Removing the International from the Refugee: India in the 1940s

This essay explores the reasons why India’s leaders removed it from UNRRA, and refused to join the IRO, even before the refugees of the Partition of India and Pakistan were excluded from the definitions of the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. As the world transitioned from war to a new peace in the 1940s, India passed the 1946 Foreigners Act, which dealt with all aliens including refugees in India. This essay places an Indian understanding of refugees within global currents of the transformation of the international order as the first wave of decolonisation was taking place, highlighting the iron grip of self-determination in the discussion of all rights, including refugee-related ones, as the starting point for its alternative conception of the refugee.