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ABSTRACT
In this article, I examine the 1971 war (better known as the war for the liberation of Bangladesh) from a western Indian perspective. I argue that this war between India and Pakistan—while it focused overtly on the independence of East Pakistan—had some significant consequences for the western border between Kutch (in Gujarat state) and Sindh (in Pakistan). I suggest that this military conflict and the subsequent brief Indian occupation of Tharparkar in Sindh allows for a significant re-thinking of questions of citizenship, identity and belonging that were sparked off in 1947 and that have been re-ignited in the context of recent debates over the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted in December 2019.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Jeffrey Gettleman, ‘“This is a Catastrophe.” In India, Illness is Everywhere’. The New York Times, April 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/world/asia/India-delhi-covid-cases.html (accessed 23 September 2021).
2 Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2013.
3 The Gazette of India, CG-DL-E-28052021-227219, PART II—Section 3—Sub-section (ii), May 28, 2021. https://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2021/227219.pdf (accessed 23 September 2021).
4 Ibid.
5 Earlier iterations of India’s citizenship regime were neither inclusive nor plural, but the 2019 Act makes explicit what was a more implicit bias of Indian citizenship rules from their earliest inception. This explicit basis of exclusion was, in fact, the reason why the CAA, 2019 provoked such widespread resistance to its enactment. The May 2021 order was framed within the provisions of the 1955 Citizenship Act rather than the 2019 Amendment which, in fact, had not yet been formulated due to the coronavirus pandemic; see, e.g., https://scroll.in/latest/996098/centre-empowers-officials-in-13-districts-to-grant-citizenship-to-minorities-from-three-countries (accessed 23 September 2021).
6 Anupama Roy, Mapping Citizenship in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 74, 77-78; Vazira F-Y Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 198-199.
7 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, Anita Hill’. American Literature Vol. 65. Issue 3 (1993): 549–574; Brenda Cossman, ‘Sexing Citizenship, Privatizing Sex’. Citizenship Studies Vol. 6. Issue 4 (2002): 483-506.
8 Farhana Ibrahim, From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021.
9 Patidars (also known as Patels) are an agrarian caste in Gujarat.
10 Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
11 Tanuja Kothiyal, Nomadic Narratives: A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
12 Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, F. No. 28020/29/08 – F III, June 23, 2009.
13 Ibrahim, op. cit.
14 Sandya Hewamanne, ‘The War Zone in My Heart: The Occupation of Southern Sri Lanka’, in Kamala Visweswaran (Ed.), Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, p. 66.
15 Nosheen Ali, Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
16 NB, All names used in the text are pseudonyms.
17 Jinnah died in September 1948; the reference is possibly to earlier in the year or a generic reference to the immediate post-Partition period.
18 Farhana Ibrahim, ‘We got Citizenship but Nothing Else: Love (Be)longing, and Betrayal in the context of India’s Citizenship Regime’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Vol. 10, Issue 3 (2020): 750-757.
19 Roy; Zamindar, op. cit.
20 This certainty did not always translate into reality, leading at times to perceptions of betrayal.
21 Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women were allegedly “abducted” by men from the hostile group, i.e., Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims, and vice-versa, during the mass exodus between India and Pakistan in 1947.
22 Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 36.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Farhana Ibrahim
Farhana Ibrahim is professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She has written extensively on the Kutch-Sindh border. Her most recent publications include a co-edited volume, South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border (Cornell University Press, 2021).