Between Narratives of Solidarity and Othering in Indo-Tibetan Borderlands: Local Resistance to Tibetan Refugee Rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh

ABSTRACT

Tibetan refugee rehabilitation in Arunachal Pradesh, India, has become a site of contention, with strident local identity narratives agitating against refugee presence in this Himalayan borderland state. This paper maps the processes of state-making, citizenship and identity that produce a collision between encompassing notions of citizenship/identity and territorialized discourses of belonging premised on ethnicity in the West Kameng and Tawang districts of Arunachal. This is a multi-factoral analysis of how pressures of land commoditization and competition for economic opportunity interact with religious solidarities and social histories of migration to produce simultaneous narratives of belonging and othering between the dominant local Monpa Buddhist community and the exiled Tibetans in Monyul in the Indo-Tibetan borderland. The post-colonial state’s failure to dismantle the ethnicity-based colonial spatial order in the Himalayan region has created a crisis of exclusionary ethnopolitics that is inherently hostile to refugees.

KEYWORDS:

• Tibetan rehabilitation
• Monyul
• Himalayan borderlands
• colonial spatial order
• post-colonial state

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to K.S. Gokul for field assistance on this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

A research grant from Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Taiwan [Project No. RG002-N-22] supported the fieldwork for this study.