Citizens or ‘Infiltrators’? Decolonising the Securitisation of Migration and Citizenship in India
Date
2025
Authors
Paul, Maggie
Editors
Advisors
Chacko, Priya
Mayer, Peter
Cao, Benito
Mayer, Peter
Cao, Benito
Journal Title
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Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
The Bangladeshi migrant has been constructed as an ‘infiltrator’ in India. The ‘infiltrator’ figure is politically presented as a threat to ‘national security’ and has played a crucial role in the progressively shrinking citizenship regime in the country. This thesis aims to explore how the discursive construction of Bangladeshi (economic) migration as ‘infiltration’ came about and what are the effects of the discourse on everyday citizenship in India. Using a decolonial perspective, the empirical analysis is laid out in two large parts. The first part traces the genealogical development of the discourse of ‘infiltration’ in the subcontinent from the colonial to contemporary times in three significant historical phases: a. the pre-independence phase; b. the post-independence phase; c. the decade beginning in 1990 wherein the ‘infiltrator’ was entrenched as a ‘security’ threat. The data for this part is drawn from academic books and government reports, as well as archived newspaper articles and NGO reports. The second part presents an analysis of primary fieldwork conducted at a metropolitan court in the city of Mumbai, wherein trials of nationality determination are being conducted. The data for this part was collected through in-depth interviews of people accused of being Bangladeshi ‘infiltrators’ and the officials involved with the cases, as well as case documents and observations at the courtroom. The overall analysis unveils that the ‘infiltrator’ figure in the contemporary context of India is a racialised figure variously expropriated, exploited and incarcerated within the changing regimes of racial capitalism in the subcontinent. The ‘migration as infiltration’ discourse in the subcontinent is the result of nativist racial capitalism of the postcolonial Indian state underpinned by religious and caste hierarchies, which in turn are predicated on the racialising logics of the colonial capitalist order. These racialising colonial capitalist logics, categories and practices also shaped the political structures, notions and lived experience of citizenship in the country, and is now turning citizens into ‘dangerous’ migrants through the mechanisms built up by the securitisation of migration, including the language of ‘infiltration’. The study demonstrates that the local securitisation apparatus built up around the figure of the ‘infiltrator’, revealed at the end of the first part of the thesis, is rendering everyday citizenship contingent (both conditional as well as unpredictable) and engaging in legal migrantisation of poor minority-citizens in local courtrooms. The key observations in the thesis discuss the need for a future wherein India (and other nation-states in South Asia) can transcend colonial borders and their racialising effects to minimise harms for their poor citizens, rather than hold colonial borders as sacrosanct instruments to further hierarchise and punish the mobility of poor migrants and ‘de-citizenise’ their own minority-citizens.
School/Discipline
School of Social Sciences : Politics and International Relations
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences : Politics and International Relations, 2025
Provenance
This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals