Education as Part of Migrant Trajectories: A Sociological Study of Pakistani Hindus in a City

ABSTRACT

The Pakistani Hindu community inhabiting a camp in the city of New Delhi presents the most recent case of South-to-South migration. Migration into India for this community has been undertaken with an aim to achieve a better life, especially one characterized by better education for their children. Education for the families from this community is associated with progress, improvement, development of intellect, and a means to put an end to the families’ endless roaming. However, the visions and aspirations for the future meet with difficulties stemming from the nature of their migration and the absence of any transactional relationship with the Indian state due to their lack of citizenship.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The Pilgrim Visa that had been issued by the Indian government is valid only for 15 days and is not extendable.

² See “The 2016 Citizenship Amendment Bill consolidates a trend towards a majoritarian and exclusionary concept of Indian citizenship,” The Caravan, February 2017.

³ This dimension is especially true, according to FritzGerald and Arar (2018), in the case of illiberal states that at times use economic tools such as cutting off employment, education, or market access to punish their political opponents or despised minorities.

⁴ One such instance in which the stock of knowledge was questioned, was when many of the families found that agricultural work was not enough to sustain their families in the city of Delhi. Due to this, many left their agrarian work and took up the job of selling mobile-phone covers. Another instance was in 2011 when the police forcibly evicted the families from the same neighborhood. These 11 families, who were also the initial settlers in this camp, had none to ask for help except their weak ties in the National Capital Region.

⁵ Residential stability has been specifically mentioned because the lives of the families from this particular migrant camp have included efforts to make new lives in terms of what Appadurai (2005) discussed, with neighborhoods that have been transformed to be recognizably social, humane, and representative of the situated life-worlds as a context for social action, interpretation, and material practice. Such attempts to produce localities are also, according to Holston and Appadurai (2003), an effort to create a sense of belonging to which the individuals and the community can lay a claim.

⁶ For further reading, see K. R. Malkani, The Sindh Story (Ahmadabad: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 1984).

⁷ The Partition saw the largest and the most rapid volume of migration on the Indian subcontinent in the years 1947 and following. The demarcation of India and Pakistan that was formally laid down by the British rulers in terms of the Radcliffe Line saw 14.5 million individuals migrating and 2.2 million individuals going missing.

⁸ See “Indian citizenship for Hindu from Pakistan to be made easier: Government, New Delhi,” Indian Express, April 2016.

⁹ See “Fate of Hindu in Pakistan depends on the Indian government: MLA Ram Singh Lodha,” India Today, May 2011.

¹⁰ The focus-group interview was conducted only among those students who had attended the Srila Prabhu International Gurukul Ashram School located in Udhampur, Jammu and Kashmir, in the year 2012. This was done to understand the nature of the children’s educational experiences there.

¹¹ The other refugee community whose members live in this Aruna Nagar II neighborhood of the Civil Lines area, which is also locally referred to as Majnu-ka-Tilla, are the Tibetan refugees who have settled here since the 1960s.

¹² However, due to the sensitivity associated with this topic, the villages from which the families hail haven’t been mentioned. Along with this, the names of the respondents have also been changed to fictional ones.

¹³ Here by the term pradhan we refer to something akin to a village headman. The Sri Ram Sena Hindu camp (which is the name of the settlement) has seven pradhans who see to the law and order along with arranging interaction with the authorities to put forth their various demands. Each of the pradhans has sets of houses under them, which usually consist of the families who had initially crossed over into India with them. The pradhans from Hyderabad are the ones who wield more power, be it in terms of monetary aspect or social networks, especially in this postmigration phase.

¹⁴ However, after their migration into India and especially to the city of New Delhi to earn a livelihood, these families have taken up informal work selling mobile-phone covers across the city of New Delhi, or run small grocery shops within the camp, or work as laborers, or are hired agrarian laborers on farms in the National Capital Region. They may also work as tailors, social workers, or homeopathic doctors. However, the majority of the families in this camp have taken up the informal work of selling mobile-phone covers. Unemployment is prevalent among the elderly or the families who arrived in the very beginning of the year 2017 in India. According to Omelaniuk (2012), employment in the informal sector doesn’t provide access to advanced technology or training, nor does it require education. Therefore, for these migrants with very low levels of education, the informal sector maybe the only choice to earn a livelihood.

¹⁵ The average age of the head of the household is not more than 40 years.

¹⁶ Indeed, the colonial boundary set up by the Britishers had geographically divided the Rajput community, as some continued to live in India while others lived in Pakistan.

¹⁷ A striking fact is that some of the families still have the pilgrimage visa and have overstayed it.

¹⁸ This is true for Sita’s and Savitri’s families. While the former was pregnant and felt that going back was economically viable, the latter went back as she believed that the larger kin network back in the native society would help her son get over his drug abuse problem.

¹⁹ The unmarried daughters had been especially left behind as they were very young, so Kiran had felt that in India they could not join the workforce and thus would be a source of economic burden.

²⁰ The redundant status was reflected in the attitude that employers and police had toward this community, where they see them with less toleration and as being disposable. The employers who often employed individuals from this community to work in their fields for free would threaten them with legal action if they demanded their wages. On the other hand, the police viewed the families from this community with distrust and suspicion.

²¹ However, work in the informal sector is not always stable, so it carries with it insecurity. Such insecurity has cropped up when the local Delhi police (who are referred to by the families as the committee people) have confiscated the goods for illegal hawking and have demanded bribes ranging from Rs.100 per day to Rs.10,000 a month.

²² Here the word dharma refers to religion, while karam refers to work. The term gurbani would refer to composition of religious text.

²³ Such vision within the immediate horizon of need is related to work, shelter, education, clothing, marriage, and so forth (Appadurai, 2013).

²⁴ Here the word tarakki means progress, while sudharna means improvement.

²⁵ Akal is a Hindi word referring to intellect.

²⁶ The lives of the members from this community have been referred to as migratory because migration has featured as a crucial part of their lives, not only after migrating to India, but also back in Sindh, where the families often undertook seasonal migration for periods ranging from a few weeks to months in search of work as farm laborers.

²⁷ Here the term bhataknah refers to leading a life that is nomadic in nature and is based on continuous movement from one place to another.

²⁸ This movement for the families from this community has often taken them from one place to another within the National Capital Region, especially to places like Adarsh Nagar, Faridabad, and Kanjavla. Much of this movement has been caused by the search for stable schooling for their children and for work (especially agrarian work) for themselves.

²⁹ The term illegal nature of their migration has been used because, even though the government laid down the proposed amendment in the year 2016 (which is yet to be passed) saying that those with valid legal documents will not be treated as illegal, the reality is far from it, as the local city police treat them as illegal and with suspicion. Also many of the families who had initially arrived had overstayed illegally their pilgrimage visas, which they later converted to long-term visas.

³⁰ Some of these neighborhood schools were the Government Boys Senior Secondary School located in Magzeen Road, Sarvodaya School and Partibha Bal Vidyalaya located in Majnu-ka-Tilla, and so on.

³¹ The biometric Aadhar card was introduced for the AADHAR (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits, and Services) Act, 2016, meant to achieve good governance and efficient, targeted delivery of subsidies across the whole of India (except the state of Jammu and Kashmir). The government had laid down that competent authorities could collect the biological and demographical feature of those enrolled. Each individual who enrolls himself under the AADHAR scheme is allotted a number.

³² Anganwadi are government-run centers that cater to the health of mother and child and were initially opened under Integrated Child Development Services.

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Aratrika Bhadra

The author is a Doctoral student at the Zakir Husain Centre of Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Her interests lie in sociology of education, vulnerable childhoods, refugees, stateless communities, vulnerability and resiliences, youth and social media.