Introduction
Of all the groups, only the Tibetans seem to have relatively
good access to rights and services. The Tibetan government-inexile is based in Dharamshala and the Indian government has been
friendly to the cause of Tibet. Hence, the needs of the community
in healthcare, education, culture, and religion have been met. The
Indian Government’s recently formalised Tibetan Rehabilitation
Policy has promised to allow the Tibetans to undertake any
economic activity and pursue jobs in any field in which they are
proficient, yet it has failed to result in any tangible change so far.
Since India has neither signed the 1951 UN Convention on
Refugees nor devised its own domestic refugee law, refugees and
forced migrants are treated on par with other foreigners, governed
by the outdated Foreigners Act 1946. Some fundamental rights
guaranteed by the Indian Constitution that are denied to foreigners
are also denied to refugees and asylum-seekers. Likewise, India has
also not ratified the 1954 and 1961 Conventions on Statelessness,
meaning there is no legal recognition of statelessness persons—a
prerequisite to access many rights. However, there have been
cases where the judiciary has recognised the rights of refugees and
protected refugees to a certain extent.
The BJP government has slowly turned this humanitarian issue
into a religious one. In 2015, the BJP government decreed through
executive order on ‘humanitarian considerations’, to allow Afghan,
Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationals belonging to non-Muslim
minority communities (specifically Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist,
Parsi and Christian) to stay on in India even without proper
documentation, though this meant difficulties in getting jobs and
so on. This consideration was not extended to persecuted Muslim
communities.
Furthermore, India has also been disenfranchising some of its
own citizens arbitrarily, making them foreigners in their own
land, incarcerating them in detention centres, and putting them
at risk of statelessness. The National Register of Citizens (NRC)
drawn up in Assam, which the current regime now wants to scale
up nationally, with ‘illegal immigrants’, a dog-whistle term in
public discourse used in India for Muslims, as the stated target.
Its implementation, however, has cut across religious, ethnic and
linguistic divisions, affecting the poor and the vulnerable most,
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