Migration, Identity, and Voting Behavior in Border Regions of India
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
This article discusses the impact of migration on political identity and voting behaviour in the border regions of India. Instead of seeing migration as just a demographic and/or economic phenomenon, the paper approaches it as a politically mediated phenomenon, and explores how its impacts rely upon historical memory, identity divisions, institutional rules, and party competition. The study takes a comparative qualitative approach using a structured, focused comparison of four cases: Assam, West Bengal, Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir, which were chosen to reflect variations across the cases in terms of the migration experience, the configuration of the borders, institutional response, and electoral mobilisation. The analysis is based on secondary sources such as the Census of India, government reports, institutional documents relating to elections and scholarly works on migration, ethnicity, citizenship, and voting behaviour. The paper suggests that migration is electorally salient because of demographic change framed within a security, religious, ethnic or linguistic lens, and when political actors transform such perceptions into organised narratives of inclusion or exclusion. In all the cases, five mechanisms are obtained: perceived threat, identity reconstitution, institutional regulation, clientelist incorporation, and spatial concentration. The article ends by suggesting that the politics of migration are not the same in all parts of India's borders, but will take different forms depending on the local histories, state power, party systems and citizenship laws. These findings have relevance for democratic inclusion, conflict-sensitive border governance, and designing fair documentation processes and enfranchisement.
Downloads
References
Baruah, S. (1999). India against itself: Assam and the politics of nationality. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Baruah, S. (2020). In the name of the nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford University Press.
Bhavnani, R. R., & Lacina, B. (2015). The effects of weather-induced migration on sons of the soil riots in India. World Politics, 67(4), 760–794. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887115000222
Bora, B. (2024). The absent voters of India: Challenges and prospects for the enfranchisement of migrants. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. https://doi.org/10.31752/idea.2024.101
Bose, S. (2003). Kashmir: Roots of conflict, paths to peace. Harvard University Press.
Castles, S., de Haas, H., & Miller, M. J. (2014). The age of migration: International population movements in the modern world (5th ed.). Guilford Press.
Chakrabarty, A. (2024). Structural intersections, hierarchical citizenship and criminalization of the migrant in Assam. Critical Criminology, 32(2), 339–355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-024-09787-z
Chandra, K. (2004). Why ethnic parties succeed: Patronage and ethnic head counts in India. Cambridge University Press.
Chhibber, P. K., & Kollman, K. (2004). The formation of national party systems: Federalism and party competition in Canada, Great Britain, India, and the United States. Princeton University Press.
Chhibber, P. K., & Verma, R. (2018). Ideology and identity: The changing party systems of India. Oxford University Press.
Deshingkar, P., & Start, D. (2003). Seasonal migration for livelihoods in India: Coping, accumulation and exclusion (Working Paper No. 220). Overseas Development Institute.
Donnan, H., & Wilson, T. M. (1999). Borders: Frontiers of identity, nation and state. Berg.
ubochet, L. (2023). Citizenship as burden of proof: Voting and hiding among migrants from India’s eastern borderlands. Citizenship Studies, 27(1), 107–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2109598
Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2017). The majority–minority divide in attitudes toward internal migration: Evidence from Mumbai. American Journal of Political Science, 61(2), 456–472. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12276
Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2021a). Do politicians discriminate against internal migrants? Evidence from nationwide field experiments in India. American Journal of Political Science, 65(4), 790–806. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12548
Gaikwad, N., & Nellis, G. (2021b). Overcoming the political exclusion of migrants: Theory and experimental evidence from India. American Political Science Review, 115(4), 1129–1146. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000435
Government of India, Government of Assam, All Assam Students’ Union, & All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad. (1985). The Assam Accord.
Government of India, Ministry of Law and Justice. (2019). The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (No. 47 of 2019). The Gazette of India.
Hazarika, S. (2000). Rites of passage: Border crossings, imagined homelands, India’s east and Bangladesh. Penguin Books India.
Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. University of California Press.
Kanjwal, H. (2023). Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian occupation. Stanford University Press.
Keshri, K., & Bhagat, R. B. (2010). Temporary and seasonal migration in India. Genus, 66(3), 25–45.
Kone, Z. L., Liu, M. Y., Mattoo, A., Özden, Ç., & Sharma, S. (2018). Internal borders and migration in India. Journal of Economic Geography, 18(4), 729–759.
Kumar, A., Dar, A., Banerjee, S., Dhar, S., & Behera, S. S. (2015). Inclusive elections in India: A study on domestic migration and issues in electoral participation. Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
Kumar, A., & Dhar, S. (2021). Migration and inclusive elections. In A. Kumar & R. B. Bhagat (Eds.), Migrants, mobility and citizenship in India (pp. 51–64). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367765477-6
National Statistical Office. (2022). Migration in India, 2020–21 (Report No. 589, Periodic Labour Force Survey). Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India.
Nizam, A., Sivakumar, P., & Rajan, S. I. (2022). Interstate migration in India during the COVID-19 pandemic: An analysis based on mobile visitor location register and roaming data. Journal of South Asian Development, 17(3), 271–296. https://doi.org/10.1177/09731741221122000
Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. (2011). Census of India 2011: Migration tables. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.
Pandey, G. (2006). Remembering Partition: Violence, nationalism and history in India. Cambridge University Press.
Press Information Bureau. (2022, December 29). ECI ready to pilot remote voting for domestic migrants; migrant voter need not travel back to home state to vote. Government of India.
Siddique, N., & Ramachandran, S. (2024). The punitive gap: NRC, due process and denationalisation politics in India’s Assam. Comparative Migration Studies, 12, Article 34. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00393-0
Weiner, M. (1978). Sons of the soil: Migration and ethnic conflict in India. Princeton University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All articles published in our journal are licensed under CC-BY 4.0, which permits authors to retain copyright of their work. This license allows for unrestricted use, sharing, and reproduction of the articles, provided that proper credit is given to the original authors and the source.