Selective, Reactive and Liminal

Exemplified by an unprecedented section devoted to internal migration, the Economic Survey of 2017-18 brought the issue of migration to the spotlight within government and policy circles. However, almost two years later, in March 2020, the government of India imposed a nation-wide lockdown prefaced by a mere four-hour notice period. As transportation froze and industries shut down abruptly, tens of thousands of migrant workers (and their dependents) were left stranded, forcing them to walk thousands of miles over foot back to their home villages, resulting in severe misery, hardship and even casualties. These events brought into stark relief the contours of migration governance in India over the past decade.

Internal migration: marginal gains and continuing crises

With a staggering 450 million internal migrants (as of the 2011 census), migration has become integral to the political economy of India. India also has the largest diaspora in the world, numbering 18 million people. The modes, institutions, and ideological underpinnings of migration governance vis-à-vis both internal and international migration have witnessed substantial shifts and continuities ever since the ascendance of the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) led Modi government in 2014. The erstwhile Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was dismantled and integrated with the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.

Consider internal migration in the first instance. The annual inter-state labour mobility has seen a steady increase from an average of 5-6 million people (from 2001 to 2011) to approximately 9 million people (from 2011 to 2021). There have indeed been important measures which have improved migrant welfare and streamlined migrant governance. One of the most admirable interventions in this regard was the One Nation One Ration Card scheme, which has greatly enhanced the portability of social welfare, especially food security. More than 2 million people have benefitted from this scheme. The government has also rationalized a complicated and messy legislative landscape to constitute four codes, including the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Codes passed by the Parliament in 2020.

Despite these gains, the internal migration governance has been hindered by a culture of ad-hocness, unsatisfactory policies and implementation as well as the invisibilization of dependents. Consider the legislative landscape in the first instance. The Interstate Migrant Workmen’s Act of 1979 is the sole legislation which explicitly tackles the question of internal migration in India. However, this legislation is confined to contractor-driven migration. Informal migrant workers’ rights are subsumed under varying labour laws which suffer from weak implementation. These weaknesses continue to persist during the NDA regime as well. This was most evident in the Covid migrant crisis, illustrating the highly inconsistent and reactive nature of India’s migration, characterized by knee-jerk reactions and half-measures. For instance, the migrant crisis prompted the government to respond with a slew of measures under the moniker ‘Atma Nirbhar Bharat’, including the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PMGKY), One Nation One Ration scheme, The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and increased allocations under the existing MGNREGS (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme) budget. However. such schemes were largely reactive and failed to alleviate the short term financial distress of migrant workers. The government response was also oblivious to the plight of international return migrants. In fact, even well-intentioned schemes like the One Nation One Ration scheme have often failed to realise their full potential (especially in terms of interstate PDS portability)  because of poor financial literacy and education among migrant workers.

Data deficiencies and prioritization of skilled migration

A critical failure of migration governance is the continuing absence of attempts to quantify and measure migration. The most comprehensive sources of national-level data, like The Census of India 2011 and the 64^th round National Sample Surveys, are inadequate as they neither cover real-time movements and seasonal migration nor capture the subjective and emotional concerns of migrants. Reliable estimates of data are thus the need of the hour. The Kerala Migration Survey, which provides such data over 5-year-intervals (covering both internal and international migrants), could serve as a model to be emulated across India. There are also increasing calls for the conduct of interpretive-qualitative data collection methods to complement existing surveys, enumerations and quantitative studies.

Ever since India’s independence, the class character of the Indian state has been historically characterised by the dominance of the state at the expense of labour and capital. In this regard, the NDA has not fared much better than its predecessors, especially vis-à-vis migrant labour. The process of rationalization of labour codes, for instance, has led to the dilution of several social welfare measures for migrant workers. These have been compounded by the invisibilisation of dependants in contemporary debates on migration. The concerns of dependants like women migrants and children are often ignored, revealing the gendered nature of India’s migratory landscape.

Perhaps, the clearest break of the Modi regime vis-à-vis previous regimes has been demonstrated in the landscape of external migration. The number of migration agreements signed between India and other countries has surged dramatically, rising from a mere five agreements signed between 1985 and 2014 to a staggering 17 during the eight-year timeframe of the NDA government from January 2015 to March 2023. These include, for instance, Labour Manpower Agreements signed between India and Saudi Arabia (2016), Jordan (2018) and UAE (2018). During the NDA years, India also signed MMPAs with France (2018), UK (2021) and Germany (2022). In addition, DOIs (Declaration of Intent), which seek to commence as well as fast track negotiations on migration, have been signed with the likes of countries like “Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Greece, Germany, Austria, and with Australia.”

A careful analysis of these interventions highlights the high degree of priority accorded to the mobility and opportunities for skilled migrants. One of the milestones in this regard has been the increasing cooperation between India and Australia, exemplified most recently in the MATES (Mobility Arrangement for Talented Early-professionals Scheme) agreement in 2023 which seeks to enhance the mobility of skilled professionals in seven sectors, including Agricultural technology, Artificial intelligence (AI), Engineering, Financial technology (FinTech), Information and communication technology (ICT), mining as well as renewable energy. In fact, the restrictions on post-study graduate visas of students in Australia imposed by the new migration strategy of Australia exempted Indian students, owing to the terms of the India- Australia Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement negotiated in April 2022.

The patronizing state: Classist, gendered and religious assumptions

However, the unskilled emigration regime leaves a lot to be desired. Several works have highlighted the colonial, classist and gendered assumptions and biases inherent in India’s emigration regime. The Gulf migration from states, especially Kerala in the 1970s following the oil boom, led to the Emigration Act, 1983, which forms the legal cornerstone of emigration regulation in India. An ECR (Emigration Clearance Required)/ ECNR (Emigration Clearance Not Required) dichotomy constitutes the fundamental framework underlying this Act; certain classes of lower-class, unskilled and under-educated citizens were granted ECR passports, which required an Emigration Clearance vis-à-vis 18 countries with low levels of labour protection. However, this paradigm of protection, control and regulation violated the principle of equal opportunity resulting in discrimination among citizens. The Modi regime has continued to uphold these classist assumptions of its predecessor governments. The most notable instance in this regard was a proposal to colour code passports mandating orange passports for ECR holders in 2018; this was scrapped after widespread opposition.

Besides this classist character of the migration regime, the regulatory framework has also consistently betrayed the gendered anxieties of the state. For instance, the widespread exploitation of female emigrant domestic workers post the Gulf War resulted in a slew of legislations which progressively curtailed the mobility of unskilled ECR women workers. The patronizing character of the migration regime has been no different under NDA rule, exemplified by the intervention of mandatory emigration clearance for nurses from May 2015 in response to recruitment frauds, resulting in drastic reductions in ECR clearances granted to women nurses.

There have also been highly spectacular shifts most prominently visible within the external migration governance framework on an ideological level. This corresponds to the increasing securitization of migration; in other words, migration is often framed as a threat to security in terms of “citizens’ livelihood, safety, and cultural identity.” This was most visible in the CAA (Citizen Amendment Act) 2019, which sought to offer Indian citizenship to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis who fled persecution from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh (and arrived by December 2014). This was a momentous intervention which enshrined a religious criterion for Indian citizenship for the very first time, which called into question the secular foundations of India’s constitution. In addition, institutional interventions like the NRC (National Register of Citizens), with a staggering exclusion of 4,070,707 applicants (in the final draft list of 2018), have sparked widespread concerns regarding the challenges to the regularization of citizenship of millions of marginalized people especially Muslim migrants from Bangladesh. In fact, as Samir Kumar Das argues, NRC represents the latest elusive attempt of the anxious Indian nation-state to make the citizen-foreigner binary progressively legible.

These interventions necessitate a word on the shifting contours of India’s refugee governance regime. As of January 2020, India had a refugee population as high as 240,000 originating, inter alia, from Tibet, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Mostly leading precarious lives, they have always faced severe challenges on the grounds of arbitrariness and indeterminacies inherent in the ambiguous legal contours of refugee governance. For one, India has neither signed the 1951 Convention nor the 1967 Protocol, which constitute the two fundamental instruments of international law. In this hazy and liminal landscape where the Indian state “arrogates to itself the ‘sovereign right” to decide who constitutes a refugee (and, by addition, a repatriate), some scholars have noted a distinct shift within the refugee governance during the NDA regime. The government has progressively made amendments to incorporate refugees within the fold of Indian citizenship (e.g. amendments to the Passport Rules, 1950 and the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the CAA). However, as hinted earlier, these inclusions are motivated by the religious identities of the refugees. Reflecting a ‘Hindu nationalist frame’, the refugee governance under the NDA regime has been selective along religious (and parochial) axes rather than singularly exclusionary.

Conclusion

Thus, a broad overview of the migration governance during the Modi era reveals quite distinct shifts and continuities from the previous era. While there have been certain policy successes in the internal migration front, it continues to suffer from weaknesses of its predecessors regarding frameworks, implementation, ignorance of gendered concerns and the limited availability of data. While the external migration landscape has been characterised by vigorous and astute negotiations facilitating external skilled migration, many have expressed increasing concerns over the perpetuation of classist and gendered biases, the distinct shift towards the securitization framework of migration and an increasing religious selectivity of refugee governance.