Making refugees in India

This thesis examines whether an alternative conception of the refugee regime as envisioned by India existed. India has not signed either the United Nations’ 1951 Convention nor the 1967 Protocol on the Status of Refugees. In examining this voluntary exclusion, this work seeks to write the colony into refugee related visions of humanitarianism, and through that rights, self-determination and citizenship. It is a twentieth century history, beginning around the moment of Wilson’s fourteen point declaration and extending till 1971, just prior to the ‘breakthrough’ of human rights in the transnational form we recognise them in today. India’s policy has been characterised as ad-hoc, and this project places this characterisation within a larger vision of India’s place in the world, as a former colony turned post-colonial nation-state in the world of the Cold War. Refugees and rights are imagined differently in line with the different vantage point and aims of this state, in turn making us question who the Right to Asylum belongs to.