit without malicious intent. The surge in violence that began shortly before the Radcliffe award was announced can be traced in part to rumors and uncertainty over where the Line would fall. It is suggested that a lengthier and more transparent boundary-making process might have averted this situation.[xii]

The experience of Partition was markedly different in the two regions. Northern India witnessed a tremendous and violent upheaval over a roughly three-year period (1947–1950), characterized mainly by a disorderly population exchange between Hindus and Sikhs coming to India and Muslims arriving in Pakistan followed by massive rioting. Yet there existed significant government intervention and resettlement and rehabilitation efforts, with refugee populations often occupying the homes and businesses of their departing counterparts. A new capital city of Chandigarh was built for the Indian province of Punjab while the national capital New Delhi absorbed so many newcomers that it has been described by some as a “city of refugees,” particularly of a Punjabi refugee diaspora.[xiii]

In Eastern India, the Partition was similarly violent, but occurred as part of a much more gradual and recurring process, and with far less population exchange or governmental intervention. The earlier Partition of Bengal in 1905 under the guise of administrative reform remained a pivotal memory for many Bengalis, especially those who had been involved in the nascent nationalist struggle and who felt the British action was punishment for their politicization. Partition again happened in 1947 and then in 1971, bringing with itself a saga of misery and trauma, yet also a will to survive all odds. The issue is dealt with in the following paragraphs.

Refugees from the Western side of the border

Much has been written on the question of Punjabi identity but as yet the scholars are not agreed on whether such an identity was important in the lives of the Punjabi-speaking people or that religion, caste, biradari (kinship lineage) or sect played a greater role in creating networks and solidarity groups. I think the notion of a composite Punjab in which all Punjabis shared a strong sense of solidarity, derived from their common culture; as well as the one that religious differences make for a permanent conflict among Punjabis are exaggerated — each of these is an oversimplification of reality[xiv]

In Punjab and Rajasthan, many private organisations-from ICRC to RSS provided for immediate relief as the state could not alone handle the pressure of providing these to the traumatised migrants from West Pakistan.[xv] The need of the hour was not just physical and economic security but also socio legal and psychological security. For details of the influx of refugee flow, the camp situation and the attempt by the government to provide for Relief and Rehabilitation / compensation one can go through Ritu Menon’s chapter on Social Security Commitments in Ranabir Samaddar edited Refugee and the State.

Refugees from the Eastern side of the border

Within a month, nearly a million refugees had entered India, fleeing the military repression in East Pakistan. By the end of May, the average daily influx into India was over 100,000 and had reached a total of almost four million. By the end of 1971, figures provided by the Indian government to the United Nations indicated that this total had reached 10 million. Such an exodus of refugees inevitably produced extraordinary problems for the host country, India. From the beginning, the Indian government made it clear that there were no circumstances under which it would allow the refugees to settle in India. The way was now open for the return of the refugees. India quickly announced that all refugees who had entered the country after 25 March 1971 would need to return to Bangladesh by the end of February 1972, an optimistic dream. Within days of the conclusion of hostilities, the refugees began returning home of their own accord. During the return, refugees were given food for the journey, medical assistance, and two weeks’ basic rations. Remarkably, by the end of February 1972, over nine million refugees had gone back to Bangladesh. The desire to return home had outweighed practical problems. On 25 March, the Indian government estimated that only 60,000 refugees remained in the country.[xvi] Joya Chatterjee has called the effort of the government to providing relief and rehabilitation to the refugees as an instrument for the communist party to further its campaign.[xvii]

On 28 August 1973, the governments of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan signed the New Delhi Agreement, which included provisions for the simultaneous repatriation of three primary groups. These comprised Pakistani prisoners of war and civilian internees in India, all Bengalis in Pakistan, and ‘a substantial number of non- Bengalis’ present in Bangladesh who had ‘opted for repatriation to Pakistan’. The‘non-Bengalis’ were commonly referred to as Biharis, since a majority of them were Indian Muslims originally from the state of Bihar in India who had come to East Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947. The United Nations was requested to provide assistance to facilitate the repatriation. Given its recent involvement as the Focal Point, the Secretary-General asked UNHCR to coordinate all activities relating to the humanitarian effort.[xviii] Samir Das has given a detailed account of the state’s response to the refugee crisis in the East and the measures of relief and rehabilitation by the state government (between 1946 – 1958) who had assumed the refugee problem as a temporary one and had to formulate a separate legal regime for these ‘displaced persons’ once it was known that most of the refugees were here to stay. The number of refugees sent back returned to West Bengal once the violence had lulled. But the partition of East Pakistan brought a fresh wave of refugees seeking asylum in Bengal which crossed over from 4 million in from 1947 – 1956 to 3 million people in a span of 2 months in 1971.[xix] However, unlike earlier, the government was successful in repatriating large number of refugees.

The refugees, finding themselves sharing the same kind of devastating circumstances, came together and one such successful example was the Bijoygarh market where community feeling gave rise to an activated network. However, the city of Kolkata could not grapple with the refugee flow. In a survey it was found out that app 68 percent of the hawkers in Kolkata were of east Pakistani origin. Adversely, during ‘Operation Sunshine’ many such persons were subjected to economic displacement, and most of them had meagre income of less than Rs. 1000.[xx] It is just one of few examples to show how the problem and status of refugee-hood continues to preoccupy the existential realities of those who have long been naturalised as citizens.

4. Refugees that side of the border

Biharis in Bangladesh

After the holocaust of communal riots in British India at the advent of its partition  into two sovereign States, India and Pakistan (comprising two wings of East and West Pakistan), Biharis, as they are known migrated from different states of India, mainly from the state of Bihar (as it then was) to East Pakistan. They abandoned their homelands in India, and migrated to the soil, now known as Bangladesh, as their adopted land in 1947-71. Majority of them are now the 1st, 2nd and 3rd generations of the Indian migrants. They are citizens by birth under the Constitution and the law with distinct language and culture. 1971-War of Liberation in Bangladesh brought them to the different camps, and they were called by a new nomenclature of "Stranded Pakistanis” on the basis of their registration with the ICRC in 1972. Following the Simla Agreement, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh resolved to address the issues of their stranded citizens in Pakistan and Bangladesh under the two Delhi Agreements signed on 28 August 1973 and 9 April 1974 respectively. The basis of repatriation was domicile, which every person acquires either by birth or by naturalization.and habitation in the ICRC built shelters in the false hope of repatriation.  The Government of Bangladesh also gave them the status of Stranded Pakistanis. .[xxi] After India’s intervention in December 1971, Pakistan evacuated Bangladesh. Left behind, in a country that had formed around them, were over one million Urdu-speaking Biharis. Persecuted, their property and houses seized, their jobs terminated, by 1972 1,008,680 Biharis were interned in camps across Bangladesh. While these ‘temporary’ camps were being constructed, officials from Pakistan, Bangladesh and the international community committed themselves to finding a solution. Of these three, the first agreed to repatriate the Biharis, the second to tolerate them for the time being, and the third to support them. The agreement is now decades old, but Islamabad accepted only a few of those it had promised to repatriate, while Dhaka let them sink to the absolute margins of society. The international community turned its attention to new challenges, and the Biharis became stateless.And there, in the camps, the Biharis remain. Over half (600,000) accepted Bangladesh’s offer of citizenship in 1974, while 539,000 registered with the International Community of the Red Cross as refugees, to “return to their country of nationality – Pakistan”. Since 1972, Pakistan has accepted back around 175,000 Biharis. 300,000, meanwhile, have continued to live in the camps for more than three decades. Camp conditions are deplorable, characterised by chronic shortages of clean or running water, undependable electricity, communal kitchens and hour-long queues for squalid bathrooms. The majority of Biharis held university degrees in 1947; today, while primary enrollment in Bangladesh nears 100 percent, less than 20 percent of Bihari children are in schools. The refugees are refused admittance into most government public schools and universities, and are prohibited from joining civil service, the police, the military or holding political office. Unemployment and extreme poverty are rampant, as two generations have been denied the resources, knowledge and skills needed to improve their lives.In 2001, 10 Biharis born after 1971 successfully petitioned a court for the right to vote. Hundreds of thousands of others, however, have been stripped of even the most basic of human rights. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh refuse to recognise their suffering and grant them citizenship. All but forgotten by the international community, the Bihari wait, desperate for attention, afraid to dream of a better future for their children.[xxii]

A permanent solution is possible if the governments of Pakistan and Bangladesh offer citizenship to the Biharis. Some camp residents think of themselves as Pakistani and would like to be reunited with family members in Pakistan. This repatriation could be funded by money already put aside by the Pakistani government. Others, who have never been to and have no family in Pakistan, can only imagine a life in Bangladesh. Those Biharis that are keen to establish lives as Bangladeshi citizens sometimes see “no other way” and marry local Bangladeshis. Others, such as 20-year-old Abdul, who survives hand to mouth as a garment factory worker, says he would like to go to Pakistan. In any case, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is not addressing the plight of the Biharis.[xxiii]From a report one learns that all most all Urdu-speaking population living in or outside the camps has been enrolled as voters for the national elections to be held in early part of 2007.[xxiv]

Pakistani muhajirs

The Muhajirs have no roots in Pakistan unlike the Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and Pathans. Before the creation of Pakistan religion was thought to be the most important identity and the Hindu was seen as the oppressor. Now in Pakistan ethnic and linguistic identities have become the most important and the majority ethnic community, the Punjabis, are perceived as the oppressor. It is not Muhajirs alone who have serious grievances against the Punjabis but Baluchis, Sindhis and Pathans too. Since the early 1980’s the Muhajirs had raised the banner of revolt against the federal Pakistani and provincial Sindhi authorities.  This had made Karachi (where large number of such refugees settled) one of the most violent cities in South Asia. The Muhajir Quami Mahaz (MQM) party formed as a manifestation of this angst demands for the recognition of the Muhajirs as a separate fifth nationality.  This indicates how Pakistan has yet to come to term with the political implications of partition and also how religion is not the sole basis for forging a unified national identity.[xxv]

5. In search of a new ‘Home’: Attempts at rebuilding lives

Thousands of state-less South Asians live across 197 ‘enclaves’ (a portion of one state completely surrounded by the territory of another) strewn along the northern border of Bangladesh. A product of 1947, 123 of these are Indian, while 74 belong to Bangladesh. As Atul Mishra quotes Historian Willem Van Schendel: “In their complexity, number, political significance and social eccentricity, they have no parallel in the world.” The proxy citizens of these enclaves represent a trans-territorial dimension of nationalism that emerged in the aftermath of August 1947. Although the first official movement on this issue in years took place in May 2007, when a high-level joint mission visited a number of the enclaves, the fact remains that both New Delhi and Dhaka have long had incentives to positively revive cross border relations along these enclaves, but the status quo has instead been preferred.[xxvi] Many of these groups, for example, have developed vibrant, established, “successful” diasporic communities in their countries of refuge; others remain marginalized, often continuing to live for decades in camps under less than ideal conditions and denied the rights and privileges enjoyed by their immediate neighbours. Examining the diverse and complex experiences of resettlement, integration, and ongoing relationships with assumed homelands is a ‘key component in understanding the makeup and mentality of refugee diasporas.’[xxvii]

The memories of the partition were entrenched in the minds of the refugees. In the words of Dipesh Chakravorty ‘there are two aspects of this memory: the sentiment of nostalgia and the sense of trauma, and their contradictory relationship to the question of past. A traumatised memory has a narrative structure, which works on a principle opposite to that of any historical narrative. At the same time, however, this memory, in order to be the memory of a trauma, has to place the event within a past that gives force to the claim of victim.’ He unearths the nostalgia for the lost homeland, which was viewed as sacred and patrilineal, and essentially Hindu in content. Muslims are mentioned in the narratives; however, their traditions are not a part of the idyllic representation of the homeland of the Bengali Hindus.[xxviii] The homeland the refugees lost was their home alone. It was one of the fundamental problems in the history of modern Bengali nationality that this nationalist construction of ‘home’ was a Hindu home. It was not a home for all Bengalis. ‘Hindu nationalism had created a sense of home that combined sacredness with beauty. This sacred was not intolerant of the Muslim. The Muslim Bengali had a place in it created through the idea of kingship.’ A kind of deafness to the call of the Others was very much present in the relationship between the two communities. This deafness is as constitutive of ethnic distance as may be the more explicit elements of violence. In the moment of crisis, this deafness posed a serious obstacle to hearing the voice of the other.[xxix]

6. The minorities’ problem: A legacy of the partition

The violence of 1947 created new subjects and subject positions. Life and conditions in the two new nations, of the individuals families, and communities that made them up, were remade and still are being fashioned in numerous ways by that violence and the curious `memory-history' that exists of those times. It was not merely the immediate problem of rehabilitation and resettlement, but also the fashioning of longer-term policies, mentalities and prejudices, seen in wide evidence. [xxx]

It was also followed by a moment of contest and an intense debate about what the character of the new nation-state should be, on who would constitute its `natural citizens'. For, the Muslims who stayed on in India (like the Hindus who stayed on in Pakistan) now constituted a minority problem. The abducted persons who remained on the wrong side of the international border also constituted a different sort of problem - they were conceived of as impurity, or theft or both. The question posed was what their place in the new dispensations of India and Pakistan would be.  Post 1947, Muslims were asked to demonstrate their loyalty to India. Their willingness to "shed their blood for India" became a desperate password for citizenship, for being Indian. While being part of a community was enough to deny nationality to or confer it on certain others naturally; for the many abducted women, it was in the process of their recovery and restoration that the new nationalisation was decided. Mass upheavals of partition bear hardest on women, who in every conflict and every partition have become a routine target for mass rape and all manner of other brutalities. In 1947, women who were long considered as having no religion or community or nation, came for that moment to stand for nothing else. Represented as nothing but the possessions of their men, their communities and their nations, many of the women and children who were victims identified by this programme became mere pawns and had little say in the crossfire of nationalist demands.[xxxi]

The fifties were relatively peaceful, but by the sixties communal riots were once again very much a part of the Indian political scene. The decade began with the Jabalpur riots of 1961, triggered reportedly by a Hindu girl eloping with a Muslim boy, and ended with a major conflagration in Ahmedabad, in 1969, which bore all the familiar characteristics of the major riots that followed — including the political assertion of the RSS/Jan Sangh. The riots of 1992-93, following the Babri Masjid demolition almost constructed the identities of the two communities involved in these riots as becoming more pronounced.     Sociologist Paul Brass has argued that this “production of Hindu-Muslim communal violence”, often occurring in waves, was linked to the political construction of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ identities in post-Independence India. But Partition did more than coalesce only communal identities. Its fearsome repercussions branded the lives of the women of the subcontinent. [xxxii] Inherently vulnerable, they were attacked in innumerable and horrific ways — outlined graphically in work done by feminists like Ritu Menon, Kamala Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia and many others — because they came to define the identities of the warring groups and represent community honour. The women became “their respective countries” bearing on their bodies the mark of their group/community identities. This legacy carried on, well into the post-Independence years.

Large scale communal violence reared it’s ugliest head in the post Godhra carnage which saw rioting at an unprecedented scale since the partition. The most appalling facet of this state monitored pogrom was the guiltless and unapologetic approach of the government of Gujarat towards the minority community in the state. The social conditions of the largest minority community in India has been brought out by Report on Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India (November 2006) The very fact that the Government of India thought it fit to enquire into the Muslim problem is a testimony enough to reflect how the Muslims are being left behind. This four hundred page report is an exceptionally candid document which details the backwardness of the Muslims in India. The current Muslim population is over 150 million about the same as Pakistan and Bangladesh which at the time of partition was about 50 million. At the current rate of growth in the decade of 2030s the Muslim population would stabilise at about 320 million. Yet the presence of Muslims was found to be only 3% in the IAS, 1.8% in the IFS and 4% in the IPS.[xxxiii] Therefore it is not a surprise that increasingly uneducated youths of the community are taking to fundamentalism, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

7. Kashmir: The unresolved dispute

'Kashmir' was one of the great populist symbols of this new national enterprise ó a Muslim-majority state aligning with secular India at the behest of the popular Muslim leader of the state's people's movement, and confirming its commitment to the new India through its participation in periodic elections. Kashmir had become an international question as early as the end of 1947, and hence a prestige issue for India's home affairs. The province became an important symbol in the Indian state's self-representation as a bastion of secularism and democracy; and, once the international dispute with Pakistan had arisen, it was no less important to the matter of national sovereignty and integrity[xxxiv]

In the present state of Jammu and Kashmir, there exists a steep communal divide, compounded by the state’s discriminating responses to different group of people. Several wave of displacements have taken place due to the conflict - those uprooted by the partition of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-48, and thereafter by some territorial alterations in subsequent wars in 1965 and 1971, those who have been forced to flee, in last couple of decades, from the Indian side of Kashmir to the Pakistani side, those displaced due to recent India-Pakistan border confrontation after the Kargil War and subsequently Operation Parakaram and finally those displaced due to violence in militancy hit areas and those displaced from one militancy infested area to a slightly lesser one.[xxxv]

The conflict in Kashmir is the primary cause of continuing hostility between India and Pakistan which has led to ‘institutionalising in a microcosm all the historical irritations between the two countries.’[xxxvi] The nuclear muscle power shown by India and then by Pakistan in 1998 and the failed Agra Summit in 2001 are cases in point.

8. Concluding comments

The division of the Indian subcontinent by the British in 1947 at the moment of their departure signified a simultaneously momentous and calamitous event. The creation of a majority Hindu India and a bifurcated, mainly Muslim Pakistan (with eastern and western wings) was predicated on the colonial notion of two indigenous populations locked in eternal enmity and strife.[xxxvii] On reading the Module note of Module the enlightens one as to how racism and xenophobia have become almost universal phenomena. “Racism has appeared in new forms, cultural differences are essentialised as biological differences”, as in the case of Hindus and Muslims residing in the whole of South Asia-a region marred by communal conflicts. Xenophobia is a related phenomenon where aggressive attitude towards national and also community based (as among the minorities of Bangladesh and India) or linguistic based (as in the case of Muhajirs) differences produces neo-racist differences. Partition of states produces the most concentrated violence, reshaping states, reshape minds, and the formation of new states happens amidst mass murders, mass dislocations, and mass displacements, as it had happened in 1947 and reoccurred in 1971.

Migrations did not end post partition. There has been a continuity in the migration of the 80’s and 90’s with that of the 1950’s which can determine how ethnic boundaries’ will melt or harden, (which in reality they certainly do) thus discouraging people from migrating. Migration today is more in economic lines and renders the phenomenon of trans-border migration a secular event. Illegal migrant have their own notions of rights and they negotiate the meaning of citizenship, which invariably create the notion of non-state persons. This category emerges from the very core of the nationalist discourse of citizenship.[xxxviii] Migration has become linked with the emergence of the ‘New Right’ with the increase ‘fascization’ of polity of most of the nations in South Asia and the question of national security taking precedence over human rights. These rights cannot be guaranteed by the nation state as it is the very process by which they are formed that leads to displacement.  The flow of population has a deep mark on the politics of care in this country. This politics of care produces power.[xxxix]The world of care is a game of protection, hospitality, security, citizenship and nation-making among others.

The whole of South Asia has to deal with the refugees and migrants as unwanted guest. As both the destination of their migration and the state to which they belong to, do not want them and they are left in a dilemma. This quagmire teaches them the art of bargaining and negotiating with their status of statelessness. Like the different kinds of community at stake in the stories and accounts of the stories of Partition, the nation too might be seen as an alterable, malleable construction. The violence is produced by the partition central to an investigation of our times, ‘of our future and past politics’, as put by Gyanendra Pandey. ‘Understanding its nuances, its moment, might help redefine and reshape contemporary society and at the same time, effectively pose a challenge to the attempted definition of communities as rigid, `natural, permanent' entities, as an increasingly vociferous right-wing polity is seeking to do’.[xl] Ashish Nandy, while writing on the huge loss of life and the imperviousness of the people of South Asia towards such crime, aptly sums up that ‘South Asia has paid heavily for not coming to grips with the violence of partition and its long-term consequences. Not merely the pervasive culture of immunity today but the paranoiac and psychopathic features of the national security states we have built in the region have their roots in that cultivated forgetfulness.’ [xli] So the story of partition(s) is intrinsic for us to understand the politics of  South Asia today. Perhaps it may allow us to throw some new light – or a whole new dimension to understanding and perhaps initiating a dialogue in the region, for a less volatile and more peaceful South Asia.  

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22.   Kabita Parajuli in ‘They are another souvenir of Partition, the Biharis – or stranded Pakistanis – of Bangladesh’. Aug 2006?????

23.   http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/4666/

24.   Atul Mishra: ‘Nations out of fantasy Modern Southasia’s ‘cartographic anxiety’ is traceable directly to colonial-era machinations. It is time for the region’s people to make their own decisions about how to define their territories.’ Himal Mag, August 2007

Gyanendra Pandey:  Remembering Partition: Violence, Natonalism and History in India  Contemporary South Asia Series, 7; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2001