Enduring liminality: voting rights and Tibetan exiles in India

This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality is related here to the legal and bureaucratic 'inbetweenness' that characterises and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. Tibetans born in I...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Asian ethnicity 2019-07, Vol.20 (3), p.330-347
Main Author: Gupta, Sonika
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Citizenship
Elections
Exile
Identity
Liminality
Social response
Statelessness
Tibet
Voters
Voting rights
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Summary:This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality is related here to the legal and bureaucratic 'inbetweenness' that characterises and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. Tibetans born in India have been registered as voters in India's electoral list albeit without an accompanying claim or path to citizenship. The paper argues that these voting rights are simultaneously contested and embraced by the Tibetan exile community. Responses of the exile community to voting rights are produced by the interaction between (a) the lived experience of statelessness and (b) complex constructions of cultural, political and legal identity. Both these factors are fundamentally informed by the liminal space that the exile community inhabits in India.
ISSN:1463-1369
1469-2953
DOI:10.1080/14631369.2019.1579635