Michel Foucault in his classic Madness and Civilization,¹ now a part of social science folklore, suggested that the medieval West did not know how to classify madness. The only tactic for domesticating madness was to dump the mad in boats and set them out to sea; this is how the term ‘ship of fools’ was born. The mad were set afloat because as unclassifiable people there was no place on land for them. Today, the language of the ship of fools has yielded to the language of the boat people. The refugee stands today in a similar condition of liminality and ambiguity that the madman did once.

The 19th century decided to rework citizenship in terms of the triangular categories of exile, migrant and refugee. The 19th century was more an age of exiles, many of whom were revolutionaries or aristocrats in their own country. An exile was a stranger who sought home away from home while waiting for the ritual of return. Yet, the period of waiting was often a creative one for many such as Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Lenin who invented their grand schemas for the revolution. There was a clarity to the category of the exile and even a feeling of marked temporariness to their waiting. The exile, as a conceptual category, rarely challenged the political theory of citizenship.

The migrant, more of a 20th century category, virtually created huge domains of knowledge. The migrant was also a central character around which 20th century American sociology was built. The notion of the melting pot, the idea of the marginal man, in fact the whole internal dynamics of the city, focused on the migrant. The archetypal Irish boss immortalized by the sociologist Robert Merton and by the author Edwin O’Connor was a creature out of this era. The migrant abandoned one country to seek citizenship in another, while the exile, poetically and poignantly, waited for the moment of return for his autobiography to be complete.

The contemporary refugee is a more problematic creature. He has been subject to theorizing by international law more to be identified like a botanical specimen possessing some legal entitlements. However, politics and philosophy have been more ambivalent about him. Today one has to ask: is the refugee only an outsider displaced because of political harassment or can he be an internal refugee displaced by dams or some other developmental project? If we insist canonically on the first, how do we face the sheer demographic pathos that India today has more refugees from dams than from all the wars we have fought? Does the internal refugee need a different kind of discourse to locate and protect him?

 

The second problem one has to address relates to the relation between the refugee and the citizen. In the informal economies of India, even citizenship becomes a temporary phenomenon. The migrant has to wait years before his residence is regularized. In fact, the informal economy emphasizes the de facto temporariness if not the de jure idea of citizenship. The informal economy domesticates new categories in a way such that the refugee in India becomes an extension of the informal economy, falling prey to contractors who use them as bonded labour. This was the fate of the Rohingyas as they fell victim to touts promising them freedom and permanence. In fact, the grey economy virtually provides an initiation into citizenship, however fragile. Many journalists cite the devastating impact demonetization had on refugees who, as extensions of the informal economy, most felt the impact of reform.

 

The question of the refugees raises issues not merely for the question of citizenship but also about the new inventiveness of violence. The new violence is rarely face to face and one confronts a new triangle as one deals with the theoretical dispensability of a people. With dispensability as a criterion one has to engage with three new forms of violence. First, obsolescence considers the growing irrelevance of citizens as they become outdated or old. There is a dispensability, a vulnerability here which challenges the sanctity of citizenship. Second, one confronts triage where people are defined by policy as vulnerable and abandoned. Garrett Hardin in his ‘Lifeboat Ethics’² argues for the abandonment of such people as they show little promise of recovery. In the very quickness of such classification, people lose their humanity, their dignity, in fact any possibility of redemption or rehabilitation. Such forms emphasize the very tenuousness of citizenship. Third, we confront ethnic cleansing as genocide, where a population is eliminated because it lays claims to an alternative domain of citizenship. The refugee becomes a creature of this nether world of citizenship.

One sees this clearly in the recent controversy over the Rohingya. For the first time in history, the Indian state refused a people asylum. The Rohingyas had already entered India enticed by the hospitality and exploitation of touts and contractors. Many of them had even spread to the deep South as far as Kerala. The government decided to send them back despite the fact that international law prevents the forcible return of anyone facing the prospect of violence or harassment. Behind such treatment lie three sets of changes which affect our understanding of the refugee.

 

Earlier the refugee was a folk category and Nehruvian India met them with a civilizational response. Here hospitality and the idea of a haven for a refugee was more important than any legal definition of rights. Nehru’s response to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans was civilizational. The ideas of folklore and law blended to welcome the Tibetan leader and his people. But today the legal and the sociological refer to different categories of being. Even if the Rohingyas are ‘recognized’ as displaced, their sociological being does not guarantee their legal status. A refugee to be a refugee has to be legally recognized and classified as such. Even as the Rohingyas are scattered in thousands across the country, the foreign ministry creates a classificatory sleight of hand by categorizing them as undesirable aliens and, as criminally susceptible elements. Instead of the traditional welcome, they are now quarantined in camps.

The stigma virtually removes the possibility of refuge and dooms them to a hopeless future. Many nation states today do not want refugees. Hundreds of the Rohingya perished in boats as even neighbouring Muslim nations like Malaysia and Indonesia refused them entry. They became the new ship of fools of this decade. Caught in their new liminality, they suffer from an increasing prospect of vulnerability. All it needs is a clerk to locate them in the pigeonhole of undesirability. In one stroke they move from the commons of hospitality to the enclosures of national security. Their humanity and the possibility of humanitarianism declines with this classificatory unacceptability.

In fact, one of the great tragedies of modern life is that the vulnerability of the refugee increases with the definitional intricacies of international law. As nation states are caught between the demands of human rights and security, the refugee becomes more and more a security problem where his humanity gets defined away by labels like aliens, criminal elements, ethnic groups susceptible to terrorism, among others. Words like security and terror can erase the civic possibilities of the refugee as a political being. There is also a question of moral luck because the very Old Testament righteousness of security makes some refugees more equal than others in an Orwellian sense. The silence around Yemen today raises this issue in a macabre form.

 

Yemen in fact is a classic case of the misfortune of the refugee being located in the (mis)behavioural science called security studies. Here international law and its extension, the United Nations, often stigmatizes refugees. The battle is between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the hegemony of the Middle East. The victim is Yemen which has come under the control of the Houthi rebels who received aid from Iran and as a result Yemen becomes a victim, a site for a proxy war as Saudi Arabia, backed by USA and UK, enforces a ruthless embargo on the country. The prospect of the blockade raises the scenario of Yemen facing the world’s largest famine affecting over seven million people. It also faces a rampant cholera epidemic.

The refugee as a liminal character becomes an object of genocide as the world watches in indifference. It is almost as if refugees are dispensable as the national security state enshrines itself. When security becomes the official sacrament of nation states, the precarious status of the refugees becomes a prelude to genocide. The idea of security as an isolated act of governance creates a politics without ethics, legitimating genocide and ethnic cleansing as normal acts of state.

The dispensability and the vulnerability of human beings becomes an accepted fact as the liminality of words like refuge increases. The more nebulous the outlines, the greater the violence. The question is: can ethics provide an answer? Can philosophy challenge the current vocabularies of politics in a radical way?

 

As one reads the debates about refugees, not merely by politicians, but by outstanding philosophers like Zygmunt Bauman,³ Slavoj Zizek⁴ or Peter Singer⁵ one senses a caution, a moderation, where there is no sense of a civilizational answer. Take the late Zygmunt Bauman. When he talks of the refugee, he does not sound like the man who wrote the classic Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman hints that when the West looks at the refugee, it sees a pale imitation of its enlightenment self in the mirror, a reminder of the unexamined rules of democracy. The refugee becomes a trigger of an anxious self. The refugee threatens the much touted solidarity of the West. The quality of thought about refugees is of a parochial kind. The refugees were not too alien when Europe formulated its laws after WW II, but today the new refugee appears threatening, a creature undoubtedly different in his cosmologies and his memory from European cutline.

The refugee threatens the West’s sense of its own conviviality. At the most, a Peter Singer, who is profound on animals but pedestrian on human beings emphasizes values but insists on a cost-benefit analysis of decision making. He suggests that the West finance the maintenance of refugees, not in USA or Europe but in Jordan. The comparative costs of maintaining a refugee is lower in Jordan than Germany and there is a greater likelihood that he will return home. Zizek adds that the West cannot respond to the current problem of the refugee without examining the global conditions that create the refugee economy.

 

Three outstanding philosophers, yet we find all of them dealing with the problem with forceps, reading it more as a problem of table manners than ethics. The answer is always at a political and pragmatic level, insisting on a need for public debate. In fact, except for the Pope, one sees little of the power of dissenting imaginations, little sense of the language of the gift. Derrida once said forgiveness must be excessive and, one would add, so should hospitality. Yet, all the three scholars talk of apportioning refugees with pipettes in their mind. There is a note of caution that makes one wonder whether this trinity of scholars is more worried about the return of xenophobia in the West than the prospect of aid to the refugee.

Suddenly in discussing the refugee, it is the West and its value system that seems vulnerable. Democracy in the West works when diversity is not too stark. It is an admission that the West has thought more deeply about equality and liberty than about fraternity, solidarity or plurality. The refugee as a statement of difference threatens the West, creating what Bauman calls ‘liquid anxiety’, a diffuse set of fears that are inarticulate and worrisome. It is almost as if the political and ethical combine for the Pope but not in any practical way for Bauman and Singer. They are caught between two stools of saving the refugee or saving the image of an enlightened West, and they fall helplessly between them. Ironically they do not seem to recognize their philosophical ambivalence.

 

When one moves from the realm of philosophy to the interdisciplinary domain which proudly dubs itself as Refugee studies, the theoretical results are even more disappointing. There are brilliant ethnographies but little sense of creative theorizing where the refugee is linked to the wider issues of democracy or enlightenment thought. The field is almost narcissistic in its preoccupation with the professionalization of the discipline, with policy debates where the refugee become a pretext rather than a text demanding a different hermeneutics. In fact, the preoccupation with policy turns refugee studies into an applied science, an act of social engineering or plumbing rather than into a moral science. There is little of the depth of theorizing that went into exploring the otherness of the Jew,⁶ or the primitive,⁷ or even the stranger.⁸

The refugee in comparison remains an ineptly theorized category eventually abandoned to a sense of sentimental outrage that we have not done enough, or a pragmatic sense of distaste, an unease which asks how much more can we do. At one level, this eventually leads to a lifeboat ethics argument which suggest the abandonment of the vulnerable as incompetent or unassimilable. The unease that the contemporary refugee from Syria, Sudan or Yemen raises in the western soul is unsettling. It exposes the democratic pretensions of these societies.

 

Indian society had a more sophisticated idea of the refugee as stranger, neighbour, a creature to be greeted with hospitality, with a civilizational openness before social science and law took over the statist imagination. As the notion of hospitality gave way to rights, and the norms of folklore to law, the response became less spontaneous and more aridly ritualistic. As a nation, we were open to other cultures and celebrated border crossings even as acts of pilgrimage. As a nation state, we made a fetish of border and territoriality. As a national security state, we not only fetishized the idea of security but created an asymmetry between security and rights, fusing internal and external security.

As the logic of security became the grammar of policy, the refugee was seen through the lenses of suspicion. The refugee was defined a trespasser, an illegitimate soul who lacked the sanctity that hospitality and even the language of victimology provided him. One wants him to be dispensable as he becomes a creature who adds to our Malthusian fears, or to the nightmare of electoral breakdown, as numbers no longer follow the logic of neat electoral games defined in terms of convenient percentages.

The refugee is the new ethnic nightmare who, from the very inception, suggests the prospect of ethnic cleansing. At one level, he is easily absorbed as part of the anarchy and normlessness of the informal economy. The greed of touts and contractors opens up both the promise of citizenship and the possibility of exploitation. Ironically the refugee, in fact, is domesticated, even assimilated, by corruption which sees in the refugee a whole global economy from electoral gains to aid and philanthropy. The very amoralism that initiated the refugee into the economy now backfires on him as he is seen as an undesirable alien, a Malthusian prospect. There is in fact a piety, a puritanism policy which demands that he ceases to be an intrusion. From victim, the refugee becomes alien, an undesirable intruder who eventually graduates into a prospective terrorist.

It is this piety that made the Indian government reject the Rohingyas. But behind the alleged piety, there is a socio-biologistic imperative, as Indian ideas of governance see in the refugee an affinity to the nomad, the tribal as other dispensable and obsolescent categories. The presence of the refugee emphasizes the privileges of citizenship and allows for the violence of the informal economy to move from exploitation and triage to genocide. The refugee who is not quite a character in civic life seems to allow for and legitimize the pathological. He becomes a fragment of electoral games and rituals of cleansing. Violence becomes an acceptable economic bargain when applied to the marginal parts of the polity. In fact, the refugee articulates once more the idea of the totally dispensable body, the bare life that Giorgio Agamben wrote about in Homo Sacer.⁹

 

For Agamben, the very idea of sovereignty in ancient times needed the complete dispensability of the body. The sheer vulnerability of the body, the whims of the sovereign, his right to dispose the body, became the sign of his power. Arbitrariness and absolute control in terms of the body was the sign of the sovereign. The Homo Sacer returns in a new way in the idea of the state in India. In India, the idea of the informal economy marked the arbitrariness of citizenship. The individual was vulnerable in terms of residency. But there were deeper circles of vulnerability in a disaster economy. The final Dantesque circle of absolute arbitrary disposability of the body was articulated in the concept of the refugee economy. In fact, one senses the concentric layers in the making of the Modi regime.

 

The 2002 riots were genocidal and exterminist. If earlier riots had a predictable cycle of a return to normalcy, where the potential victim returned to the domesticity of the old neighbourhood, the 2002 riots sought to break this cycle by being exterminist. It sought, at least ideally, the elimination of the minority as part of the body politic. Development as a ritual of displacement already articulated another circle of vulnerability. The Rohingya added the third by being denied the possibility of citizenship. Here the informal economy of the refugee did not, through corruption, lead to domestication and regularization; in fact, it lead to dispensability of the refugee from the body politics.

From the Gujarat riots to the Rohingya crisis, the BJP has articulated a new idea of the state, elaborating several levels of marginality and vulnerability among the population. In a way, it is ironic. In the West, the refugee creates a crisis of democracy. In India, the refugee strengthens the new strains of authoritarianism; India as a strong state realizes the indispensability of the disposable body. The refugee provides that final possibility as the marginal informal economy becomes more susceptible to genocidal intent. In that sense, the reclassification and social construction of the Rohingya plays a critical role in the social construction of the Modivian state, recreating itself around varieties of marginality as possibilities of vulnerability and dispensability.

 

Georg Simmel described the stranger as someone who is here today and gone tomorrow. A refugee is more than a stranger; he is here today and waits to stay on for several tomorrows. The manner in which we respond to him has become one litmus test for the inventiveness of democracy. It has become the relevant other for this era. While the West is cagey, almost coy, in its response to the refugee, India is using a redefined idea of the refugee to strengthen its ideas of national security and a majoritarian state. In fact, the refugee as the other has become a threat subverting India’s ideas of hospitality and plurality. Oddly, the only objection comes from religion, whether we rework the idea of the good Samaritan conceptualizing the refugee as the neighbour with a difference or that of Pope Francis’ attempt to challenge the West to go beyond rights and think of Charity and Fraternity.

Sadly, the idea of the refugee is seen more as a managerial problem than an ethical one. The sheer scale of the influx undermines our logistical confidence in handling it. Yet, the issue is more than a case of logistics. First, as the refugee today determines the anthropology of the other, one needs a Buberian sense of the other. South African philosopher A.C. Jordan once suggested, ethically and playfully, that one must constantly invent new others to sustain the vitality of the self. Indian democracy recreates itself by inventing two sets of others – the internal other as the minoritarian, marginal or dissenting self and the external other as refugee.

In many ways the refugee is the neighbour across the border. He is the Sri Lankan we have stereotyped as a thief, or the Bangladeshi incessantly at the receiving end of violence. As India becomes aspirational and projects a more successful version of itself, the refugee in a developmental sense is a request to re-enact the painfulness of the development sequence. If he cannot be absorbed into development, he graduates into a security threat, becoming a potential terrorist. He becomes a Rorschach of our anxieties and fears as a result of which we demonize them.

There is a fundamental need to rethink our current categories of border, security, development, nation state as India proceeds to panopticize itself. Even more fundamentally there is a need to rethink a link between ethics and politics and posit the possibilities of a world beyond humanitarianism. Humanitarianism which treats the refugee through the lenses of cultural and economic superiority can often turn to a lifeboat ethics where we move to a rational abandonment of a people.

 

The normalization or the everyday-ness of genocide is one of the biggest challenges to contemporary ethics. A mere human rights cuticle of protection does not work as shifts in classification from victim to undesirable alien can rob a refugee of his entitlements in law. But here, the current language of discourse is inadequate in law. Culture has to come to the rescue. We have to dig deep into our unconscious, our culture, our language to explore the idea of sewa, of service which goes beyond humanitarianism, of hospitality and try to create a sense of the other as complementing to the incompleteness of our current self.¹⁰ The Tibetan refugee, like the Parsee of an earlier time, added to our sense of fraternity. Today, one has to see how creatively the Rohingya, the Sri Lankan, the Bangladeshi can add to our democratic imagination. This I think is the ethical challenge of the refugee.

 

Footnotes:

1. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Routledge, London and NY, 1989.

2. Garrett Hardin, ‘Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor’ (1974). Advanced Composition and Critical Thinking Course Reader: War and Peace. Compiled by Jason Wohlstadter. Modesto Junior College, 2012, pp. 66-73. Print.

3. Al Jazeera English. ‘Why the World Fears Refugees’, (narrated by Zygmunt Bauman). YouTube, 13 October 2016, www.youtube. com/watch?v=_Qlv8pqtTss.

4. Big Think, ‘Slavoj Zizek on Refugees, Conservatism, and Cultural Incompatibility’. YouTube, 4 December 2016, www.youtube. com/watch?v=s5PigZzSAJo.

5. ‘Professor Peter Singer’s Thoughts on Syrian Refugee Crisis.’ Princeton TV’s Variety Studio with Evan and Rob, YouTube, 24 November 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v= dVGI1-TDcGc.

6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Books, 2017.

7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1970.

8. Georg Simmel, ‘The Sociological Significance of the "Stranger".’ Introduction to the Science of Sociology, University of Chicago Press, 1921, pp. 322-327.

9. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Seuil, Paris, 2003.

10. Chandrika Parmar, The Pluriverse of Disasters: Knowledge, Mediation and Citizenship. PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2012.