Abstract
Yamamoto’s chapter features Tibetan refugees in India and partly in Nepal, and explores how citizenship-related issues have been causing controversies and revisions of legal interpretations and policies in regards to Tibetan refugees under a dual legal system of the Government of India and the Central Tibetan Administration since the 2010s. Yamamoto clarifies that rulings in regard to giving Indian citizenship to Tibetan refugees meeting the requirements have legally been divided between those who can be Indian citizens and others who cannot be, and been similarly making invisible the existence of “unofficial” Tibetan refugees who have been seeking Tibetan citizenship in both a material and religious sense. Yamamoto shows how the Indian legal order not only enables some Tibetan refugees in India to participate in Indian democracy as Indian citizens, but also disables other Tibetan refugees in India from being legally and officially recognized as Tibetan refugees.
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Notes
- 1.
The Government of Sweden declared that it would not accept the IC as an official travel document since July 28 2016. This case is an apparent example of the unstable status of the documents concerning Tibetan refugees.
- 2.
McConnell uses the term for the Tibetan Government in Exile (the TGiE), but this is just a commonly used name of the CTA , and “CTA ” should be used to refer to this Tibetan polity in India.
- 3.
See the article in Times of India at https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/25-yr-old-first-Tibetan-to-be-Indian-citizen/articleshow/7323090.cms
- 4.
“Tibetans born between the designated years are still routinely denied passports and it appears that the only way to enforce the provisions of the Citizenship Act is to hire a lawyer (for roughly 100,000 rupees) to contest the denial in High Court. This is not a realistic option for the vast majority of Tibetans” (TJC 2016: 61).
- 5.
- 6.
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- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Such interpretations could be invited by the CTA’s stance toward marriage by Tibetan refugees. While the CTA encouraged intra-marriage among Tibetan refugees, it discouraged intermarriages, according to its nationalistic agenda (Childs and Barkin 2006: 49).
- 11.
- 12.
In a web cast that invited Namgyal Dolkar, the host said that Tibetan refugees in general do not know the detail about the Citizenship Act 1955. See https://www.voatibetanenglish.com/a/2284591.html
- 13.
- 14.
However, Namgyal Dolkar was elected a member of Parliament, despite the CTA’s declaration. How strict this rule’s adaptation will be is still unclear.
- 15.
Originally, the Special Entry Permits had four items to describe the applicant’s purpose in coming to India: (a) refugee, (b) pilgrimage, (c) education and (d) other. However, in 2005 the GoI removed (a) refugee, and the version amended in 2016 just has two items: (a) education, and (b) other.
- 16.
Conversation with Tenzin on August 20 at Boudha. The case concerning the census shows that the CTA does not have any measure to calculate the number of non-Green Book holders, and it therefore seems the CTA’s stance toward such Tibetans has been indifferent.
- 17.
I have heard that many Tibetan refugees illegally seeking an Indian passport have failed to acquire it because the GoI started computerized screening of applicants by seeing whether applicants had been issued with documents such as an RC or an IC since around 2005. It can be said that the fact that Tenzin had been issued with neither an RC nor an IC enabled him to acquire an Indian passport, paradoxically.
- 18.
Conversations with Tenzin on September 3 2015, and on August 25 2017.
- 19.
During a two-week stay in Kathmandu in 2017, I have met at least four Tibetan males without a Green Book, an RC and, needless to say, an Indian passport.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to especially thank Lobsang Wangyal, Thupten Tenzin and Tendar for sharing their time.
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Yamamoto, T. (2019). Citizenship In-between: A Case Study of Tibetan Refugees in India. In: Yamamoto, T., Ueda, T. (eds) Law and Democracy in Contemporary India. Human Rights Interventions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95837-8_4
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