Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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The Bloody Colonial Political Cartography and the Forced Migration in 1947: Dissecting the Case of West-Punjab Dalits in the Jammu and Kashmir, India
Ajay Kumar
ABSTRACT:
On the eve of British departure from India, Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, formed a boundary commission headed by Sir C.J. Radcliffe to divide the Indian sub-continent – a former British colony- on communal lines. The Radcliffe project eventually led to the creation of two separate states of India and Pakistan in August 1947. The “Great Divide” witnessed the worst communal holocaust and the mass migration in world history. However, despite major advances in partition studies in the context of South Asia, the Dalit historiography has received very less academic attention. Thus, drawing on the field narratives and existing literature, the present study unravels the painful transition of West Punjab Dalits, who during the partition violence in 1947, not only had to leave their native villages in Lahore and Sialkot regions in Pakistan but even after migrating to the Indian part of Jammu and Kashmir, were forced to live an undignified identity-less life due to the denial of citizenship rights and constitutional apartheid that they have been facing for more than seven decades. Presently, there are 25,460 families of West-Punjab refugees (West-Pakistan Refugees Action Committee, 2023), out of which more than 70% belong to the Dalit community – a socially and economically disenfranchised social group in South Asia. Living along the international border areas in the Jammu region, they have been undergoing multi-layered marginalization ranging from political exclusion to social stigmatization at the hands of the state and society respectively.
keywords: Colonialism, Dalits, Forced Migration, Partition, Political Exclusion