Introduction
Over the past two decades, new historical scholarship has recast the study of the Indian diaspora by reframing the Indian Ocean as an interconnected space. Historians have located overseas Indians within the functioning and development of a wider British imperial system in the region.Footnote 1 They have explored the circulation of ideas, trade, and people in the Indian Ocean before and during colonial times.Footnote 2 Further studies have analysed the diaspora's subjective experience of home, identity, and culture.Footnote 3 Scholars have provided a more refined understanding of diasporas’ relation to homeland and their political imaginary, as well as of diasporas’ roles in the production of new ideas of nationhood, race, solidarity, and belonging.Footnote 4
Several of these historians conclude their works by tracing the ways in which the coming of independence in South and Southeast Asia abruptly terminated the circular migrations of the age of empire. This process, as Amrith has shown, ‘immobilized people that had once been mobile’.Footnote 5 Relying on the public speeches of the prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, these historians regard the end of the circulation of people as the end of the Government of India's involvement with the diaspora. The research below, however, demonstrates that the political and social networks and the ‘imaginative worlds’Footnote 6 that were fundamental to the experience of the diaspora did not disappear once the circular migrations of the age of empire had been halted. At the same time, historians of the Indian diaspora have shown that independence was also the culmination of a longer process of minoritization of Indians in Burma, Ceylon, and elsewhere.Footnote 7 In the pages that follow, we show that this very process of minoritization was not simply foisted on Indians overseas against their will, but was itself the product of a transnational and multi-scalar negotiation, albeit one conducted on the basis of a highly unequal balance of power between the parties. This negotiation mobilized some of the same networks and imaginaries of earlier eras.
From the Indian side of the scholarship, these overseas Indians have been integrated into histories of nationalism and imperialism in the period before 1947. Scholars have uncovered the ways in which the imperial Government of India was called upon to protect the interests of and develop a regime of rights for Indians overseas.Footnote 8 In parallel, the diaspora played an important role in the development of Indian nationalism and helped to foster a certain extraterritorial understanding of India.Footnote 9 Aware of the difficult working conditions and discrimination overseas Indians faced, India's nationalists called for reports on their conditions and, in the 1920s, for these workers to return ‘home’ to India.Footnote 10
In 1947, it was estimated that almost 3.5 million Indians lived outside the subcontinent. The majority of these overseas Indians lived in Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya.Footnote 11 There were 500,000 Indians in Burma and 900,000 in Ceylon, including 750,000 mostly Dalit labourers who worked on tea plantations on the island.Footnote 12 Independent India, therefore, inherited a double nationalist and colonial legacy of responsibility for overseas Indians. Concurring with the scholarship on the diaspora, historians of India have mostly agreed that India quickly abjured this responsibility after independence.
There are several versions of this argument. One claims that, with independence, India's new government adhered to a territorially based understanding of sovereignty and citizenship. India moved to a territorial nationality, which required ‘publicly distancing itself from its long-standing concerns for the condition of its diaspora’.Footnote 13 This meant that overseas Indians had ‘given up their rights of protection from the Indian state’.Footnote 14 Some authors described a ‘dramatic shift in the Congress party's policy’, which moved from being ‘very concerned with the fate of the expatriate Indians’ to ignoring them from 1947 onwards.Footnote 15 A second, more nuanced, assessment notes the fact that overseas Indians remained in place and records their struggles to acquire citizenship, but minimizes the Government of India's role in determining their fate. Latha Varadarajan, for example, has argued that ‘[r]ather than embracing the cause of the Indians abroad … the new leadership instead offered a critique of their comportment in their states of residence, while upholding the sovereign political and economic rights of those states’.Footnote 16 A third version of the story argues that India remained concerned for overseas Indians, but transferred responsibility for their protection to the United Nations (UN).Footnote 17
Examining relations between the Government of India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma in the two decades after independence, this article demonstrates that India neither renounced its responsibility for overseas Indians at independence nor handed it over to the UN. To be sure, representatives of the Government of India, especially the prime minister, publicly reiterated the new country's commitment to a form of ‘hard’ sovereignty that appears to have precluded any action on behalf of overseas Indians. Beyond the level of official rhetoric, however, there were constant demands for the Government of India to act to assist overseas Indians, and it often did so. It worked to help Indians in Burma and Ceylon negotiate claims for citizenship in those countries. It also shaped the institutions and language through which Indians in those countries articulated demands for their rights, whether these were claims for citizenship, representation, or economic welfare.
Uncovering the continued engagement of the Indian government with overseas Indians enables us to make two arguments. The first concerns sovereignty and begins with a methodological intervention. Representatives of the Government of India never spoke explicitly about sovereignty. Consequently, scholars have been left to infer how India understood this concept. Because access to the records of the Ministry of External Affairs has long been restricted, scholars have tended to make these inferences based on the public pronouncements of Jawaharlal Nehru, who, as prime minister and minister for external affairs, directed Indian foreign policy. It is obvious, however, that no state's foreign policy can be understood solely through the public statements of one leader. For that reason, in this article we explore the issue through what we call ‘practices of sovereignty’. Focusing on practice as an expression of sovereignty allows us to examine what was being done by official representatives of the Government of India at various levels and in different locations.Footnote 18
The second facet of this argument concerns the unitary nature of sovereignty. The existing literature on sovereignty in India tends to support the hypothesis of a move towards a Westphalian-type of sovereignty with independence in 1947, even as the idea of Westphalian sovereignty has been subjected to revision elsewhere.Footnote 19 Studies focused on the nature of India's conception of sovereignty can be seen as divided between two camps. One camp argues that India did, at least largely, conform to a model of what has been understood until recently and without complications as the Westphalian nation-state.Footnote 20 The other camp argues that India's post-colonial sovereignty was more complex because of its multilateral engagement.Footnote 21 Both of these camps tend to regard sovereignty as existing on a single plane, whether singular or shared.
The starting point for our study of post-colonial India is the fact that imperial sovereignty was layered. Within the British empire, sovereignty had been shared across multiple tiers of authority, from the imperial centre in London to the capital in New Delhi and the princely states. Independent India not only inherited these layered practices of sovereignty, it reproduced them. While the government may have publicly expressed adherence to a unitary and territorialized form of sovereignty, it simultaneously faced pressures that pulled it in the opposite direction. Those forces tended to derive from pre-existing connections either above or below the nation-state level—connections that were forged during India's time in Britain's imperial system.
Because independent India inherited a set of responsibilities and concerns that existed across multiple layers of sub-national, national, and international politics, this article uses the term ‘post-imperial sovereignty’ to characterize India's complex expressions of sovereignty. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the shift from a world of competing imperialisms to one of nation-states was not straightforward. The international system and its constituent parts are in a constant state of becoming, and the period between the 1940s and the 1960s witnessed a ‘process of struggle between entrenched formations and new forces’.Footnote 22 The very notion of India was born into this struggle: its borders were ill-defined, its responsibilities spread across far-flung spaces, and it was unusually concerned with people. India grappled with these post-imperial problems by working to usher in a new international order. As Indian government representatives, state governments, ambassadors, and high commissioners, as well as ordinary Indians (overseas and at home) negotiated this amorphous and changing world, they articulated conceptions of responsibility and expressions of sovereignty that extended beyond the territorialized nation-state.
Because expressions of sovereignty were not restricted to the space of the nation-state, this had repercussions for practices of citizenship, which brings us to our second argument. Scholarship on citizenship has moved beyond the idea that it is best understood as a legal regime. Instead, citizenship is now regarded as both a set of laws defining citizens’ rights, as well as a set of practices through which citizens make use of those rights. Focusing on partition and its aftermath, this literature in South Asia has traced the struggles that partition refugees faced as they sought recognition as legal citizens and as they endeavoured to exercise their substantive citizenship.Footnote 23 The pages that follow deal with a little-studied aspect of citizenship: the complicated route to de-recognition.Footnote 24 Before 1947, there was a mutual recognition of the responsibility that existed between the Government of India and overseas Indians.Footnote 25 After 1947, the official position was that Indians overseas who chose to adopt the citizenship of their country of residence would no longer be India's responsibility, while those who remained Indian citizens could only be temporary residents elsewhere. Two problems arose from this attempted pivot. First, there was the problem of sorting Indian citizens from non-citizens, a process that was not fully worked out during two decades of negotiations. Secondly, there was the fact of existing ties of recognition between the Government of India and all overseas Indians, regardless of citizenship. We argue below that mutual recognition of responsibility remained between the Government of India and overseas Indians in Ceylon and Burma. This recognition saw the Government of India build institutions in Ceylon and Burma, and shape the ways in which people of Indian origin articulated their claims for rights in these countries.
As it negotiated a changing regime of both sovereignty and citizenship, the Indian government also tried to shape the international norms and rules that would govern the emerging international order. In so doing it articulated universal principles, which simultaneously served India's interests. This was absolutely in accord with the common practice of the time. After all, the Anglo-American system that emerged after the Second World War was cast in the same mould. India sought to instil three norms as it worked through the problem of overseas Indians: first, that the future of non-citizen minorities like overseas Indians ought to be settled through negotiation between states, rather than unilaterally by one of them; second, that the will of the people concerned ought to be paramount, so that they would not be forced to move if they did not wish to; and third, that any laws or rules which applied to non-citizen minorities ought to be non-discriminatory. Moving away from the details of any particular situation, the Government of India tried to elaborate principles that could be universally applied in a way that would serve the interests of Indian communities overseas. India sought to shape international norms by elaborating universal principles.
India's policy towards Indians in Burma and Ceylon can be seen as part of India's larger effort to help overseas Indians fight discrimination after independence. The strategy India adopted as it argued for rights on behalf of overseas Indians was simultaneously multilateral and bilateral. It sought to use international fora to solve their problems on a larger scale. Bhagavan's work on India's case against South Africa at the UN reminds us that India's foreign policy was concerned with the fight against discrimination at the international level. Far from forgetting this long-lasting issue, the Indian government took the lead in addressing it at the UN as early as 1946. It did not, however, uniformly move the issue to the UN for all states. India also sought to use the Commonwealth and the 1947 Asian Relations Conference (ARC) to raise the same problem. Regionally, India attempted to negotiate a solution within an all-Asian regional framework and bilaterally with Ceylon and Burma.
Even as it pursued ambitious multilateral plans, India maintained localized, practical efforts at the regional level. Here, the effects of pressure from below were in evidence. Because the diaspora in Ceylon and Burma retained strong links to India via regular returns, marriages, and remittances, there was a constituency within India, particularly in Madras, that could convey information about what was happening in Ceylon and Burma to New Delhi and call on the central government to act. The Government of India tended to pick up the case only when it could fit the demands within the norms it was articulating about the will of the people and non-discrimination.
Research for this article cobbles together material from the UK National Archives, the British Library, the National Archives of India, as well as published sources and digitized newspapers. The nature of the official archive for the period after independence in India is such that this is necessarily an incomplete and ad hoc set of records. Our collection of resources has its limitations: access to archives related to Myanmar is not easy, and as our own linguistic competencies do not extend to Tamil, we have been unable to explore Tamil sources or the rich linkages of Tamil politics that are only hinted at in the pages below.Footnote 26
This article is divided into four sections. The first situates the question of overseas Indians within its pre-independence context, while the second examines the post-imperial transition. In the third section we analyse how India attempted to find a multilateral solution in different fora—the UN, the Commonwealth, and the ARC. The last section charts how India worked to secure access to citizenship for overseas Indians and to negotiate better conditions for Indians in Ceylon and Burma. In the conclusion we offer some thoughts on whether the patterns set in relations with these two close neighbours were repeated for overseas Indians further afield.
The decade before independence
In the nineteenth century, Indians began to move across the British empire in large numbers as indentured labourers. The Government of India was instrumental in developing this system and was compelled to take cognizance of the welfare of these labourers in their destination countries. Officials took an interest in questions of ‘transport, conditions of service in the countries of immigration, repatriation, and permanent settlement’.Footnote 27 The Government of India not only facilitated migration but also regulated it.Footnote 28 Indentured labour was abolished in 1917, but the government remained attentive in the question of overseas Indians’ welfare, not least because by this time India's nationalists had taken up the issue, and it appointed agents in Ceylon, Malaya, Burma, and South Africa. The role of these agents was ‘to see that the conditions under which Emigration was permitted were carried out’ and to make suggestions on legislation affecting Indian labour.Footnote 29 At home, after Indians were granted significant legislative powers with the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms, an Indian Emigration Act was passed in 1922. That Act included an assurance that Indians would be treated on an equal footing with other British subjects elsewhere.
The Government of India's moves to protect overseas Indians from discrimination came at a time when pressure against them was gathering pace. As South Africa continued to pass discriminatory laws against Indians, India's representatives tried to directly negotiate with its government at a round table conference in Cape Town in 1926–27.Footnote 30 While in the 1920s Ceylon's constitutions had granted equal rights to Indians, the Constitution of 1931 marked the beginning of a process of rolling back the rights of Indians.Footnote 31 Reforms abolished communal electorates (meant to ensure the protection of minorities) and extended universal adult franchise but with literacy, property, and residence qualifications. These changes resulted in decreasing the representation in the legislature and restricting the vote of a large portion of people of Indian origin on the island.Footnote 32 As the effects of the Great Depression tore through Ceylon's economy, many began to argue that removing Indians would provide much needed economic relief for the small island's unemployment problem. At the end of the 1930s Ceylon attempted to completely ban unskilled Indian labourers from immigrating to the country. It also sought to retrench thousands of Indians working in government service in Ceylon and send them home, thereby significantly reducing the size of the island's Indian population.Footnote 33 The Government of India took umbrage at these unilateral measures and negotiated, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the government in Colombo across multiple conferences in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
During these meetings, India articulated a universalist norm against discrimination. Sir G. S. Bajpai,Footnote 34 a frequent member of delegations to conferences on overseas Indians since the 1920s, summed up the Indian Government's position, which was that after a certain period of time spent residing in another territory of the British empire, Indians ‘acquire equality with the indigenous inhabitants of the territory’.Footnote 35 Even as it negotiated with Ceylon, the Government of India remained mindful that any agreement with one territory could have repercussions in others. Bajpai noted that if the Government of India conceded to any limitations on Indians obtaining full citizenship rights in Ceylon, ‘we open the door to similar claims all over the British Commonwealth of Nations’.Footnote 36
In Burma the response to the economic crises of the 1930s was similar.Footnote 37 In contrast with the Ceylon case, however, the Government of India did reach an agreement with Burma to restrict Indian immigration there. While Ceylon had taken unilateral action, the Government of Burma invited India to bilateral talks on the question, which opened in the monsoon season of 1941. Burma's delegation to the talks was led by the premier U Saw, who was careful to note that Indian landowners and labourers had been welcomed when the population of the country was scant. During the Depression, however, a class of Burmese had emerged who neither owned land nor were able to find employment ‘owing to competition from non-Burman labour’.Footnote 38 Riots between Indians and Burmese in 1938 added a sense of urgency to how the presence of Indians in Burma was problematized. In 1941 the two governments agreed to ‘regulate and restrict’ Indian immigration to Burma, with a system of passports, visas for temporary entry, and permits for employment and longer residence.Footnote 39
Although the war ensured that the pact was never implemented,Footnote 40 negotiations over the accord provided an opportunity for the two to agree to what the governments called ‘principles’ that underpinned their discussions on overseas Indians. The first was that the Government of Burma had ‘the right to determine the composition of [its] own population’. The second was that ‘Indians who have wholly identified themselves with the interests of Burma should enjoy the same rights as members of the permanent population’.Footnote 41 One might add a third principle, which can be inferred from the practice of negotiation: the norm that these decisions ought to be made in consultation, rather than unilaterally.
In parallel, the Indian National Congress (INC) deepened its links with the diaspora, first in Ceylon and then in Burma.Footnote 42 In July 1939, as Ceylon announced a raft of measures against Indians, Jawaharlal Nehru travelled across the Palk Strait on a goodwill mission. Described as an ‘ambassador’ by the press, Nehru tried to persuade the Government of Ceylon that ‘there should always be full consultation with each other before any action was taken’ which might affect Indians.Footnote 43 Although he was unable to put together a solution to the complex problem of Indian labour during his brief visit, he did succeed in persuading Indian leaders in Ceylon to form a single political body to represent their interests. Nehru was said to have drafted the Constitution of the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC), according to which, it was reported, the new party ‘will have more or less the same ideals as the Indian National Congress’.Footnote 44
The transition to a new, nationalist-led interim government in September 1946 did not put an end to the pre-independence concern for Indians abroad that the INC and its leaders had publicly manifested, nor did it sever links with the CIC. In November 1946, Nehru evoked specific measures for India to stay in contact with overseas Indians and check on their wellbeing.Footnote 45 At the legislative assembly in 1947, he mentioned again that the government wished to send ‘missions to keep in touch with our people there, bring us data and help in establishing closer relations with them’.Footnote 46
While the CIC had been founded nearly a decade before independence, the All-Burma Indian Conference (later Congress) was established in December 1947, barely a week before Burma celebrated its independence. B. N. Rau, the constitutional adviser to the Government of India, opened the conference in Rangoon.Footnote 47 In terms of both rhetoric and institutions, the independent Government of India was not so much abjuring responsibility for these overseas Indians as setting relations on a new footing.
The post-imperial transition: Overseas Indians and citizenship
During the colonial period, the Government of India and the Indian National Congress had recognized overseas Indians as a constituency that could legitimately claim their attention and support. They had also elaborated principles and founded institutions for the exercise of this responsibility. This recognition had been reciprocated, as overseas Indians looked to institutions, politicians, and governments back in India to help them define and defend their interests in Burma and Ceylon. For as long as India was part of the British empire, Indians of all stripes could appeal to the higher imperial authorities to help them exercise influence over Burma and Ceylon. Indeed, in the final decade of imperial rule, Britain appointed various commissions and investigations to try to propose a solution to what was called the ‘problem’ of overseas Indians in Burma and Ceylon.Footnote 48 Moreover, while Indians remained British subjects, they possessed what Nehru called ‘a kind of dual nationality’Footnote 49 which prevented them from being rendered stateless by the actions of another colonial territory.
The British declaration in 1947 that they would be departing from their South Asian empire removed a layer of sovereign authority from the equation. It also began a transition to national regimes of citizenship, outside of the umbrella of British subjecthood. The ‘kind of dual nationality’ that had prevailed under the British empire did not require the rigid demarcation between Indian citizens and non-citizens, nor, for most who travelled, did it necessitate passports. The new regime would require both. In this new context, overseas Indians could be vulnerable to unilateral expulsion or subject to discriminatory legislation. Indeed, Burma and Ceylon both moved in this direction in the late 1940s.
Historians studying these new national regimes of citizenship have tended to argue that India adopted a territorialized and restricted form of citizenship.Footnote 50 However, if citizenship is understood as a form of recognition and a set of practices, then the Government of India's official position on overseas Indians was more complex than previous scholars have acknowledged. Because dual citizenship was not ever seriously countenanced in post-imperial South Asia, the Government of India had to begin to try to parse citizens from non-citizens. Those who claimed Indian citizenship would have to obtain Indian passports and would have their ability to travel and work outside of India curtailed. For those who wished to stay where they had migrated, the Government of India's official position was ‘Indian settlers abroad should identify themselves, as far as possible, with the interests of the nationals of the country of their adoption and really become part and parcel of its national life’ so as to be able to claim citizenship of their adopted country. For India, it followed that Indian settlers ‘should not suffer from racial inequality’ and so should be granted citizenship or rights equal to citizens in their adopted countries.Footnote 51
There were several ways in which the task of demarcating citizens from aliens was complicated. First, Indian representatives repeatedly visited overseas Indians and urged them to act as ‘ambassadors’ for India, blurring the simple division of this population into citizens and aliens.Footnote 52 As late as 1959, the president of India Rajendra Prasad visited Ceylon, where he addressed a gathering of Indians there. Using the term ‘ambassador’ to describe Indians living in Ceylon, Prasad told his audience, ‘I request you to do this—nay, as President of India, I order you to do your best to help the country you live in. It is in this way you will help yourselves and your motherland best.’Footnote 53 In a world with unitary understandings of sovereignty and citizenship, the statement is nonsensical. But the president's order makes sense as an expression of a layered understanding of sovereignty. In this conception, loyalty could be demanded and professed at several levels and across multiple spaces.
Secondly, separating citizens from others was complicated by pressure from below in India. Many Indians viewed the treatment of Indians in Burma, Ceylon, or South Africa with dismay, and demanded their government act, regardless of their legal status. As one letter to the Times of India put it, ‘If Indians are illtreated because they are Indians, then we must protect them because they are Indians.’Footnote 54 In some ways this was merely a continuation of the recognition that had been established during the colonial period. That the Government of India felt compelled to conduct its foreign policy with a mind to respecting these demands is evidence of the importance of sub-national actors in Indian foreign relations in this layered practice of sovereignty.
Thirdly, and most importantly, Indians overseas simply refused to sort themselves into discrete groups by making a declaration of nationality. This problem was recognized even before Indian independence. In 1946, the civil servant R. N. Banerjee wrote to R. T. Chari, the secretary to the representative of the Government of India in Ceylon, that they both knew that ‘a very large number of Indians would not be prepared to make any such declaration’.Footnote 55 The same was true in Burma. Often those who did choose to take up another nationality found that countries did not always accept their claims. While India was happy to take responsibility for its citizens and renounce it for those who took up a different nationality, there was an enormous group of people who did not fit into either category, but with whom India had historic ties of recognition and responsibility. The problem of overseas Indians at independence, therefore, entailed sorting those with Indian nationality from those without it, and also ensuring that those overseas Indians who wished to claim rights in other countries, including the right to citizenship and nationality, were not discriminated against.
Negotiating multilateral citizenship
Around the time of independence, India attempted to craft a multilateral solution to the problem of overseas Indians. To a certain extent, this was in line with pre-independence approaches of both the colonial Government of India and of anti-colonial leaders, who ensured that negotiations on the issue of overseas Indians in different countries tended to be treated as a single topic in imperial conferences. In the 1920s, Indian nationalists had also leveraged ideas of imperial citizenship and used early international organizations to promote protections for overseas communities.Footnote 56 In 1946, India's interim government retained a similarly global perspective. One key difference with the pre-independence era, however, was that the postwar/decolonization moment opened a window of opportunity to shape and promote a new order through international norms—a possibility India was keenly aware of.Footnote 57 This global possibility paralleled and intersected with the development of a post-colonial legal order through national constitution-making.Footnote 58 The Indian government made several attempts to forge a consensus on new norms that would have ensured equality of treatment for overseas Indians. Its representatives promoted common and general principles and mechanisms on minorities, as well as individuals’ and citizens’ rights, which they hoped would be agreed on and recognized at the UN (1946), the Commonwealth (1947–49), and the Asian Relations Conference (1947).
At the UN, as is well-known, India was the first state to refer a case against another UN member to challenge its discriminatory policies. In June 1946, it requested that the Agenda of the General Assembly include the treatment of Indians in South Africa.Footnote 59 Its case challenged Article 2.7 of the UN Charter, since Indians were nationals of South Africa, by arguing that the treatment of Indians was not a domestic issue, but an international one. Subsequently, in 1947–48, India promoted a strong UN human rights regime, again partly to protect overseas Indians against discrimination through the UN system. Hansa Mehta, India's delegate to the Human Rights Commission, promoted ambitious proposals to implement and enforce human rights, for the binding character of these rights, and for a right of petition by individuals and organizations, which would have enabled overseas Indians to defend themselves through the UN.Footnote 60
The Asian Relations Conference of March–April 1947 gave India another opportunity to try to craft a multilateral solution to the problem of overseas Indians. This conference is usually depicted as an early Indian initiative to boost Asia and India's international standing after the Second World War. It has been seen as the ‘inaugural act of [the] vision’ of Nehru's foreign policy and the origin of the ‘Third World’.Footnote 61 Nehru introduced the conference by reflecting on internationalism and on how to reconnect the people of Asia after the isolation of colonialism.Footnote 62 For all the symbolism of this gathering, the topics discussed in the groups addressed very concrete issues shared by Asian neighbours.Footnote 63
Thus, the group on Racial Problems and Inter-Asian Migration discussed issues pertaining directly to overseas Indians. As a contemporary commentator noted, its discussion topic was ‘of absorbing interest’ to delegates since ‘[e]verywhere in the East [were] great settlements of immigrants—Indians in Ceylon, Indians and Chinese in Burma and Malaya, Chinese in Siam, Indians and Chinese in Indo-China, Chinese in Indonesia’.Footnote 64 The conference is often presented as the moment when a new Asian order took shape along strict territorial national lines as opposed to a past fluidity of belonging and movement. It is usually emphasized that delegates agreed that states had the right to determine their population and limit immigration. It has been argued that this group's discussion therefore illustrated their ‘acceptance of the nation-state model’, proving that India ‘[reterritorialized] itself unambiguously’ and broke from a more expansive and less territorial notion of itself.Footnote 65
Yet, proceedings show that the topic of discrimination against minorities abroad was a central part of that discussion, and that the conversation was led by Indian delegates. At the round table, speaking first,Footnote 66 they developed the idea of an inclusive and non-discriminatory framework for minorities in Asia. Unlike India's argument at the UN in 1946, they framed the question as an inter-state issue.Footnote 67 Thus, K. M. Panikkar, Indian delegate and vice-chairman of the group, adopted a ‘very legalistic and theoretical view of the problem of immigrants’, which he called ‘non-citizen groups’.Footnote 68 After asserting a state's right to ‘determine the future composition of its nationhood’, another Indian delegate formulated India's second proposition: non-citizen groups should be equal before the law even though they would not be able to claim political rights in the country in which they lived.Footnote 69 In this argument, these two principles went necessarily hand-in-hand. More specifically, Indian delegates enunciated three criteria by which to judge a government's ‘dealings with races’: equality before the law, religious equality, and the absence of public social discrimination.Footnote 70 As the group moved on to debate ‘ways and means to eliminate racial conflicts and promote understanding’,Footnote 71 they sought to forge a consensus on these principles by making ‘concrete suggestions’:
First, discriminatory legislation should as far as possible be prevented. Secondly, the non-citizen permanent alien groups which have so far cropped up as a direct result of British imperialism should be eliminated from the countries where they are numerous by offering citizenship rights to them or treating them as aliens come there on temporary business. Thirdly, political parties should be non-racial and non-communal in composition and should be based purely on economic principles. Fourthly, all countries should take steps to assimilate the non-indigenous groups in them.Footnote 72
Those principles constituted India's proposal for an all-Asian framework that it hoped would solve the problem of overseas Indians. Significantly, Burmese and Indian delegates stressed that aliens should be assimilated ‘in due course of time because permanent aliens would continue to be under the diplomatic protection of their mother country’.Footnote 73 They seemed to put the onus on the states, rather than on communities, by arguing that the ‘home’ state still had a responsibility towards these overseas populations.
The summary of the discussion took on board India's suggestion that countries had an ‘absolute right to limit immigration, but this limitation should be based on the principle of non-discrimination’—at least among Asians.Footnote 74 The principles ‘which should govern the relations of different racial groups in all Asian countries’ corresponded to what Indians had proposed at the beginning of the discussion.Footnote 75 An internal Indian report acknowledged that,Footnote 76 and highlighted that there was ‘consensus of opinion that—(i) the total assimilation of the present non-citizen groups within the citizenship of the country of sojourn is desirable and should be expedited; and (ii) for the future each country should be free to frame its own immigration laws as it liked, subject only to the consideration that they should be reasonable and non-discriminatory’.Footnote 77 This Indian activism at the ARC reveals how India strived to reshape the concept of citizenship after independence.
However, the proposal faced resistance from Ceylon. Just as a newspaper noticed that ‘the principles and views enunciated there go to the roots of Indo-Ceylon relations’,Footnote 78 so did Ceylonese delegates. Accordingly, Solomon Bandaranaike, the left-leaning Sinhalese leader and future prime minister, reacted negatively and proved to be the ‘only strong dissenter’ from the Indian view. He rejected the idea that ‘the entire non-citizen group now existing in Ceylon could or should be absorbed’.Footnote 79 He further accused the Tamil members of his delegation of ‘speaking against his own and his Government's majority view’.Footnote 80 Ceylonese Tamils (and Indian Burmese) were part of the Burma and Ceylon delegations. Apparently providing proof positive of Sinhala fears about the loyalty of Indian Tamils, during the discussion of the report, one Indian Tamil delegate for Ceylon, Mr Naganathan, voiced his agreement with India's position.Footnote 81 Bandaranaike sought to defeat India's proposal on procedural grounds: he argued that, as the conference was informal, ‘it would not be proper to lay down that the opinions expressed in the Group reports should be followed up by measures to give effect to them’. The conference was not meant to ‘go into the internal affairs of any country’ and ‘call upon governments of participating countries to give effect to its conclusions’.Footnote 82
Bandaranaike's procedural remarks set off an argument over the purpose of the conference and the future of the conclusions reached by its delegates. Interestingly, the Indian delegation proved to be divided on this point. On one side, Leilamani Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit advocated a stronger form of action.Footnote 83 Pandit, Nehru's sister, argued that ‘the purpose of the Conference would be defeated if a specific recommendation were not made to all governments to act in accordance with the principles accepted by the Conference’.Footnote 84 On the other side, two delegates linked to the Indian Council of World Affairs, the organizing body of the ARC, informed Pandit that her position was not sustainable.Footnote 85 She insisted, however, connecting the discussions at the ARC to the resolution she had spearheaded in 1946 in the UN General Assembly against South Africa's racial discrimination: ‘Would it not be anomalous […] if we talked loudly on race in the United Nations without being able to recommend measures to Governments in our own Asian Conference?’Footnote 86 However, Bandaranaike opposed this interpretation and he prevailed. The Plenary Session adopted the Rapporteur's report, in which common principles for citizenship across Asia were absent.
On a third multilateral front, the Indian government sought to protect overseas Indians against racial discrimination through its negotiations with the Commonwealth. Between 1947 and 1949, republican India strived to negotiate a common Commonwealth citizenship as a basis of its new relation to the organization.Footnote 87 This conception of citizenship would have allowed Indians to benefit from reciprocal rights within the Commonwealth, which theoretically would have ended their discrimination in the Dominions.
Thus, according to Alan Campbell-Johnson,Footnote 88 Nehru first suggested ‘an Anglo-Indian union involving nothing less than common citizenship’ when he met Lord Mountbatten, India's last viceroy, in March 1947.Footnote 89 Subsequently, at the 1948 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Nehru told the ministers that his government could consider ‘some link with the Commonwealth … on [the] basis of a Commonwealth nationality on reciprocal footing’, which would involve ‘dual nationality’.Footnote 90 Along these lines, on 28 October 1948 Nehru wrote to the British prime minister Clement Attlee to propose a formula which specified, among other things, ‘In any fresh legislation or treaties Commonwealth countries would not be treated as foreign states or their citizens as foreigners.’Footnote 91
A ‘Ten-Point Memorandum’ restated India's proposals and described further what a common citizenship within the Commonwealth might mean for the Indian government: first, ‘[making] Indian nationals Commonwealth citizens, and the nationals of any Commonwealth country Commonwealth citizens when they are in India’, on a reciprocal basis, through the UK Nationality Act. Second, India could ‘make use of any other Commonwealth country's Ambassador or Minister’ in states where it had no representation, and this arrangement would be on a reciprocal basis. Third, to ‘[fulfil] the obligations of the Crown towards Commonwealth citizens other than Indian nationals the President of the Indian Republic may at the request of the Crown act on behalf of the King within the territories of India’, and a ‘similar arrangement on a reciprocal basis [would] apply to Indian nationals in the rest of the Commonwealth’.Footnote 92 On the last point, Attlee understood that the king ‘would act as the President's representative for the protection of Indian citizens in the United Kingdom’ and ‘where India maintained no separate diplomatic representation, the diplomatic protection of Indian citizens would be undertaken by the diplomatic representatives of other Commonwealth countries’.Footnote 93 When G. S. Bajpai, the secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs, discussed India's proposals with Dominions’ representatives and Britain in November 1948, he confirmed that, for Nehru, the king would be ‘the custodian of human rights’.Footnote 94 Thus, without doubt, India envisioned the mechanism of a common citizenship to protect overseas Indians. Until the last moment of negotiations at the 1949 Conference of the Commonwealth Prime Ministers, Nehru proposed the same formula. At that point, India also accepted continued membership and the king as the symbol of the association of Commonwealth countries.Footnote 95
This proposal of citizenship would have been ‘something between nationality and the status of an alien’.Footnote 96 As such, it represented both a reactualization of older Indian demands of imperial citizenship in the empire and an attempt to radically reconfigure a post-colonial order along new normative lines, closer to the interests of both India and its overseas communities. However, in the face of the Dominions’ opposition, India came to accept Commonwealth membership without common citizenship.
Representation, citizenship, and property
Even while proposing these ambitious multilateral imaginations of citizenship, the Government of India was also pressing for more modest solutions at the bilateral level. It did this as the relatively free circulations of people which had characterized the region in the colonial period were choked off: a permit system and then passports were introduced in states across South Asia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, requiring people to claim a nationality and then gain permission to move across the new borders.Footnote 97 Passports for travel to Ceylon were required from 1949, and for Burma from 1950.Footnote 98 In the case of both Burma and Ceylon, as they began to restrict the movement of people, and even tried to expel people of Indian origin, the Government of India remained engaged with the problems of overseas Indians in both countries across three broad areas: citizenship, representation, and property.
Citizenship
One of the central problems concerning overseas Indians was legal citizenship, especially the process of guiding individuals who had had no need for passports or travel documents under the British empire towards obtaining citizenship, passports, and travel permits. Far from abjuring any responsibility for overseas Indians, the Government of India worked for decades to sort nationals from non-nationals, and also to help non-nationals secure their position in their host countries. This was a complex process that involved Indian officials in the lives of citizens, aliens, and stateless persons.
In the transition to independence, Burma and India seemed to seek mutually agreed solutions to the movement of people between the two countries. For its part, India had welcomed large numbers of evacuees from Burma (both Burmese and Indian) during the Second World War, and it took responsibility for restricting the movement of Indian evacuees back to Burma after the war had ended. To avoid exacerbating the unemployment problem in the country as it recovered, the Government of India undertook to ban Indian ‘evacuee unskilled labour’ from returning to Burma in the aftermath of the war.Footnote 99 Adhering to the ideal of consultation established during the war, in the early months of 1947 the Government of Burma had sent the Government of India a draft of an Emergency Immigration Bill for comment. However, by June 1947, Burma's newly formed Constituent Assembly had passed an Emergency Immigration Act, which prohibited anyone except ‘a British subject domiciled in the United Kingdom’ from entering Burma without a visa or a permit.Footnote 100 This act was ‘very different’ to the draft India had seen.Footnote 101
Soon after the Act was passed, sub-national groups in India began to raise a hue and cry about the provisions of the legislation in Burma. The president of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, M. A. Master, said Burma's immigration rules were ‘a matter to be deeply deplored’, while the honourable secretary of the Rice Conference of India, Burma, and Ceylon, Mahomed Husein Basham Premji, warned that new legislation would ‘cause serious misgivings’ regarding the future of relations between the two countries.Footnote 102 The following year, the Madras Legislative Assembly passed resolutions calling on Prime Minister Nehru to ‘use his influence’ to persuade the Government of Burma to amend the legislation.Footnote 103
In these early years, non-officials were not yet echoing the Government of India's language to make their case. Instead, there were simple appeals on behalf of Indian interests. M. A. Master alleged that the legislation ‘deprived Indians of their legitimate rights to proceed to Burma’ and worried it would deal a ‘severe blow to their interests’.Footnote 104 Equally, the leader of the Madras Legislative Assembly, P. Subbaroyan, spoke of the house's ‘duty to safeguard their interests’.Footnote 105 For its part, the Government of India protested that, although it had ‘never questioned the right of the Government of Burma to enact legislation intended to restrict immigration into Burma’, such legislation ‘should be based on a bi-lateral agreement between the two countries…and that there should be no legislation in advance of such an agreement’.Footnote 106
The new citizenship regime in Burma required Indians to apply for citizenship, or to hold an Indian passport and obtain a permit to remain in Burma. Within a decade of Burma's independence, an estimated 40,000 Indians had applied for Burmese citizenship.Footnote 107 For those who were required to obtain a residence permit to remain in Burma, the All-Burma Indian Congress helped them make this application. However, the cost of this permit was raised to 50 kyats per year in 1957.Footnote 108 With a rough exchange rate of one kyat to one Indian rupee, the price was prohibitively high for many of the poorer Indian labourers in Burma. Indeed, it emerged in 1959 that around 12,000 cultivators, descendants of a group who had migrated from Bihar in the late nineteenth century and resided in the Zeyawaddy area of Taungoo district, were facing prosecution for failing to register for residence permits. India's ambassador to Burma, Lalji Mehrotra, visited the area, promised a house-to-house census, and took up the matter with the Government of Burma to ensure that these Biharis were not prosecuted for not having the proper paperwork to remain in Burma.Footnote 109 More than a decade after the independence of the two countries, we find Indian representatives travelling to Burma to help Indians comply with Burma's immigration laws. What we witness here is the continued practice of recognition of and responsibility for Indians abroad.
Although the legal provisions for citizenship in Burma and Ceylon were similar—both instituted jus sanguinis citizenship combined with the possibility of naturalization by registration after a period of residence in the country—Ceylon pursued a much more aggressive policy against Indians in the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this period, Ceylon's government pursued what it called ‘Ceylonization’, working to oust Indians and Pakistanis from sectors one by one.Footnote 110 As early as September 1948, workers in the country who could not produce a certificate of birth on the island were being ‘discharged’ from their employment.Footnote 111 The process was slowest on tea plantations, where the majority of Indians worked, and the government focused on ousting clerical and technical workers of Indian origin, while retaining Indian labourers.Footnote 112
In the same period, Ceylon's legislature passed a raft of legislation designed to restrict movement into the country and to encourage people of Indian origin to leave. The Ceylon Immigrants and Emigrants Act, passed in 1948, required foreigners to hold passports and obtain visas or permits to enter or work in the country. As with the other measures, an exemption was made for labourers on plantations, the largest population of Indians in the country: they could travel with documentation from the superintendent of an estate.Footnote 113 The following year, the Indian and Pakistani Residents Citizenship Act in theory provided a route to citizenship for Indians and Pakistanis in Ceylon, but in practice restricted the ability of people of Indian or Pakistani origin to claim citizenship by instituting a minimum income requirement, by requiring ‘uninterrupted’ residence in Ceylon for a period of seven to ten years, or by insisting that claims to citizenship be validated by documentary evidence. In a context in which work was irregular, labourers moved across the Indian Ocean regularly, births were rarely registered with authorities, and paperwork relating to migration, employment, and education was rarely kept, these provisions made it extremely difficult for Indians and Pakistanis to claim citizenship in Ceylon.Footnote 114 The government did not hide the fact that its aim was to reduce the number of people of Indian origin in the country, and to restrict the rights of those who remained, in particular by keeping them from voting.
As the new citizenship regime emerged, it left an estimated 900,000 overseas Indians in Ceylon in an indeterminate state: they had to apply for citizenship of either India or Ceylon. The Ceylon government contended that these people, regardless of the fact that many were second or third generation migrants, were Indian citizens. In practice, the Government of India generally accepted the applications of those who applied for Indian citizenship, even though its official position was that it was under no obligation to do so.Footnote 115 The high commissioner in Colombo stressed that applications for Indian citizenship had to be ‘wholly voluntary’, again underlining India's insistence on abiding by the will of the person concerned.Footnote 116 He received instructions from New Delhi that ‘documentary evidence’ proving the applicant fulfilled the requirements of Indian nationality ‘need not be insisted on’, and the high commissioner should consider the application of anyone wishing to voluntarily return to India ‘leniently’.Footnote 117
The sticking point was those who applied for citizenship of Ceylon, because its government was not keen to accept them. For this group, the Government of India's position was that they would be ‘stateless’. While this has been interpreted as a sign of the Indian government's abandonment of overseas Indians, the opposite is in fact the case: this political position put pressure on the government in Colombo to accept the presence of Indians on the island. Crucially, it came at the recommendation of prominent members of the Tamil community and the Ceylon Indian Congress (CIC). The president of the CIC, S. Thondaman, repeatedly described Indians on the island as being in a state of ‘imposed statelessness’, and argued that their status could only be remedied by the Government of Ceylon accepting them as citizens.Footnote 118 C. C. Desai, high commissioner for India in Ceylon, noted that several prominent Tamil politicians had recommended this course of action, including Senator S. Nadesan, and two members of parliament, C. Suntharalingam and G. G. Ponnambalam, who was also president of the Ceylon Tamil Congress.Footnote 119 The Government of India's representatives in Ceylon recognized, consulted, and coordinated with these individuals and organizations, even as they made the case that the problem of stateless people on the island was, in the words of S. Thondaman, ‘Ceylon's domestic problem … which must be solved in a democratic manner without twisting it as an international problem.’Footnote 120 This was a delicate dance, in which Indian representatives coordinated with overseas Indians to demand the Government of Ceylon grant them rights as citizens of Ceylon.
The dance continued throughout the 1950s, across an agreement between the two premiers Jawaharlal Nehru and John Kotelawala in the early part of 1954, which was meant to resolve the problem. According to the Nehru-Kotelawala Pact, the 900,000 Indians in Ceylon were to apply for citizenship of the country of their choice. Kotelawala committed his country to trying to review all applications within two years. It was also agreed that those who received Ceylon citizenship would go on an electoral register and be allowed to vote in elections, while those who did not would be entered on a separate roll. The Pact included provisions allowing the Ceylon government to provide ‘inducements’ for people of Indian origin to seek Indian citizenship.Footnote 121
When, after a few months, it became clear that Ceylon was rejecting more than 75 per cent of applicants, New Delhi expressed its ‘deep concern’ about how Ceylon was interpreting its own citizenship law. The Government of India's complaint alleged that, ‘Most of the rejections … have been on purely technical or legalistic grounds such as failure to spell names properly.’Footnote 122 While the official position was that Ceylon had the absolute right to determine its citizens, the Government of India insisted that this right be negotiated, and it monitored the implementation of Ceylon's laws and inserted itself into the process when it felt the procedures were unfair.
The final chapter in the saga of the stateless Indians opened after Nehru's death, when Lal Bahadur Shastri negotiated an agreement with Sirimayo Bandaranaike which covered people of Indian origin without citizenship. According to the new accord, India promised to grant citizenship to 525,000 people of Indian origin, while Ceylon was to take 300,000 of them, leaving a further 150,000 whose status would be the subject of ongoing negotiations. Repatriation of Indian citizens was set to take place over 15 years. The Government of India set aside Rs 37 crore (Rs 370 million) to rehabilitate the repatriates, and dusted off resettlement schemes from the era of the partition refugee crisis, hoping to settle these new citizens in Dandakaranya, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and other parts of the country in need of labour.Footnote 123 Once again, sub-national pressures affected this decision: the Government of Madras, eager to colonize the Nicobar islands, had been pressing the Government of India since 1959 to repatriate estate labour from Ceylon to help with this project.Footnote 124
In sum, India did not simply adopt a territorialized approach to citizenship in 1947. Instead, officials in New Delhi, as well as official representatives on the ground, engaged in a decades-long negotiation on behalf of all overseas Indians, whether they were citizens or not. While different rhetorical strategies were used in the period up until Nehru's death in May 1964, India's focus was on determining the will of the persons concerned and insisting that Indians should not be coerced into leaving the country in which they resided. India remained actively engaged with overseas Indians, even as it tried to secure for them citizenship or at least residency rights in Burma or Ceylon. This was complemented by layered expressions of sovereignty, which recognized legitimate representatives below the level of the nation-state.
Representation
Indians helped establish the organizations that represented overseas Indians in Burma and Ceylon, shaped the claims that they made on their host governments, and strategized with them on how best to fight their corner. We have seen that in 1939 Jawaharlal Nehru helped establish the Ceylon Indian Congress. After independence, the strong connection between the two Congresses remained. V. V. Giri, while serving as high commissioner for India in Ceylon in the late 1940s, attended the annual sessions of the CIC, where, along with other prominent Indian visitors, including the former premier of Madras T. Prakasam and the Kashmiri politician Shaffi Mohammed, he hoisted the tricolour and sang ‘Bande Mataram’.Footnote 125 After the All-Burma Indian Conference (later Congress) was established in December 1947,Footnote 126 it received visits and messages of support from Indian leaders. For example, in 1954, Nehru sent a telegram to the Congress's annual session urging the Indians of Burma to be ‘ambassadors of India’ and to work for ‘friendly and cooperative relations between the peoples of the two countries’.Footnote 127
The purposes of these Congresses were decidedly ambiguous. On the one hand, they were a mechanism through which the will of the Indian people in Burma and Ceylon could be ascertained and conveyed to the governments of these countries. Nehru explained to his high commissioner in Ceylon K. P. Kesava Menon, ‘we have recognized them as representatives of the great mass of Indians in Ceylon’.Footnote 128 Beyond the question of representation, the question of influence was more nuanced. Because these Congresses were separate organizations, the Government of India's official position was that it had no influence over them. And yet, members of the CIC, for example, openly sought advice from the Government of India. Indeed, Nehru would advise the high commissioner in Colombo during a particularly tense period on the island that, ‘it must not be made to appear to the Ceylon government that there are differences between us and that our advice has not been accepted by the Ceylon Congress’.Footnote 129
As Indians in Ceylon and Burma navigated the new nationalist regimes’ rules, the demands made by the bodies that represented Indians tended to reflect the Government of India's positions and priorities. Thus, as Burma drafted its rules for democratic representation, the All-Burma Indian Congress declared it would not seek ‘any particular constitutional privilege or position’, echoing the Indian National Congress's dislike of separate electorates. Meanwhile, the Government of Burma declared that it would ‘afford members of the Indian community equal opportunities … in securing representation in the Parliament’ and promised to take ‘special care’ to look after minority interests.Footnote 130 That the ruling party would see that minorities were represented and their interests protected was precisely the position of the Indian National Congress.
In Ceylon, there was not such comity of views. Instead, the Government in Colombo sought to disenfranchise some 200,000 Indians, removing their right to vote by declaring them non-nationals. In response, in the summer of 1952, the CIC launched a satyagraha ‘to secure the removal of all discriminatory legislation against the Indian Community in Ceylon’. The demand clearly echoed the Government of India's language of non-discrimination. Moreover, the CIC opened its membership to ‘all communities irrespective of caste, creed or race’.Footnote 131 As it braced for the start of the movement, the Government of Ceylon sent a note to the Government of India, delivered via the high commissioner Kesava Menon, in which it recorded that ‘it would be appropriate for the Government of India to persuade the [Ceylon Indian] Congress to call off the satyagraha’.Footnote 132 Although the Indian government declined to do so, the key point to note is that both governments recognized the relationship between the CIC and the Government of India. Underscoring this connection, during the course of negotiations later in the year about draft legislation on the matter, a delegation from the CIC travelled to Delhi to meet prominent members of the government.Footnote 133
In other words, far from renouncing all obligations to overseas Indians, independent India continued to recognize institutional mechanisms for maintaining contact. Its responsibility extended to advising overseas Indians on the language to use and the strategies to adopt when making their case to the governments of Burma and Ceylon. In this layered practice of sovereignty, India's expression of sovereignty extended to the sub-national recognition of representative bodies of overseas Indians in other countries, which responsibility included helping them to realize their rights against the government of their host country.
Property
The third area where the Government of India took responsibility for overseas Indians concerned property. As the new regime of citizenship emerged, Indians outside of the elevated circles of the Ministry of External Affairs in the Government of India staked a claim to the wealth of Ceylon and Burma, citing the contribution of Indians to the development of each country.Footnote 134 At the sub-national level, therefore, Indian expressions of sovereignty extended to the wealth of Indians outside of India. When the property rights of people of Indian origin in Burma or Ceylon were threatened or curtailed, the Government of India took up the case.
For example, the Government of Ceylon repeatedly put restrictions on remittances from Indians in Ceylon to their families in India. Many plantation workers were married to women back in South India and educated their children there too, so when they could not send money home, their families felt the pinch. In 1949, as part of their campaign to deny Indians a claim to stay on the island, the Government of Ceylon required those who wished to remit money to India to obtain a permit to do so. In order to acquire the permit, those sending money had to declare themselves a temporary resident of Ceylon. But doing so would disqualify these Indians from making any claim to citizenship of Ceylon.Footnote 135 The rule initially applied to all Sterling Area nationals except Britons.Footnote 136 The Government of India seized on this fact to allege that the policy was discriminatory. While acknowledging that Ceylon had every right to place controls on its currency, the high commissioner warned that such controls ‘should not be used as a means of driving out the Indian nationals from Ceylon’.Footnote 137 Ceylon responded to these allegations by altering the policy so that it covered Britons as well. The result was a somewhat back-handed victory for India: it won the argument on discrimination, but was not able to lift the burden of the new policy from Indians in Ceylon.
In Burma, the Government of India was moved to protect propertied interests more than once. After independence, Burma's new government pursued a progressive plan of land reforms, which included acquisition of land with limited compensation, restrictions on the sale and transfer of land, as well as limits on rent. This programme affected Nakarattar Chettiar landowners, originally from Madras.Footnote 138 A deputation of Indian landowners in Burma visited the governor of Madras in October 1948 to plead for India to act on their behalf. They declared that they ‘would be agreeable to any settlement regarding compensation which the Government of India would consider reasonable and equitable’. The governor agreed to take the matter up with the Government of India.Footnote 139
Eventually, in the middle of 1950, a delegation, headed by the Indian ambassador to Burma, M. A. Raud, travelled to Rangoon to negotiate with Thakin Nu's government. The Indian representatives made it clear that they ‘heartily endorsed the scheme of nationalisation’, but were keen to ensure greater compensation for landlords.Footnote 140 India's position therefore centred on the question of discrimination against Indian landlords. Shortly after Raud had visited Burma, a return delegation visited India, with Thakin Maung, the leader of the delegation, assuring the press that, ‘All landlords in Burma, irrespective of their nationality, would be treated on the same footing for the purpose of land nationalisation.’Footnote 141 When the Land Nationalisation Act of 1948 was replaced in 1953 with a bill allowing for reduced compensation, the Chettiars organized again. By this time they and their advocates in India had adopted the language of non-discrimination. The South India Chamber of Congress sent a telegram to Nehru to complain: ‘The Bill is discriminatory because the compensation of one year's land revenue mentioned in it mostly affects Indians.’Footnote 142 Here again, it is evident that the norm of non-discrimination was gaining widespread purchase in this period, even if just as a rhetorical device.
Finally, when Ne Win's Union Revolutionary Council took power in 1962 and initiated a programme of mass nationalization, up to 20,000 businessmen and small traders of Indian origin were affected. In 1964, the government announced that all foreign property would be nationalized and that all those with a Foreigners’ Registration Certificate would have to leave the country. When the issue was raised in India's Lok Sabha, Dinesh Singh, the deputy minister of external affairs, promised that ‘the Government of India are fully alive to the seriousness of this problem’, and noted that they had liberalized customs measures and put on extra boats and more flights from Burma to assist people who were fleeing the country. But, he concluded, ‘All these measures that have been taken … are not directed against Indians as such but are applied to the foreigners in Burma.’Footnote 143 In other words, they did not violate the norm that had guided Indian intervention since independence—that of non-discrimination.
In a rambunctious debate, while the government focused on the narrow question of whether Indians were being discriminated against, MPs stressed the wider issue of Indians being mistreated. Yashpal Singh asked in Hindi, ‘How long will the government tolerate Indians in every country being pushed out?’Footnote 144 Hari Vishnu Kamath lamented, ‘India is being kicked by Ceylon; India is being kicked by Burma; India is being kicked by Pakistan; India is being kicked by China. What are they [the government] doing sitting and moping?’Footnote 145 The prime minister, who was in ill health and would pass away just one month later, spoke up only to note that ‘All these laws have been passed for all foreigners and not only for Indians.’Footnote 146 The Government of India did put ‘gentle’ pressure to ensure that the Indians affected by the nationalization laws ‘should be rehabilitated and compensated’,Footnote 147 but non-discrimination remained the primary basis upon which New Delhi's foreign policy establishment reacted to the moves in Burma, even as several constituents raised their voices to demand a more expansive policy.
Meanwhile, as Indians poured out of the country, a rather more capacious understanding of India's responsibility briefly opened up. When it transpired that Indians leaving Burma would not be permitted to take cash or jewellery as they departed, India's foreign secretary Y. D. Gundevia suggested that the Indian embassy in Rangoon might take possession of their movable property. The embassy did, ‘pending a settlement between the two Governments on the final disposition of these assets’.Footnote 148 Indians departing the country began leaving their cash and jewellery at the embassy, from where it was deposited in a vault at the People's Bank of the Union of Burma.Footnote 149
Conclusion
Despite its rhetoric, independent India did not renounce its responsibility for overseas Indians. It kept looking for solutions to help them fight discrimination well into the 1960s. It sought to shape solutions at the multilateral level, an effort that converged and overlapped with its larger attempt to develop the norms and rules that would govern the emerging international order, through new universal principles and overarching frameworks. India promoted, in particular, three norms as it sought to solve problem of overseas Indians: the mechanism of inter-state negotiation to solve the future of non-citizen minorities, as opposed to unilateral action; the primacy of the will of the people regarding their place of residence; and the necessity of non-discriminatory laws or rules as regards non-citizen minorities. Though comprehensive solutions evaded it, the Government of India continued to engage with the situation of overseas Indians in its neighbourhood through less visible means in bilateral negotiations.
To what extent was India's treatment of overseas Indians in Burma and Ceylon unique, compared to other parts of the British empire? This is a question for other scholars to answer in full, but we have hints that the social networks and the political imaginaries of the era of empire had a similar resilience elsewhere. We see patterns of behaviour that indicate not only that overseas Indians had a shared approach to their problems, but that Indians across the world were keen to maintain their links with one another and with India. For example, representatives of overseas Indians from Mauritius, Jamaica, British Guiana, Fiji, and elsewhere met in London more than once in the 1940s and 1950s. In June 1953, they held a two-day conference where they defined their ‘rights and duties’. They passed a resolution pledging to ‘look upon their adopted country as their homeland’ and calling on those host countries to guarantee ‘equal rights and privileges’ with all other citizens.Footnote 150 The language was nearly identical to that promoted by New Delhi in Ceylon and Burma. Further research might determine whether Indian government representatives or senior Congressmen were behind this conference and its declaration.
While senior Indian politicians helped establish institutions in Burma and Ceylon, they also set up links back on the subcontinent. S. K. Patil, prominent Congressman and later colossus of the Party, founded the Brihad Bharatiya Samaj in the early 1950s. In 1954, it set up a ‘centre for fostering cultural relations between the people of India and Indians settled abroad’. Far from cutting off all ties, Indians were building new institutions to remake existing networks for the new age. The centre had a building in Bombay, with a library, a meeting hall, and accommodation. Patil said he expected the centre to act as a ‘clearing house’ for overseas Indians arriving in the city.Footnote 151 Given the role that the Congress Party had played as a conduit for information and as a proxy for official government action, this institution is worth a further look.
Thirdly, the Government of India kept tabs on Indians overseas, their conditions, and legislation relating to them. We know most about this in East Africa, where Indian leaders worked behind the scenes in shaping, as far as possible, the fate of Indians in Kenya and Uganda, as well as in Britain. Famously, Nehru appointed Apa Pant as India's representative in Kenya. Pant's creative and extensive work to foster good relations between Indians and Kenyans is well documented.Footnote 152 The authors would suggest that, in spite of Pant's idiosyncratic approach, it can be understood as part of the Government of India's efforts to avoid the kind of conflicts that it had had to cope with in Ceylon and Burma. Staying with Kenya, as British officials negotiated with the country in the late 1960s over the fate of overseas Indians there, India maintained the same public position that Nehru had articulated two decades before. Still, British officials are reported to have ‘believed India was saying one thing but doing another’.Footnote 153 A few years later, India was central to negotiations over where Ugandan Asians would be sent when they were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s.Footnote 154 There are hints, too, that the Government of India did not limit this kind of involvement to the Indian Ocean. It may have overseen the repatriation of Indians from Fiji, as they arrived by the boatload in Calcutta in 1949.Footnote 155 It is reasonable to ask whether the Government of India or the Congress Party were working, as they had done elsewhere, to help Indians stay in Fiji in the decades after 1947, or in British Guiana, or in any other territory.
In light of India's engagement with its diaspora through the two decades after independence and beyond, it is clear that the dominant narrative, according to which India completely cut ties with overseas Indians at independence, is simply unsustainable. More research can shed light on whether the same norms and practices of sovereignty that guided Indian action in Ceylon and Burma applied elsewhere.
With these new perspectives on this relationship between state and diasporic communities, this article qualifies a common view of the construction of post-colonial states and the development of their understanding of sovereignty. It shows that, in its engagements with overseas Indians, independent India practised a layered form of sovereignty. This post-imperial sovereignty retained a certain continuity in independent India's relation to sovereignty with the colonial period. It was expressed on multiple levels, including through multinational negotiations and also through sub-national demands. After independence, it became a post-imperial conception of sovereignty by being consubstantially linked with India's desire to forge global norms and shared principles.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Ian Patel for sharing unpublished work, and to the participants in the workshop on Sovereignty and Power in South Asia and Beyond, organized by Neilesh Bose and Jon Wilson at King's College London in June 2019, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work. They would also like to thank the anonymous referees of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments.
