Thus, the refugee has become a fundamentally unreliable base point of inquiry such as to justify the shift to a generalized or group-based evaluation of a well-founded fear. Some one has asked rhetorically, but it makes lot of sense: What would happen if the refugee interviewed the government official? Would the official be able to comprehend that many of his or her deepest longings were the same as those of the refugees, but without the physical dislocation? Would they understand that their own doubts were the same as (those of) the refugees? Or take this case, on which a jurist had to comment, “Refugee determination procedure on individual basis and the unequal sharing of burden of care have now produced confused, traumatized, and nervous shelter-seekers who travel rarely with supportive documents, false or no papers, and land in alien systems which are frequently hostile or incredulous" hosts”. In this case involving a Sri Lanka Tamil who had fled persecution allegedly at the hands of the LTTE (R. SSHD ex parte Karunakaran 25 January 2000, unreported), the judge commented, “The civil standard of proof, which treats anything, which probably happened, is part of a pragmatic legal fiction. It has no logical bearing on the assessment of the likelihood of future events or (by parity of reasoning) the quality of past ones... The method of evaluation is itself not one of hard facts. But it requires knowledge not only of applicant's own tale, and what is accepted of it, but a whole range of other factual matters.”

Therefore the problem we are now confronting in studying root causes is the “exceptional” nature of the refugee situation. Is the refugee situation exceptional because the refugee is merely outside some state responsibility? Or, and this is what we are implying, is the refugee situation exceptional because of the inherent violence of the state, and the incapacity of all states to fulfil their human rights obligations consistently? The question is 

complicated, because it affects the political attitude and will of the States to grant asylum to a person on the ground of “well founded fear”.

In any case, the dual phenomena of racism and xenophobia have become almost universal phenomena. Racism has appeared in new forms, cultural differences are essentialised as biological differences on the supposed reality of which old racism arose and persisted. Conflicts drawn to its extreme level produces neo-racist differences, the sign of which is the increasing division of population groups along supposed physical lines, segregating groups thereby in an extreme manner. Such extreme differences become in time hereditary principles of discrimination. Xenophobia is a related phenomenon; aggressive attitude towards national differences produces neo-racist differences. It had been so earlier also. 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. Partition refugees are a special category, for they lose the right to return even – a right granted at least nominally to other groups of refugees.

The right to return is a significant issue in this context.  Refugees enjoy very few rights but one of the most intrinsic rights for a refugee is the right to return.  Although much debated internationally the right to return is most clearly enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) under its provisions on the right to freedom of movement (Article 12.4) which says that No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country.  But this right has often proved to be a chimera at least in South Asia. A historian has shown that perhaps the first
group of people, though not refugees, whose right to return