Politics of (In)visibility and Fragmented Refugee Governance: Experiences of the Rohingya Refugee Community Across India

Cross-border regular and irregular migration in South Asia is rooted in shared colonial histories and geographies that persist today, while policies reflect the impacts of ‘cartographic anxieties’ related to the Partition of the subcontinent (Sur, 2022) as well as that of domestic political narratives (Paliwal, 2022). Despite lacking a comprehensive refugee policy, India has hosted numerous refugee communities (e.g: Tibetans, Rohingya, Somalian, and Congolese) through a fragmented migration/refugee governance. Of these, the Rohingya, a stateless refugee community from Myanmar, most of them onward ‘(irregular’) migrants from Bangladesh to India, have been subject to a shifting set of policies. Although Rohingya people have been migrating to various cities in India in small numbers as “Burmawaale” or Burmese immigrants since the 1990s, it is only since 2012 that the community started being recognised as refugees by the UNHCR and were extended a de-facto recognition (in the form of Long-Term Visas) by the Indian government. This legal recognition (regularisation attempt) was short-lived until 2014. Rohingya refugees now face policies of arbitrary detention (and deportation in some cases) as well as police harassment in addition to the everyday challenges of accessing livelihoods, education, and healthcare due to their ‘irregular’ status (Shwe et al, 2021). Today, Rohingya refugees live across various cities in India, and the community is marked by a high degree of internal mobility, typically in response to local crackdowns, policy changes, and in search of better livelihoods. Drawing on life history interviews with refugees, as well as in-depth interviews with humanitarian NGOs (2022-23), this paper will focus on how a politics of (in)visibility has shaped and continues to shape not only the lived experiences of refugees but also the gaze of multiple arms of the Indian state across two cities (Delhi and Jaipur). It will explore how the fragmentation of refugee governance in India is shaped not only by community and country of origin but also by space and geography. By engaging with the experiences of self-settled Rohingya living in Delhi and Jaipur, it will connect the nature of fragmented refugee governance in India with the various political and spatial (in)visibilities that the Rohingya community face and examine how individuals and communities respond to such (in)visibalisations to exert agency over their own futures in a hostile policy landscape. Hence, the paper seeks to contribute to the discussion around the relationality of governance and resistance practices with a particular focus on ‘irregular migration’ and the constitution of refugee subjectivities through invisibility in a less studied host country context, namely, India.