ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 throws light on the security dimension of the postcolonial age of migration. It shows how this age links the issue of national security to migration. Migration points to the need for the governmental logic of security to connect the internal with the external. The chapter asks: How does migration appear as a threat to the security of a nation? Is the language of “doom as a result of migrant invasion”, graphically invoked again and again by various nationalist leaders around the world, sudden? Is it without any colonial lineage and postcolonial effect? What are the conditions in which migration becomes a matter of insecurity/security? By way of answering these questions this chapter examines the patterns of collective politics and collective violence. Also, it shows how in the twenty-first century the two discourses of the terrorist and the migrant, who is permanently a potential threat to security, have coalesced. In a high-potency brew of neo-liberalism, national frenzy, border regime, and untrammelled flow of capital, the only troubling element is the migrant – the potential terrorist. Insecurity envelops the society. The policies of macro-security – the security of society – are ensured by creating micro-insecurities, insecurity of every community. The entire dimension of security around the “migration question” is examined in this chapter on the basis of the material drawn from the history of the Indian Northeast.
