By Rohini Mitra | Issue 26
There are many stories to be told of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. From the collapse of the healthcare system to the draconian top-down management of the initial lockdown to household economic distress across the country, the pandemic further ruptured many existing fractures. This exposed all but the ultra-privileged to new forms of vulnerability. India’s many migrant populations, both within and outside the country, faced unique vulnerabilities of their own.
Although not often studied as a prominent refugee-hosting nation, India is home to a diverse group of refugee and asylum-seeking populations including the Tibetans, Sri Lankan Tamils, Afghans, Chin (a Burmese Christian community), Rohingya, and more. Given the lack of a national refugee policy, these groups are governed in an ad hoc and divergent manner, with different communities having access to a different set of rights. For instance, mandate refugees (i.e. those falling under the mandate of the UNHCR) occupy a precarious legal position, having access to UNHCR refugee cards, but in a country that does not recognise the Convention and has often publicly challenged the legitimacy of these cards, even while allowing the UNHCR to continue its operations. Lack of acceptable identity papers often restricts refugees' access to employment, and other important services like education and healthcare, demonstrating how profoundly legal and political rights affect everyday vulnerabilities.
The pandemic years
On 24 March 2020, with a mere 4 hours’ notice, India declared a national lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Mobility down to the level of the neighbourhood was halted, and everybody was asked to remain at home, with only some leeway to buy food items and essentials on a daily basis. The impact of such forced immobility on the daily lives and livelihoods of vulnerable groups was particularly apparent. Refugee communities, many of them working in urban informal industries, found themselves without income and with dwindling savings to sustain themselves through the lockdown. Economic crisis and food insecurity were particularly noted among the Rohingya refugees, many of whom live in urban camp-like settlements and work as daily wage labourers and rag-pickers. Social distancing was difficult in cramped quarters and access to healthcare was initially also severely limited. Media reports highlighted dire circumstances faced by the over 200,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in the country. At the same time, some refugee communities, such as the Tibetans, were better supported due to strong community networks and the Central Tibetan Administration, which began to take measures and coordinate with the Indian government.
Although the UNHCR and partner NGOs extended aid in the form of rations and supplies across the country, their efforts could not keep up with the sheer scale of the crisis experienced. In the subsequent months, while initially hesitant, the Indian government, in the interest of public health, eventually issued a Standard Operating Procedure for the systematic vaccination of all populations without the prescribed national ID documents – which implicitly brought refugees under the ambit as one such group. Media coverage at the time continued to highlight barriers to vaccination but reports on populations such as the Rohingya in 2022 found high rates of COVID-19 vaccination were belatedly achieved.
Selective visibilities
Despite this eventual inclusion in the vaccination programme, refugees and asylum seekers experienced other forms of discrimination and exclusion. The nature of the public health crisis in 2020 saw a rise in xenophobic and racist reporting about migrants – who are inherently mobile – in major destination countries across the world. In India, this manifested in the harsh reception faced by returning migrants (both from within the country and abroad) in their home villages and towns. In the case of refugee populations, discriminatory reporting was also shaped by other social, religious, and economic factors.
For example, at the start of the lockdown in 2020, media coverage exploded surrounding an Islamic religious event – the Tablighi Jamaat that had taken place in March – and with it, accusations of corona jihad. The Muslim community was portrayed as deliberate spreaders of disease, highlighting how crisis situations exacerbate existing social tensions. The Rohingya refugees of India, most of them Muslim, some of whom had attended this gathering, found themselves implicated and scapegoated in domestic political contestations – as they often have been in the past. In April 2020, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order instructing regional (state) governments in the country to track down and test Rohingya refugees for COVID-19. Other forms of discrimination were also reported from refugee groups such as the Chin, who faced discrimination from host communities in Delhi. Similar experiences were reported by Tibetan refugees who bore the brunt of Sinophobia in the aftermath of the pandemic as well as border excursions with China.
Pandemic persistence and lessons (not) learned
The mobility restrictions of the early days of the pandemic have been one of the key persisting legacies of the time. When I started my fieldwork with Rohingya refugees in India in 2022, many spoke about harsh restrictions on everyday mobility that have now become a part of refugee life. In cities like Delhi, moving houses as a refugee had become close to impossible, even from one neighbourhood to the other. While in Hyderabad, it was nearly impossible for new families to move to or even rejoin their family members already in the city. Practices of community data collection and, in some cases, coercive surveillance, became common, severely impacting everyday mobility and quality of life for refugees, leading to arrests and the threat of detention.
Practices of containment also impacted refugee resettlement from India, as it did across the world. But as some countries continued to process emergency resettlement cases and eventually began to reopen, in India, where resettlement has typically been a rare prospect, even those with valid visas found themselves stuck. A 2023 report from Refugees International found that over 1,000 refugees, primarily Chin and Rohingya, were awaiting resettlement that year, with their exit visas from India (a necessary document to be presented along with the visa of the country of resettlement) still pending. While this particular containment practice has now eased, with some being allowed to exit from mid-2023 onwards, resettlement continues to be an option available to only a fraction of refugees worldwide. In 2021, this was further exacerbated when the military coup in Myanmar displaced a new generation of Chin into the border state of Mizoram in Northeast India. The subsequent conflict between the State Government of Mizoram and the Central Government illustrated the limits of an all-India national approach towards asylum. While the Central Government ordered Mizoram to push back the refugees, the State Government reiterated their commitment to their ‘brothers from across the border’, providing aid and relief and issuing temporary refugee cards.
India’s ad hoc approach to refugee governance over the years has meant that the treatment of the country’s diverse refugee communities during and after the pandemic has also been fragmented. While experiences of immobility, economic distress, stalled educational journeys, and emotional stress were common to vulnerable groups across the country, refugees and asylum seekers frequently faced additional barriers due to uncertain legal status. Mobility restrictions and selective practices of containment continue to persist, ultimately meaning that the pandemic enabled the further marginalisation of some refugee groups.
Rohini Mitra is a doctoral student at the Centre for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, where her research is focused on forced migration governance, networks, and refugee transnationalism in and beyond South Asia. Her doctoral research examines these themes in the context of the Rohingya refugees in India. Her larger research interests include migrant (and refugee) transnationalism, migration governance regimes, diaspora politics, and borders. She has completed a Masters in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and worked in the migration policy and research space in India.
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