Nepali Migrants Political Activisms in India and their Engagement with Homeland

Abstract

Dominance of research on Nepalis migration to India is consideres as ‘ for livelihood’, ‘passage of rites’, ‘taken for granted’, more importantly ’tradition’ or ‘Kamaune’ for majority of Nepalis. Nepal is an oldest nation-state of South Asia and its democracy had been, for a number of times, suspended or dismissed which forced Nepali leaders to exile in India. It still continues in different ways. Nepal’s political development is directly or indirectly influenced by political activism in India. India has been important ‘space’ for Nepal’s political change and it also has been a place for migrant’s political activism since a long time. Out of several Nepali migrants’ organizations in India, some are active in transnational political mobilizations. This study will look into the concept, evolution and contemporary discourse of the political transnationalism. It examines in the framework of transnationalism; development process of major political parties in Nepal, and situation of Nepali migrant’s political activisms in India and their associations with homeland politics. Definitions of migrant ‘transnationalism’ have flourished in the 1990s to explain the phenomena of migrants’ activities in two or more countries. The back and forth relations of their home and host countries resembles this fact. Steven Vertovec (2009) defines the broad meaning of transnationalism refers to multiple ties and intersection linking people or institutions across the borders of nation states. Migration has never been a one-way process of assimilation in multicultural field but it varies in degrees or it is embedded in the multiple sites and layers of the transnational social fields in which they live (Levitt and Jaworsky, 2007). They argue “decade ago international relations had to rethink its basic conceptual categories to capture cross-border relations between non-state actors and subnational actors.” Several aspects of social life take place across border. Most of the works on migrant transnationalism has emphasized transnationalism as a “counter-narrative to assimilation theory” (Glick Schiler et al., 1992; Guarnizo and Portes, 2001). 32 Journal of International Affairs Vol. 1, No. 1, 2016 Migrant’s multiple attachments in a political activism is a notion of ‘homeland politics’ and also sometimes described it in terms of ‘long-distance nationalism’, ‘deterritorialized nations’ or ‘globalization of domestic politics’ (Anderson, 1995, Basch et al., 1994; Koslowski 2001). Portes et al. (1999) suggest that this kind of transnationalism could be applied also in economic domain, where local level transnational business practices are relatively important. Similarly, transnational migrant communities connected with homeland politics are in a variety of forms. According to Ostergaard-Nielsen (2003), such practices are organizing return program for exiled groups, lobbying to homeland politics, extended offices of political parties, formation of migrant hometown associations, representing social and cultural groups of homeland, and opposition groups campaigning or planning actions to effect political changes in homeland. In fact, political activities of migrants in receiving country do not run in smooth way. Host country’s policy towards sending country plays the vital role. Mostly, it determines by the power relation between two countries that effects migrants’ political participation in destined country. The range of transnational political activities of transnational migrants entails both nation building and nation wrecking. There are many examples of nationbuilding projects, which were not only designed but also operated from exile. Lenin, Gandhi, and Ho Chi Minh’s periods in exile are some of the examples of this kind. These types of practices still continue. For example, several Kurds, Kashmiris, Sri Lankan, Tamils and Palestines are operating as ‘stateless diasporas’ so as to achieve their goal. In all forms of political transnationalism, homeland political allegiances, mobilization and engagements rest on the re-configuration of their identities. People from a particular place regard themselves as legitimate members of the collective identity and socio-political order of a place even though they reside outside the borders (Vertovec, 2009). States are not natural entities rather than the products of complex social and historical processes. The state capacity, authority, structures, legitimacy, and sovereignty depend on the forces that participate in the process of state making (Riaz & Basu, 2010). In the process of state making, those factors keep changing and causing new dynamics at different times under different circumstances. Therefore, there is no linear way of state formation process. In case of Nepal too, a process of nation-state formation has not developed in a linear way. The practice of liberal democratic political system in Nepal is relatively new and has been