Refugees to (Re)Build the Nation

Abstract

The rehabilitation of refugees after Partition was formative for the Indian state, connected with issues of citizenship, of politics and parties, of Kashmir and Hyderabad, and the very development of the Indian state. This chapter explains how refugee rehabilitation was intrinsically intertwined with the Nehruvian state’s efforts to (re)construct the Indian state after the events of the 1940s, while actions in the name of these same refugees became a way to challenge the Nehruvian vision too. The Indian government exerted more control over the refugees than any other citizens, recovering as both the state and the displaced were from the loss of Pakistan. The contradictions of establishing the secular, planned, developmentalist state in a place where the two-nation theory and ethno-religious division had recently caused a mass migration left the refugees of Partition as the site at which the tensions of Indian citizenship, state-building, and consolidation played out.