Resolve Sri Lankan refugee dilemma

Abstract

Refugees not only suffer an arrhythmic oscillation between life and death, they simultaneously are stuck within the unfamiliar fetters of legality and illegality. Deprived of decision-making power and unaware of the logistics of international as well as national law, they remain in a transitional phase, in a constant struggle to understand and abide by the rules and principles laid down by powerful ‘others’ working in the name of humanitarianism. Despite using the language of humanitarianism for the provision of their protection, human rights of refugees continue to get violated explicitly through violence by the country of origin and by the reluctant population of the host country, as well as implicitly due to the ‘latent’ violence of the state dualism and stringent laws to secure the sovereignty of nation. With the implementation of the Refugee Convention of 1951, the emergence of an era, which introduced an uncontested perception of refugees, is evident. Refugees, like citizens, have since been conceptualized in a ‘bounded definition’ but in relative terms. While the latter signifies a legitimate category privileged with civil, political, and social rights within a confined spatial organization of the State, the former is viewed as devoid of all these aspects – legitimacy, rights, and particular space – but enjoys the possession of ‘human rights’. Human rights are prone to ambiguity in the case of refugees, which exhibit a range of meanings – from the provision of protection to the fulfilment of the necessities of livelihood. Despite several loopholes in the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 Protocol, it has been adopted as a standard framework for the formulation of national law. Even the attempts made by Indian ministers to propose national uniform law for refugees largely emulate this standard framework. The present chapter traces the problem behind the situation of refugees in the international as well as national Indian law. The purpose of the chapter is five-fold: (1) to trace the epistemological basis of the refugee law, (2) to reveal the legal positivist nature of the international law and suggest following B.S. Chimni the need to take up the humanist approach during the interpretation of law, (3) after revealing the inadequacy of the application of the international law, the chapter would move to analyze the attempts of producing a uniform law in India emulating the 1951 convention, (4) to study various Citizenship Amendment Acts to trace the politics of hospitality, and (5) to reveal the politics of hospitality played on the part of the Indian state in accommodating the refugee groups in India.