Refugee Crisis: Impact and Dynamics

Population movements have been a constant feature of the evolution of human civilisation. But, in the last hundred years the world has witnessed many events responsible for global displacement of people on an unprecedented scale due to various factors. Migration and forced migration as global processes are today seen as a burning issue and an irreversible process. Usually term ‘migrants’ is used for the persons who have voluntarily migrated for better socio-economic prospects. However, for the forced migrants ‘refugee’ term is used. What causes people to flee a country and become refugees are different from choice based migration primarily for economic or social purposes.

Among the most common causes of refugee movements are: war, poverty, human rights violations, and mistreatment of minorities. These causes are most often found in combination with each other. Ethnic cleansing leads to war; human rights violations lead to poverty; etc. Usually their experiences of discrimination, threat to life, denial of opportunities for education or employment, and a lack of hope for the future forces them to leave their homeland. Now a day, issues of Refugees is a topic of hot debate across the world due cultural conflict, competition for resources and ultimately changing geo-political circumstances. At present, the increasing number of refugees in various part of the world indicates that something has gone seriously wrong and it is a big moral burden on civilised society across the world. South Asia has a major share in world’s refugee population and causes behind the displacement are political instability, armed conflict, ethnic and communal strife, lack of resources and other socio-political reasons. Like many other refugees in South Asia, Tibetan refugees are also product of turmoil in their native country i.e. Tibet.

Like any other social factors, displacement or forced migration also has its social consequences on the origin and host societies along with refugees themselves. The acts of the country of origin in a way constitute an injury to both the refugees and other host states. Refugees, thus represent a failure of the state system, a ‘problem’ to be solved. The existence of refugees and their moral claim to protection puts pressure on the basic infrastructure of the state, and modern India is also facing same dilemma since its independence. At the time of independence, due to partition a huge population of refugees in fluxed in India. India faced the same dilemma again in the next phase of exodus in 1960s, when the political turmoil in Tibet sparked off an unprecedented flow of Tibetan refugees in India. Thereafter during the Bangladesh Liberation War 1971, massacres in Bangladesh escalated an estimated 10 million refugees fled to India causing financial hardship, instability in Bangladesh and regional conflicts in the north-eastern states. Subsequently more than 60,000 Afghan refugees came to India in the years following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Indian government does not officially recognise them as refugees, but has allowed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to operate a programme for them. In recent years, many Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka and Rohingya Muslims from Mayanmar have taken asylum in the India.

Some scholars have opinion that Indian government treated refugees on a case-by-case basis, and there was an absence of a clear-cut policy or refugee care regime in the government. The response of the Indian state towards the refugees and their needs has been a matter of calculation, discrimination, and discretion. The sphere of care, as a result, got segmented, became strategically ambiguous and there was an inherent paradox in the relation between care and power. India received the largest number of refugees since her decolonisation but treated them more as strategic pawns in the geopolitical games. The issue of the Tibetan refugees has always been an issue of contestation between India and Peoples Republic of China. In this article, I have confined my discussion on cultural identity issue among these Tibetan refugees and its changing dynamics with time.

Forced migration of a refugee damages them not only economically but socially also. When a refugee leaves his homeland to take shelter in a foreign land, his existing social world which was well tuned with his original environment gets tired off. In a new host location, he tries to reconstruct his social world with available resources and new environment.

Works Cited

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