ABSTRACT
Citizenship, as defined by the Constitution of India, has attracted immense debate and dissent since the first drafting of the Citizenship Act in 1955. The subject of Constitution and citizenship gained renewed attention with the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 which recognized illegal migrants of Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian religious minorities, who had fled persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan before December 2014 and took shelter in India but did not include Muslim refugees from those countries under the same circumstances. Consequently, this policy has come under fire for implementing religious segregation and is seen as a move to construct a ‘Hindu’ India. The relation between the Constitution and citizenship takes an interesting turn at the intersection of caste, gender, and the refugee identity. The rhetoric of citizenship, under the garb of resolving the refugee problem, functions as a justification for caste and gender oppression. This article sets its premise on the second partition of Bengal in 1947 which is tarnished by bloodied histories of the Marichjhapi massacre and the socio-economic exclusion of dalit refugees. I propose that there is a need for a new framework to adequately address issues of political exclusion, naturalization of sexual violence on dalit women, and the lack of an intersectional lens in mainstream feminist and dalit politics in India. To this end, I examine the sexed bodies of dalit women refugees as sites of caste oppression. The status as a refugee created a different experiential reality for dalit women. Hence, I also look at dalit women’s autobiographies to explore how experience as a tool is used to generate an alternative intersectional standpoint.
