Citizenship as Politics and Performance of Religious Identity: Hindu Refugees from Sindh

Abstract

Drawing from the ethnographic insights and experiences of Pakistani Hindu refugees in Rajasthan, India, this article examines their agency, politics and dilemmas. It illustrates how they actively participate in the process of their ‘becoming citizens’ by making use of the majoritarian political space and nationalist ‘Hindu India’ imagery. Their expressions of a cohesive Hindu identity, however, remain illusionary and incomplete as they do not correspond with the lived realities of fractures, antagonisms and heterogeneities within various Hindu communities. These differentiations also lay open the hierarchies within Hindu refugees and enable an analysis of citizenship as a continued, contested and differentiated process based on caste and class locations of the refugees. For the lower-caste/-class refugees, their citizenship assertions go beyond the point of acquiring legal citizenship and merges with the struggles of native Dalits. Through these variegated expressions and claims of citizenship of Hindu refugees, this article foregrounds the idea of citizenship as performative and processual, and not necessarily contingent on legal status or state’s sovereignty logic of citizen/non-citizen binary.