Becoming Foreigners in 1962: Tracing the History of Citizenship Rights of the Indian-Chinese

Abstract

The geopolitical relationship of India and China is replete with a long and pernicious history which had culminated in the 1962 Indo-China war. I propose to examine the war from the point of view which bears upon the Indian-state’s relation with its citizens. One of the aims of the paper was to return on one hand to the Indian parliamentary debates around the changes in the Foreigner’s laws which turned Indian-Chinese nationals into Foreigners almost overnight and results in a collective loss of state citizenship and patronage. I also recount the ethnographic aspect of the people who had lived through the experience of being forced to deport, surveillance and curfews which also resulted in en masse internment from their homes to internment camps in Deoli in Rajasthan. The narrative of the people and the state are placed in the relief of discussion of the State’s notion of power, more specifically the notion of Bio-power as discussed in the works of Foucault and Agamben. The paper further brings in the trope of collective remembrance and memory narratives of the Indian-Chinese people as a means of unearthing how citizenship rights of minorities/foreigners has played out in the instance of the 1962 war.