2020.9: Ankushi Mitra, Into the Corona Bomb: The Making of a Migration Crisis in South Asia
Around mid-March, days before India’s COVID-19 lockdown, a gathering hosted by the Tablighi Jamaat missionary movement at Delhi’s Banglewali Masjid inflamed panic locally and across the country. After the people involved in this gathering scattered across the country, Muslims, migrants, and refugees began to be vilified by influential sectors of the Indian political and media establishment as “corona bombs,” “murderers,” “jihadis,” and “enemies of the nation.” Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his allies applauded the success of the Vande Bharat (“Respect / Praise India”) operation — touted as the “world’s largest evacuation” — that has brought citizens stranded primarily in North America, Europe, and the Gulf back to India. This kind of vivid image-making for the Indian state — tied to the production and reproduction of a privileged citizenship — is at once in-tune with the political mood of the country, and yet far removed from so much of its contemporary experience.[i]
Far from Home
As the commendations and controversies traced above were unfolding, thousands of displaced migrant workers who make the country’s urban dreamscapes a possibility — now unwanted both by their host states and home states — were also braving on foot daily, hourly precarity in the scorching Indian summer to make their way back to their towns and villages. Since then, several million have contended with haphazard state assistance, hastily-built IDP camps, long detention, and threats to physical and mental well-being. Simultaneously, refugees and migrants continue to be excluded entirely from policy conversations on protection and return. One undocumented Nepali worker said:
I have tried since March to return home, but there is no way to leave. Trains have stopped … our embassy has not offered any solutions. I ran out of money in April, and have survived by borrowing from family members or friends. Kathmandu is not a destination for the Vande Bharat flights. Even if it was, I could not afford it…
The structure of the repatriation process designed by the Indian government limits both the reality of return (for instance, with no flights to destinations like Kathmandu, Thimphu, Colombo, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi), and its possibility (as an emphasis on self-financed return functions as a de facto fee for low-income groups). Meanwhile, most embassies have neither the political will nor the resources to negotiate with the Indian government to bring home stranded citizens.
Vulnerability, Surveillance, Discrimination
The Indian state has long maintained complex and often inconsistent positions on international movement and displacement, picking and choosing those it deems worthy of recognition and protection based on the whims of internal politics and fancies of geopolitical ambition. Only select asylum-seekers are recognized on an ad hoc basis. Support infrastructures involve a ragtag collection of services provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a handful of local NGOs, and very limited state-sanctioned access to protections through UNHCR-administered programs, refugee status determination (now suspended in India), Under Consideration Certificates (UCC), and Refugee Cards. There is no clear pathway to citizenship for refugees, except for non-Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, who can apply for religious asylum under the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The lack of a cohesive policy on cross-border mobility, linked to complicated debates on national identity, is now being reproduced when clear guidance for refugee and migrant communities is more essential than ever. The lack of targeted public health support, in particular, is systematically limiting access to testing and treatment for non-citizens already at-risk due to their intersectional vulnerabilities. Most members of these communities are packed into shared homes, small neighborhoods, and urban slums that render social distancing practically impossible. Many do not have regular access to good sanitation facilities and basic items like soap. They are denied key identity documents like a national identity card and excluded from existing national safety nets and COVID-19 relief packages. One Rohingya asylum-seeker in East Delhi noted:
UNHCR only gives us warnings for what to do to avoid coronavirus. Some families have also received rations from them. I went to get checked at Ambedkar Hospital a few weeks ago…they would not test me because every patient needs to be linked to an Aadhar number.[ii] They told me to visit a private hospital instead, but they too…don’t treat anyone without an Aadhar ID.
Most migrants and refugees are facing a great deal of income uncertainty. An Afghan community leader in Southeast Delhi explained:
Many people have lost their jobs recently. Some are working for local shops in exchange for rice, flour, and pulses …we have been here for ten, twenty years, and there is no one to depend on but ourselves…but one of my biggest fears is that these jobs will never come back.
Local and international NGOs and organizations like UNHCR are raising awareness about public health best-practices and distributing rations to certain refugee communities (such as Rohingya asylees), but their aid is micro-targeted, and thus quite limited. Meanwhile, most refugee and migrant communities are dealing with the evolving challenge of surveillance and urban securitization. Many of my interlocutors emphasized a heightened police presence and an increasing number of encounters with strategic barricades, armed personnel, arbitrary document checks, and neighborhood patrols in migrant- and refugee-dense areas. Racial discrimination, especially against those phenotypically coded as ‘Chinese,’ Africans, and Muslims, is particularly salient. A Somali student recounted one such egregious experience:
In April I went to a clinic just outside Kamla Nagar where some of the other students I know had been able to get treatment…one doctor there told me he doesn’t treat “blacks.” There was a lot of racism against Africans in India before this, but it is much worse now for foreigners.
Housing vulnerability is also on the rise. Many internally displaced people northeastern India, as well as members of South Asian, African, and Middle Eastern communities in Delhi, speak of growing conflicts with landlords, threats of eviction, and generalized racism centered on perceptions of outsiders as carriers of disease. One Mizo student from Bangladesh said:
Until March, I lived in a shared house with four other [international] students…but we were evicted in April. Our landlady said she did not want to take any risks since the virus “‘came from foreigners.” I had to start living with a friend and still haven’t found a flat.
Trust, Public Health, and Urban Sociability
A layered crisis is currently brewing in this migration landscape. Social trust, already a fragile thing in India, is a failing enterprise in major migrant and refugee destinations across the country. The communalization and criminalization of public health management[iii] and a lack of recognition, guidance, and strategic communication with refugee and migrant community leaders is undermining public health partnerships that need mutual confidence between at-risk groups, their neighbors, government officials, and healthcare providers. The upcoming monsoon season, which will bring malaria, dengue, cholera, and typhoid, will worsen this bleak reality.
Reticular linkages between a poisonous national debate on migration, a lack of state recognition and protection for foreigners, and vicious cycles of discrimination and recrimination are changing how movement and displacement is negotiated. They are rearranging urban sociabilities between hosts and the hosted across urban centers (though it is not entirely clear now how this will unfold). Meanwhile, the frozen vocabulary of the state when it comes to vulnerable mobility, now woefully inadequate for these multidimensional, dynamic perils, remains cannon fodder for a government that thrives on nationalistic clanging. There is an acute sense among those working with migrants and refugees that being able to vilify the non-national — the “corona bombs,” and “enemies of the state” — is helping to manufacture public optimism about the national response to the crisis.
As people on the move face a paradox between the demand to practice good public health measures and their lived realities, regional mobility is likely to undergo complex transformations, with the cost measured in life and death. But young men and women, refugees and migrants of tremendous capacity, are also organizing, in many cases pooling resources to support the most marginal households, demanding Covid-19 testing drives in Delhi’s poorest neighborhoods, advocating for better ration distribution, taking on the burden of education in their communities, and sharing their stories of resilience in exile with each other, and others willing to listen.
Ankushi Mitra is an MA candidate at Trinity College Dublin’s Development Practice program, currently based in New Delhi, India. Her research focuses on displacement, bordered hierarchies, and transregional spatial justice in South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa.
Notes
[i] “Modi’s Popularity Soars as India Weathers the Pandemic,” The New York Times, May 16, 2020.
[ii] An Aadhaar card is a unique, twelve digit number that is issued to citizens by the Indian government.
[iii] “Tablighi Jamaat: Delhi Police Files 35 Charge Sheets against 376 Foreigners,” The Hindu, May 28, 2020.
“Mumbai Police Registers FIR against 150 Tablighi Jamaat Attendees for Negligence,” The Print, April 7, 2020.