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The Wire
8 hours ago
- Politics
- The Wire
Refuge Without a Name: South Asia's Architecture of Statelessness
Across South Asia, refugee movements have become one of the quietest yet most consequential forces shaping the region's political and security terrain. From Assam to the Arakan, from the Himalayan ridges of Bhutan to the shrinking mangroves of Bengal, people have crossed borders not in pursuit of safety but in search of recognition. Displacement here is not the residue of war, it is often the intention of peace. Bureaucratically crafted, legally disguised, rhetorically justified. The blueprint of this architecture was drawn in 1947. But its foundations were laid long before. The colonial state had already tested the logic of exclusion: pass laws, criminal tribe registries, vagrancy codes. It taught the postcolonial state how to document without protection, to survey without rights, to govern through absence. uprooted over 15 million people in a frenzy of postcolonial violence. That rupture did not end with the ceasefires; it rehearsed, refined, and rehearsed again, until exclusion became policy masquerading as nationhood. It institutionalised the belief that borders could manufacture belonging through exclusion, that citizenship could be both inherited and revoked. What began as a line across a subcontinent became a template for expulsion. Since then, South Asia's map has been redrawn repeatedly, through secession, civil war, monarchy's fall, proxy insurgencies, demographic engineering. Each upheaval displaced its own cast of undesirables. The birth of sent ten million refugees into India. Bhutan's campaign of national purification expelled the Lhotshampa. The Sri Lankan scattered Tamils from Tamil Nadu to Toronto. turned Pakistan into a refugee depot. Myanmar's were erased from citizenship and hunted by their state. India's National Register of Citizens (NRC) sought to vanish the undocumented by redefining who had the right to exist, on paper. Every decade, a new group of refugees joins the ledger Every decade, a new group joins the ledger. Their languages differ. The cause of exile changes. But the experience remains the same: move, wait, disappear. These are not episodic tragedies. They are the architecture of exclusion, calibrated, systemic, and sanctioned. Today, an estimated 3.5 million refugees live in South Asia, just 0.18% of its population. But numbers miss the point. The real story lies in the normalisation of statelessness: how expulsion becomes policy, how documentation becomes a weapon, how silence becomes law. Nowhere is this more visible than in Assam, where the past returned with . India's Home Minister called undocumented Bangladeshis '.' The metaphor was not casual. It naturalised exclusion, turned people into pests, and made denial feel like hygiene. The NRC asked people to prove, with brittle papers, that they were Indian. Nearly two million could not. Among them, many had never known any other home. But even as the state prepared to unwrite them, something softer but no less stubborn emerged: a quiet resistance. In villages across Assam, neighbours pooled documents, drafted affidavits, shared what proof they could find. Volunteers taught the elderly how to speak for themselves before tribunals. Lawyers filed petitions not to win, but to delay erasure. It wasn't enough. But for a moment, it was refusal. The law offered no clarity on what would happen next, only that something would. Entire families, by a signature. The question was never really about borders. It was about belonging. of the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampas, once woven into its agricultural spine, followed a similar logic. The state decided it needed to look more like itself. Ethnic Nepalis who had lived there for generations were asked to prove loyalty with papers few possessed. When they failed, they were declared alien. The language was legal. The motive, demographic. The method: cultural cleansing through policy. Camps took root in eastern Nepal. They lingered for two decades, until foreign planes carried many away. The region moved on, leaving its displaced to histories few would remember and fewer still would write down. Not all displacement is marked by tents. In Myanmar, the Rohingya were removed not just from land, but from law. The 1982 Citizenship Act left them stateless. The military's 2017 campaign drove 700,000 into Bangladesh. became a city of waiting; a million people with nowhere to go, and no way to belong. The world flew drones, delivered aid, hosted conferences. The camps grew, hemmed by wire. The tarpaulin roofs became symbols of permanence. In one of the camps, where the tarpaulin walls pulsed with heat by day and damp by dawn, a girl knelt in the corner of her shelter and traced her name into the fabric. Over and over, she pressed her finger into the weave, as if to keep it from slipping. She had never seen it written. Her name lived in breath, recited at checkpoints, repeated for clerks, forgotten in silence. In a place built from waiting, this was the only record she could make: a movement, a murmur, gone with the morning damp. South Asia does not declare its expulsions, it enacts them, quietly Sri Lanka's civil war drove tens of thousands of Tamils into India. Many still remain in limbo, neither citizens of Sri Lanka nor fully recognised by India. They inhabit the fault lines of memory, war, and neglect. Even in Tamil Nadu, the state most sympathetic to their cause, the word 'citizenship' catches in the throat. Others moved further still. In Canada, in the UK, in Australia, fragments of that exile found new ground. Statelessness dispersed into diaspora, sometimes remembered, sometimes ritualised, sometimes recast. Some funded movements. Others tried to forget. A few carried the war within them: across borders, into basements, through births and funerals, across decades. Pakistan's Afghan hosting has turned from geopolitical leverage to domestic burden. In Karachi, Afghan families who arrived in the 1980s still live in the shadows, on the margins of neighborhoods built by others. Their names are absent from the census. Their children inherit liminality like property. Some fought Pakistan's wars. Others built shops and futures on borrowed ground. South Asia does not declare its expulsions. It enacts them, quietly, bureaucratically, sometimes with courtesy, more often with silence. The refugee is rarely called one. He is an infiltrator in one country, a voter in another, a ghost in records that were never digitised. In Delhi, Tibetan flags hang from second-story windows, folded, cautious, half-visible. The refugee here is suspended in plain sight, not unseen, but unclaimed, between exile and embrace, between hospitality and the hush of hesitation. Across the region, borders have become mirrors, each reflecting stories the state would rather forget. Words follow policy. The vocabulary of welcome has expiry built in. And the words that remain - alien, illegal, suspect - shape what follows: detention, denial, disappearance. The refugee becomes shorthand for disorder. For dilution. For danger. Rarely for history. Rarely for justice. Also Read: From Balochistan to Kashmir, the Region's Unresolved Grievances Refuse To Stay Buried Language is never neutral. It becomes architecture, brick by bureaucratic brick, affidavit by affidavit, silence by silence. In speeches and televised declarations, the refugee shifts from someone who lost protection to someone who must be monitored. In India, the term – intruder - echoes through everyday speech. 'Each is a threat to the nation,' the Home Minister thundered in 2018, drawing applause and lines deeper than any border wall. Even South Asia's moments of magnanimity have not translated into permanence. India's hospitality to Tibetans has endured, but few have been offered citizenship. Bangladesh shelters over a million Rohingya, but the political vocabulary frames them as guests overstaying their welcome. Pakistan's have become political flashpoints. The language of protection erodes with each electoral cycle. South Asia has no refugee convention. No regional asylum framework. No mutual recognition system. Protection is not a right, it is a favour. Refugees are logistical problems, not political subjects. None of the region's principal states are signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its . The UNHCR is allowed to operate, not empowered to enforce. Statelessness becomes a feature of sovereignty, not a failure of it. Laws shape the absence of rights as much as their presence. In leaving them behind, the region sketches a different kind of map, one where citizenship is conditional, belonging revocable, protection dictated by whim. The refugee is not the exception. He is the evidence. What happens at the border does not begin there. It begins in speech, in silence, in statute. What begins in silence ends in disappearance. The crisis ahead And the tide is rising. The crisis ahead will not be driven by war alone. Environmental degradation will multiply displacement. Rivers swell. Coasts recede. The are becoming a geography of waiting. They retreat inland, inch by inch. Communities follow. Villages drown, slowly, bureaucratically. Himalayan melt and glacier ruptures threaten entire valleys. This isn't tomorrow's crisis. It is today's reality. The land is sinking while policy treads water. These people are not yet called refugees. But they will be. In the Maldives, the a little more each year. No refugee camps have formed, yet. Only models, projections, and a growing fear that someday soon, even the memory of return will feel fictional. The region's smallest state may soon become its loudest metaphor. To watch this region is to witness a quiet reconstitution of belonging. Citizenship is redrawn by ancestry. Rights are filtered through religion. Bureaucracy the border. Today, exclusion is no longer stamped, it is scanned. In places like India, the Aadhaar system has made identity digital, and disappearance easier. Refugees are not simply those who have lost a country. They are reminders that nations can also lose their people, one document, one silence at a time. Global comparisons do little to flatter South Asia. The EU's asylum system is contested but codified. Africa's Kampala Convention acknowledges the displaced within borders. Latin America's Cartagena Declaration expands protections. South Asia has no such moral vocabulary, only the grammar of delay. Also Read: Fighting Terrorism Demands Partnership, Not Primacy The international community treats this displacement as static. The world has grown accustomed to the camp, but not to the cause. It funds containment as if mercy were enough, and forgets that recognition, not rations, is the measure of justice. Aid flows. Resettlement trickles. The architecture endures. Host states perform hospitality but deny permanence. Across South Asia, refugee governance is not built for permanence. This is not a failure of resources. It is a blueprint. It is a waiting room with no exit, where time is suspended and return is myth. Refugees are not the fallout of collapse alone, but of intent, of someone deciding who belonged, and who did not. Displacement here is not a crisis. It is a . The refugee is not the aberration; he is not the exception, but the system's most faithful creation. For too long, the region has redrawn its maps, of territory, memory, citizenship, while erasing those it first cast out. When return is impossible, memory becomes the last homeland: fragile, portable, and haunted. Refugees carry their histories. Sometimes, they carry their wars. They may leave the battlefield, but the battle does not leave them. Wounds travel. And where they are ignored, they deepen. They are not stranded between countries; they are disowned by the very lands that once claimed them, named, then unmade. That alone should remind us that displacement begins not with movement, but with abandonment. If the world is serious about reducing forced migration, it must do more than feed the symptom. It must confront the sovereign impulse to erase. What's needed is a politics that names the displaced not as burden, but as evidence, of what states deny, and what justice demands. Statelessness is not sovereignty's accident. It is its design, and its deepest cruelty. Until that is reversed, borders will remain: not as protections, but as the quiet scars of decisions made, and never confessed. Somewhere, another border will be drawn. And somewhere else, someone will vanish into it. Shyam Tekwani is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of DKI APCSS, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. The appearance of external hyperlinks does not constitute endorsement by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) of the linked websites, or the information, products, or services contained therein. DoD does not exercise any editorial, security, or other control over the information you may find at these sites. The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Scroll.in
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Some want Israel to use Lanka-style brutality against Hamas – ignoring the strategy's true costs
As Israel's war on Hamas grinds into its 20th month, comparisons with Sri Lanka's 2009 military defeat of the Tamil Tigers have grown louder. For some, Sri Lanka represents a rare example of a state achieving total military victory over a powerful insurgent group. Among those advancing this approach is Israeli security expert Moshe Elad, who told The Jerusalem Post last month that Sri Lanka demonstrated how 'terror groups can…be completely defeated through military means'. 'Sri Lanka did it without a Supreme Court or B'Tselem,' Elad remarked, referring to the absence of legal considerations or scrutiny by human rights groups. Other security experts have also drawn parallels between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Hamas. The subtext is clear: Israel should consider following the Sri Lankan model, mounting a campaign of overwhelming force to annihilate Hamas. This argument misses the fact that Sri Lanka's victory came at the cost of immense civilian suffering, long-term instability and international legitimacy. If Israel borrows this script, it may not just replicate Sri Lanka's battlefield gains, it may also inherit its political and moral collapse. The Sri Lankan government's war against the LTTE was among the most brutal counterinsurgency campaigns of the past century. Between 2006 and 2009, the Sri Lankan military launched coordinated offensives across several fronts and methodically dismantled the LTTE's war-making capacity. But this military strategy also relied on a scorched-earth approach that devastated the civilian population. As the fighting intensified, over 300,000 Tamil civilians were cornered in shrinking pockets of territory. Areas designated as 'no fire zones' were bombed; hospitals and schools were destroyed. International observers, journalists, and aid agencies were expelled or obstructed. In the final phase of the war, estimates suggest between 40,000 and 70,000 civilians were killed. The government denied any wrongdoing. With geopolitical momentum on its side, Sri Lanka largely avoided any real accountability. To frame this as a success story is to treat mass atrocity as a price worth paying. The danger lies not only in the ethical cost of such logic but also in its strategic consequences. Sri Lanka's post-war years did not deliver national unity or sustainable peace. While the LTTE was wiped out as a fighting force, the deep-rooted ethnic conflict between Sinhalese and Tamils remained unresolved. The Rajapaksa government diverted enormous resources to militarise the island's north east, suppress dissent, and reconstruct the region in ways that alienated the Tamil population even further. At the same time, the war effort saddled Sri Lanka with massive debt, much of it used to fund military expansion and prestige infrastructure projects. Combined with corruption and cronyism, this laid the groundwork for Sri Lanka's economic collapse. By 2022, the country defaulted on its debt, faced crippling inflation, and experienced widespread protests that forced the Rajapaksa family from power. The political establishment that had claimed glory in war could not survive peace. If Israel adopts the Sri Lankan strategy, it risks repeating not only its military triumph but its unraveling. A military win that generates long-term instability is not a victory – it is a delayed crisis. Even as a matter of tactics, the analogy fails to hold. Hamas is embedded in a radically different geopolitical context. It has strong state backers, including Iran and Qatar, and its leadership has adapted to operate in decentralised, transnational ways. The LTTE, by contrast, was increasingly isolated diplomatically by the end of its war. Its support networks were disrupted and its leadership physically cornered in a fixed geographic zone. One of the most dangerous elements of the Sri Lanka comparison lies in the way that the LTTE was completely dehumanised. The World Trade Center attack in the US in 2001 resulted in a conclusive shift in global counterterrorism discourse. Groups labeled as 'terrorists' were increasingly framed not as political or military actors with goals and constituencies, but as existential threats requiring elimination. This allowed states to ignore civilian protections, blur the lines between combatants and noncombatants and justify extreme violence. In Sri Lanka, this meant Tamil civilians were often treated as extensions of the LTTE, collateral in a war that no longer differentiated between targets. In Gaza, similar dynamics are playing out. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened. Civilian infrastructure is treated as inherently suspicious. Humanitarian corridors are shelled. Over 55,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began in October 2023, many of them women and children. As in Sri Lanka, the dominant narrative paints the population as indistinguishable from the militants. This kind of discourse is not just ethically corrosive. It is strategically shortsighted. It fuels grievance, radicalisation and long-term resistance. When civilians are treated as complicit, the political space for any future reconciliation disappears. Sri Lanka's 'success' was in part made possible by international fatigue. The West, entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan, had little appetite to challenge a state that framed its campaign as part of the global war on terror. Sri Lanka exploited this context to conduct its final war with near-total impunity. But the effects of that impunity linger. The country remains diplomatically almost isolated on human rights issues, its war crimes unresolved and its path to reconciliation blocked by unresolved trauma. The silence of the international community did not make the consequences disappear – it only deferred them. Israel faces a different international landscape. The International Court of Justice has already found plausible grounds to investigate Israel's actions in Gaza under the Genocide Convention. Civil society mobilisation has been far more rapid and global. The legal, political and reputational costs are mounting. To adopt a strategy modeled on Sri Lanka in this context is not just a moral risk. It is a gamble against the weight of international law and memory. Even if Israel were to militarily defeat Hamas, the aftermath would not be straightforward. Gaza would remain devastated, politically ungovernable and socially fractured. The destruction of whatever is left of Hamas's current leadership would not erase the ideas that fuel its support. Nor would it build a foundation for coexistence. Without a parallel political strategy aimed at restoring Palestinian agency, justice and rights, another iteration of Hamas – or something worse – will emerge. Sri Lanka shows that annihilation can end a war, but not the conflict that produced it. It also shows that the consequences of how a war ends last far longer than the military campaign itself. Elad is right that Sri Lanka fought its war without a Supreme Court or a B'Tselem. That is exactly why it should not be the model.
New Indian Express
11 hours ago
- Politics
- New Indian Express
BJP trying to bury Tamil culture: CM Stalin
CHENNAI: DMK president and Chief Minister MK Stalin accused the BJP-led union government of attempting to suppress and bury the pride of Tamil culture that emerged through the Keezhadi excavations. Praising the DMK student wing for organising an agitation - Keezhadi Engal Thaimadi - in Madurai on June 18, Stalin wrote a detailed letter in Murasoli, the DMK's mouthpiece, emphasising the importance of the excavation findings. The protest was held to condemn the union government for not approving the archaeological report on the Keezhadi findings. 'In 2013, during the UPA government, the ASI identified, through its inspections along the Vaigai river bank, that Keezhadi was an important settlement. The BJP government continued the excavations, but after three phases in 2015, the work was halted. The remaining seven phases were carried out by the state archaeology department,' Stalin said in the letter. He also recalled how officer Amarnath Ramakrishna was transferred from the project and later returned after a legal battle to continue his work. 'The artefacts found at the excavation sites were sent to renowned laboratories across the world for testing. Based on the results, Ramakrishna submitted a scientifically grounded 982-page report in 2023. However, even after two years, the BJP government has not approved the report and has instead sent it back, seeking additional proof,' he added. Referring to the scientific findings that iron was used in the Tamil region over 5,300 years ago, Stalin said, 'BJP leaders, including PM Narendra Modi, did not even acknowledge it on social media, even though Tamil Nadu is part of India and Tamils are Indian citizens. BJP leaders in Tamil Nadu are betraying Tamils for positions.'
Hindustan Times
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Stalin hits out at BJP for ‘bid to hide Keeladi site findings'
The BJP was attempting to hide findings from Keeladi because of their hatred for Tamil pride, said TN chief minister and DMK president MK Stalin on Thursday, amid the controversy over Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) officer Amarnath Ramakrishna's report on the archaeological site and his transfer two days ago. Describing ASI asking for additional evidence from Ramakrishna as a 'blatant attack' on Tamil culture, Stalin in a letter to DMK cadre said that the party's struggle on this issue will not stop. Stalin added that the final report submitted in 2023 by Ramakrishna was based on scientific results obtained from laboratories in Pune, Bengaluru, Florida (US), and Italy, analysing artifacts from the Keeladi excavations. Stalin questioned whether the BJP has evidence to prove the existence of a Saraswathi civilisation, which he said is imaginary. 'The BJP-led Union government has demanded additional evidence on Keeladi over two years after a detailed report was submitted to the ASI in 2023,' Stalin said. 'They are keen on suppressing Tamil cultural pride. This is a blatant attack on us.' This also comes a day after the DMK's student wing on June 18 protested in Madurai against the issue. 'Tamils are Indians. However, neither the Prime Minister nor the BJP government acknowledge the significance of findings by the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology (TNSDA) that Iron Age in the state could go back to 5,200 years ago,' Stalin said. 'The responsibility to protect and establish the glory of Tamil culture lies solely with the DMK and its allied forces. The slogans raised in Keeladi and Chennai are just the beginning. They will continue to echo until Delhi. The DMK's struggle will not cease until the pride of Tamil culture is firmly established.' Stalin's remarks also come a day after the DMK's student wing on June 18 protested in Madurai against the issue. Almost a month after he refused to rework his voluminous report on the excavations at the archaeological site of Keeladi, Ramakrishna was transferred by the ASI on June 17. Ramakrishna, who was director, Antiquity and National Mission on Monument and Antiquity (NMMA), New Delhi, has now been transferred to Greater Noida as director of NMMA. This comes amid the controversy surrounding his report on Keeladi. In May, ASI had challenged the dating and classification of key discoveries from Tamil Nadu's Keeladi excavations, Ramakrishna to carry out extensive revisions to a report that underpins the state government's, and of rival Dravidian parties', claims about ancient Tamil civilisation. ASI asked Ramakrishna—who led the first two phases of excavations at the politically sensitive site — to rework his 982-page findings submitted in January 2023. The central agency said two experts had vetted the report and suggested five corrections to make it 'more authentic.' In his response, Ramakrishna on May 23, defended his report, stating that the chronological sequence of Keeladi has been clearly explained in the voluminous report. He had relied on AMS dating of 23 artefacts, which established their age to be 300 CE to arrive at a chronological sequence of Keeladi to be between the 8th century BCE to 3rd century CE. In response to his letter, the ASI said that they regularly send reports to various subject experts to vet for publication. The transfers come days after chief minister MK Stalin on June 13 said that the truth from the findings in Keeladi does not serve the script of the BJP and RSS and so they are dismissing the rigorously proven antiquity of Tamil culture. The chief minister has framed these archaeological pursuits as part of a broader ideological battle. On June 11, Union minister of culture and tourism Gajendra Singh Shekhawat had alleged that the DMK government was refusing to cooperate with the Centre on Keeladi research and politicising the findings.
Time of India
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
BJP govt's refusal to release Keeladi report an attack on Tamil culture: CM
Chennai: Chief minister M K Stalin said the Union govt's refusal to publish Keeladi report even after two years of its submission was an attack on Tamil culture. "The Union BJP government, which seeks to suppress the cultural pride of Tamils by delaying the release of Keeladi excavation findings, has returned the final report submitted two years ago citing the need for additional evidence. This is a blatant attack by the BJP regime on Tamil culture," he said in a letter to cadres. Stalin said the Union govt's decision to turn down the report despite scientific backing, even as it continues to promote the 'imaginary' Saraswati civilisation which lacks scientific evidence, speaks about 'BJP's hatred for TN'. "Till now, the BJP has not been able to prove the existence of Saraswati civilization through any scientific methods. On the other hand, every artifact unearthed from the Keeladi, has undergone rigorous internationally accepted scientific analysis," he said. Stalin also hit out at the AIADMK, alleging the party was silent despite Tamil cultural identity being suppressed. "Keeladi excavations took place when the AIADMK was in power in Tamil Nadu. However, the AIADMK has remained silent on the racial and linguistic hegemony shown by BJP by rejecting the Keeladi findings," he said. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like American Investor Warren Buffett Recommends: 5 Books For Turning Your Life Around Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo Stalin said AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami was silent because he had mortgaged his party to BJP. He charged that a former AIADMK minister had gone to the extent of describing Keeladi, a Tamil civilization as 'Bharat civilization,' in a bid to please the BJP. Stalin said that TN govt has proven, through international studies on the antiquity of iron, that Tamil culture dates back more than 5,300 years. "It was the Dravidian model govt that released those findings. Yet, not a single tweet has been made by the Prime Minister or any BJP leader regarding the findings that establish the ancientness of Tamil culture," he said.
