Resisting an Alien Invasion of Principles

Abstract

This chapter examines the anti-colonial nationalist led Indian government’s decision to remove itself from international humanitarian bodies and covenants addressing refugee relief and rehabilitation in the 1940s, as a result of the experiences of the Second World War. Instead, all aliens, regardless of their circumstances, were flattened into a single umbrella category by legal instruments like the 1946 Foreigners Act. The decision rested on a particular understanding of how the self-determination and the rights it guaranteed were in tension with a more universalist notion of human rights adopted in the 1940s. It thus explores the nature of rights, humanitarianism and the establishment of the self-determined nation-state in India, and how the figure of the refugee was caught in between these, at the immediate moment of India’s transition from colony to nation-state.