https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6593-9727
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Abstract
This article examines how Hindu migrant-refugee men use the digital smartphone application WhatsApp to make collective claims on Indian citizenship based on their experiences of exclusion as a religious minority in Pakistan. Drawing on long-term digital and in-person ethnography, I explore the ways that Pakistani Hindu migrant-refugee men commonly exchange images of young Hindu women, reportedly forcefully converted as part of marriages to Muslim men. The circulation of these images on WhatsApp facilitates homosocial bonds between migrant-refugee men based on a shared vulnerability, in contrast with dominant configurations of a muscular Hindu masculinity in India. In addition, men share images from WhatsApp in immigration proceedings, mobilizing them as evidence of religious and caste-based persecution in Pakistan. Mobilizing a wounded masculinity, men’s exchange of images on social media fosters a Pakistani Hindu political community. I argue that these exchanges hinge on gendered hierarchies that shape migrants’ patriarchal claims to citizenship in Hindu majoritarian India.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Ghazal Asif, Brian Horton, and Karishma Desai for reading drafts and sharing feedback. This paper benefited from a conference supported by the Asia Research Institute, NUS. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers, the Special Issue editors: Shiori Shakuto and Brenda Yeoh the Journal’s editorial team: Anna Triandafyllidou, Irina Isaakyan, and Arathi S for their insight and support.
Notes
1 The prevalent migrant-refugee binary in international human rights and humanitarian regimes is predicated on ideas of “migrants” as having choice in pursuit of economic aspirations and “refugees” as not having choice and as persecuted on the basis of group identity. By referring to Pakistani Hindus in India as migrant-refugees, I problematize notions of choice and trouble the distinction between these categories.
2 Demographic household data from a 2016 survey indicate that Pakistani migrants in Jodhpur come from Adivasi (Bhil) backgrounds, Dalit (Meghwal, Kolhi), OBC (Mali, Suthar), and dominant caste (Rajput Sodha) backgrounds (Raheja 2022). While caste is an axis of inequity in Pakistan (Gazdar Citation2007), the politics of recognition are constructed through language of religious majorities and minorities without a distinctive political counterculture around caste and Indigeneity (Asif 2020, Mahmood Citation2022). Migrant-refugees in Jodhpur discussed experiences of caste discrimination, and sometimes identified as Adivasi, but typically did not self-identify as Dalit; when they did, they simultaneously avowed Hindu identity. There is a critique of Hindu majoritarian projects in India for enfolding Dalits and Indigenous tribes (like Bhils) into Hinduism (Longukmer 2020, Lee Citation2021). Here I follow my fieldwork interlocutors’ statements averring multiple associations and identities (e.g. Bhil and Hindu). I use pseudonyms for research participants and WhatsApp groups, but not for names reported in news stories.
3 I thank Lucinda Ramberg for pointing me to Sedgwick’s theorization of homosocial relations between men.
4 Thus, in another iteration of Sedgwick’s triangle, debates in Pakistan concerning Hindu women’s sexual availability also point to a bond between (Hindu and Muslim) men that is broken through forced conversion and repaired (or permanently severed) through the ceding of custody to a respective religious community (Asif Citation2021). Here, Hindu women who have converted, or may convert, as part of marriage with Muslim men, form a tenuous bridge not only between Hindu men across castes, but men across religions.
5 The lack of such a group for women points to the ways migrant-refugee activism was largely associated with men, as was also the case in physical meetings of migrant-refugee activists that I attended.
7 It must be noted here that the majority of Pakistani Hindus do not migrate to India. Some Hindu leaders in Pakistan explicitly argue against migration, emphasizing the importance of incorporation of Hindus within the Pakistani national imaginary and thus lead struggles for recognition from the Pakistani state in the idiom of formal equality.
8 Elsewhere I expand upon how the bureaucratic framing of these images is an aesthetic register that facilitates claims to citizenship within the visual logics of state recognition (author n.d.).