Air Travel, Statelessness, and the Rights Claims of Ugandan Asians, c.1973

In the aftermath of Idi Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s South Asians in 1972, some of those made technically stateless arrived in India unsupported by the United Nations or any national government. Eleven of them attempted to fly on via Sri Lanka, without the required paperwork, to join their families in the United Kingdom. As large colonial empires gave way to postcolonial nation states, and as the international community and the former colonial metropole shed responsibilities towards their former subjects, the various destinations to which such stateless persons were considered for deportation reflect the uneasy status of diasporic communities. Using what official records saw as the ‘problem’ of this international flight, this article explores how the sealed realm of air travel became a locus for the articulation of their rights as these peoples of the postcolonial world used the devices of deportation and ‘shuttlecocking’ against national and international actors to challenge the inequitable application of notionally universal principles to deny material assistance and recognition of their rights as refugees and stateless persons. In this way, individuals and non-state actors were able to use air travel to intervene bodily to influence national and supranational discourses designed to exclude them.