Understanding Refugeeism: An Introduction to Tibetan Refugees in India

Mallica Mishra
The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees defines a refugee as someone who is outside
his own country owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion or
nationality, or for having membership in a particular social group, or for holding a particular political
opinion, and is unable or unwilling to return to his country of origin for fear of the same. In brief, they
are people who are forcibly torn and uprooted from their native milieu and are transplanted to a
different environment due to circumstances beyond their control. These refugees stay in semi-
permanent camps that resemble barracks and asylums for protracted periods of time.
Repatriation (going back to one’s country), local integration or resettlement in a third country
are the possible options to solve the refugee crisis.
The refugees are a homogenous group and are stereotypical and monolithic in nature.
However each refugee group is different from the other in terms of country of origin, ethnicity, race,
religion, culture, language, gender, class, disability and socio-economic and educational background.
Refugees are different from other immigrants and ethnic minorities as the latter voluntarily
move to another country in search of greener pastures to improve their economic position. Refugees
share similarities with other ethnic minorities, as they also have a subordinate position in society and a
culture different from the mainstream society.
Hanna Arendt who wrote on the condition of refugees after the end of World War II states
that the loss of homes was the first great loss suffered by the refugees. But she points out that a greater
difficulty lay in the impossibility of finding a new home. This was not due to lack of geographical
space or overpopulation but because there was no country on earth where they would be assimilated.
Thus as pointed out by W. N. Xenos, the problem of refugees in our time, is uprootedness or
homelessness where space is not really geographical but political.
The term refugee was originally coined in the west to specify French Protestants who fled
from the forced conversion policy of the French state in the late seventeenth century. After the
American Revolution, the term began to be used to refer to human beings that ‘leave their country in
times of distress.’
It was in 1921-22, in the aftermath of World War I, the breakup of the Austro- Hungarian
Empire and the Russian Revolution that the refugee problem invited international attention and global
cooperation. However the real movement to protect refugees began only with the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights which proclaimed basic rights for all human beings irrespective of their
nationality or citizenship. It was recognised that refugees are not simply ‘victims of human rights
violations’ but a distinct group of individuals who are without the protection of a national state. The
international system of refugee law was adopted for the protection of the refugees which was until
then the responsibility of national governments.
The 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees had laid down general guidelines for the
protection of refugees. However, these guidelines have been variously interpreted by individual states
according to their convenience. While more than 189 states have adhered to at least one of the
international human rights treaties, many countries, including India have not agreed to the
Convention. Thus the protection and welfare of refugees is dependent solely upon the host
government’s policies.
The refugee crisis has become a global issue now as armed conflicts are wide spread in many
countries thus producing millions of refugees. The status and treatment of these refugees in the host
country is far more complex due to their specific geo-political and socio- cultural contexts. But their
protection and welfare, especially education cannot be neglected and instead are to be highlighted.
Refugee groups regard the preservation of their native culture and identity in the host country
as important components of their adaptation. When two cultures are in contact with each other for an
extended period of time, they undergo various processes of change which are called assimilation,
acculturation and integration. In assimilation, the minority culture loses all the markers that set it apart
as a separate culture. It becomes indistinguishable from the majority culture. In acculturation, the
minority culture is able to retain its unique cultural markers thus retaining its distinctiveness. In
integration, the minority culture accepts the laws and ways of the host country without giving up their
own laws and ways. Both accommodate the viewpoints of each other in a bid to live harmoniously.
The refugees prefer acculturation and integration to assimilation as they help in preserving their native
culture.
As the refugees are uprooted from their homeland and transported to alien lands, they
experience a ‘constantly challenged identity’ which requires a mediation between a scattered past and
a heterogeneous present. Simone Weil’s (a French philosopher and activist) notion of rootedness
helps to understand the problem of refugeeism. According to her, to be rooted is the most important
and least recognised need of the human soul. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and
natural participation in the life of a community which provides him with treasurable experiences of
past and expectations for future. This participation is natural as it is automatically brought about by
place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. To be rooted is perhaps the most
important need for the human soul as it draws near a human being’s moral, intellectual and spiritual
life closer to the environment in which he lives.
It is difficult for the refugees to preserve their culture and identity in an alien country as they
seek to re-root their lives. Lisa Malkki, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University criticises the
trivialising of the relocation of the refugees as “a smooth journey of people who neatly pack their
roots and transplant them later.” According to her re-rooting is a crisis of great magnitude as it
involves changes in legal and political status, ruptures in families, struggles for economic mobility
and the tensions between older social and cultural values and the norms and values of the new society.
Dick Hebdige, a British sociologist asserts that roots are in a state of constant flux. They
change colour, shape and even location. Refugee groups are torn between nostalgia for the past and
the present realities of acculturation in their life.
There are two major theoretical approaches to ethnic identity which help in the study of
refugeeism- the Primordialist approach and the Optional- Situational approach. The Primordialist
approach conceives of ethnic identity as rooted in similarities in physical appearance as well as
common culture that may include a shared religion, and a sense of common origin and history and
perception of shared life chances. Ethnic identity is understood as something eternal that persists
through change. In contrast, the Optional- Situational approach sees ethnicity as a process
continuously created and recreated, adopted and shed according to the requirements of different social
situations. From this perspective, ethnicity is an ongoing process and it would not decline. Its form
may change depending upon the situation. Ethnic identity is regarded as fluid, situational, changeable
and self- interested. It is socially constructed and arrived at through processes of interaction.
Individuals opt for an identity on the basis of their goals as well as the positive and negative value he
or she assumes a particular identity will confer.
This approach also fits with Berger and Luckman’s concept of ‘social construction of reality’
which describes the process by which people create their own version of what is real via interaction
with each other.