was denied by a South Asian state were the Indian emigrants who travelled abroad in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to work as plantation labourers. All through the nationalist period the fate of these labourers in their country of domicile was a rallying point for Indian leaders to portray the dark side of foreign rule. There was constant reiteration that the state was responsible for all the people who were born in India. Yet during the legislative assembly debates in 1944 the leaders came to a consensus that these émigrés rightfully belonged to their country of domicile and not in India. Unlike nationalists during the colonial period, the leaders of the post-colonial State formation project no longer looked forward to the return of the emigrants who were slowly being considered as foreigners.  South Asian independence was accompanied by a blood bath.  The partition of India and Pakistan resulted in two million deaths and about 15 million people were displaced. Most of the refugees were lucky enough to get domicile and often citizenship in their country of domicile. Yet problem arose over the issue of return. In people’s memory their Desh (country) was where they were born. But once displaced they did not have the right to return even when they so desired.  South Asian states passed legislations whereby property of the displaced were confiscated by the State and treated as enemy property.  So the home that they wanted to go back to remained only in their own imagination. One often hears the argument that because partition refugees got an alternate citizenship they lost the right to return. In South Asia there are however, other groups of refugees who remain as stateless people; yet they are denied the right to return. We have the instances of two such groups of refugees: the Chakmas (Jumma people) and the Bhutanese. This module has to discuss in the context of these experiences as to how South Asia’s political history is predicated by aliens, half-citizens, exiles, 

refuge, temporary shelters where citizens pass away their lives, illegal immigrants, - in short, the non-state persons who are beyond the pale of citizenship rights, and who are not even the proper subjects of the international law on non-state persons? The focus in any discussion on the right to return of citizens expelled has to be thus on the need to move away from the classical theories of sovereignty, democracy, State, and citizenship, and take the exile, the alien, the displaced (both internally and trans-border), and the half-citizen as the central figure of the politics in South Asia, the figure who is with us like the eternally accompanying shadow, so normalised that we forget its existence which we have taken for granted. In this physical milieu of expulsion, de-enfranchisement, and nationalisation, the right to return is at once the most crucial question and the most hallucinatory claim. The illusory nature in many cases of the right to return shows the deep nature of the causes that force displacement in the first place. The apparent reasons may go away, while the root causes remain. Once the population groups leave, they are reduced to extreme marginality wherefrom it becomes extremely difficult for them to force back to their original position in their “national” societies. Instead of durable solutions we have durable vulnerabilities. The root causes spark off forced migration, but marginal and vulnerable positions have a way of accumulating so that even when causes are removed marginal positions or situations persist.

The last point that we shall discuss under this module is the relation between refugee flow and immigration flow, and the way in which immigration is controlled today impacts on refugee protection also. The flow of (illegal) immigration has not only overwhelmed in some cases the flow of refugees, it has got mixed with it also to such an extent that we can say that aliens have appeared as a subject in the world today.