Ambiguous citizenship and the politics of informal representation: migrant activists’ mediation between low-wage labour migrants and migrant origin states in the Gulf countries

On paper, India has established an institutional framework of social protection for its estimated 8.5 million low-wage workers migrating to the Gulf countries, e.g., financial emergency support, repatriation services, and walk-in centers. However, despite Indian labour migrants being citizens of a formal institutional democracy, they cannot acquire substantive social citizenship in practice and rely on Indian upper/middle-class-led migrant activist groups to mediate access to Indian embassies and services in the destination countries. The realization of social rights via informal, third party representation steams from a representational disjuncture between low-wage labour migrants and the Indian state, which is rooted in their historically socio-economic marginalization, limitations of the formal political system, and the constitutive role of informality in shaping and structuring citizen-state interactions in India. Through the lens of Piper & von Lieres’ (2015) concept of mediated citizenship and based on data from semi-structured interviews with migrant support networks in the Gulf countries, this paper examines the objectives and political character of mediation and how both, along a continuum of democratic and coercive forms, contest and conform norms of the democratic liberal state and the promise of democratic citizenship. While informal representation in this context can be dismissed as undemocratic, it can overcome democratic deficits by negotiating for distributing social goods more equitably or engaging marginalized groups to develop political agency. Nevertheless, the status as intermediaries underlines the disaggregation of Indian citizenship along class lines and can be (mis)used by mediators to pursue their interests, e.g., in favour of political support.