Humans... 'Like Us'

India’s ad hoc refugee policy is structured around the politicised binary of good refugee, bad refugee’, with religious nationalism becoming the arbiter

- Rita Manchanda

WHAT will it take to shift our moral compass from hostile dehumanisaton to empathetic humanitarian concern for those desperate 600 children, women and men fleeing the persecution of life and livelihood insecurity in that slowly capsising fishing trawler? As they drowned off the Peloponnesian shore, what did they think of the inhumanity of policies that held back the Greek coast guard from rescuing them?

Could they have expected anything different when populist xenophobic politics around migration have led to the rise of hard Right regimes such as those of Georgia Meloni and the strategy of standoffs with humanitarian rescue ships in Italy, of Rishi Sunak’s policies of detention, deportation and holding in transit in Rwanda illegal migrants who have reached UK shores, or of Donald Trump’s barricading of borders to enforce ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy.

Lest we get comfortable in smug self-righteousness over the ‘blame game’ of the migration/refugee crisis and castigate colonial rapacity, which structurally beggared post-colonial economies and today’s neo liberalism, which produces growth, but deepens inequality. And add to that, geo-politics that stoke violent conflicts that produce Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and refugees as well as the racialisation of discriminatory international regimes of protection and care. But what about our own ethics, our humanity when it comes to the 2,44,000 Afghan, Rohingya, Chin, Chakma, Sri Lankan and Tibetan refugees seeking protection and care in India?