In their petitions against the Act, refugees asked why they were being treated differently to other nationals of India and in violation of the provisions of the Indian Constitution (then still in the making). The provincial government enacted the Bombay Refugees’ Act 1948 to restrict refugee movement, to extern refugees from specific areas, and to subject them to forcible dispersal, criminalising them if they violated these rules. Sindhis acquired legal citizenship, however, they have often found themselves on the edges of debates of who constitutes the nation.Īfter partition, Sindhis arrived in the province of Bombay (which then encompassed Gujarat) in their largest numbers.
Since partition, the lack of a ‘Sindh’ in India ─ specifically the lack of a historic territory to which they could claim attachment ─ has shaped the Sindhis’ relationship with the Indian Republic and their fellow citizens. It was a deterritorialised and demographic partition, producing approximately a million ‘non-Muslim’ refugees (not all of them Sindhi-speaking) who resettled in India and abroad. But Sindh’s ‘partition’ in 1947 involved no division of territory. Most often, historians attend to the division of Punjab and Bengal ─ even if Assam was also divided. We think of the partition of India, and we think of the division of territories. As a sportsman, Bhatnagar had more occasion than most to sing the anthem, and it was while standing to attention to jana gana mana that he had arrived at the conclusion that Sindh did not belong in it.īhatnagar argued that since Sindh was the name of a province in Pakistan, its inclusion in the Indian anthem could raise an international dispute that its presence was an infringement on the sovereignty of Pakistan and that ‘Sindh’ should be replaced with ‘Kashmir.’ Bhatnagar’s telepathic abilities were not verified nonetheless he insisted that the singing of the anthem with the word ‘Sindh’ in it for over fifty-five years had been ‘hurting the feelings of over 100 crore people.’ Partition without a territory In 2005, the Supreme Court of India heard a petition from Sanjeev Bhatnagar, a speed-skater and advocate, to direct the government to delete the word ‘Sindh’ from the Indian national anthem since Sindh is now a part of Pakistan.
#SINDHI INDIAN SERIES#
This is the third article in The Leaflet’s Special Series on Citizenship edited by Jhuma Sen.
The history of Sindhi refugees serves as a reminder of how modern nation-states are constantly engaged in a process of hierarchical minority-formation and demarcating the acceptable citizen, writes UTTARA SHAHANI, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, and ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. In this Special Issue on Citizenship, we take the occasion of the Republic Day to look back at the historical and material conditions surrounding the citizenship debates in the Constituent Assembly, as well as in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens who negotiated, resisted, or facilitated legal belongings with the state. The three-pronged idea of citizenship germinating at the constitutional moment as status, rights and identity, have undergone significant transformations since the Constitution was drafted.
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