Refuge by ‘technical’ means: humanitarianism, bureaucratic asylum, and the politics of refracted mandates in postcolonial India (1947–1981)

Abstract

This article argues that India’s post-independence engagement with international refugee governance was shaped less by outright resistance and more by a repertoire of selective accommodations. Drawing on Indian bureaucratic archives, it shows how the state sidestepped legal frameworks by recasting refugee issues as ‘technical’ and within the purview of domestic limits. International involvement was refracted through this lens: acceptable when channelled as ‘technical interventions’, unwelcome when it implied legal oversight. The article conceptualises this ‘technicality’ as a layered mode of governance: procedural, developmental, and diplomatic, through which the state absorbed global norms while avoiding juridical commitments. This logic of ‘technical’ assistance emerged from an intricate terrain of Partition-era exclusions, Cold War alignments, regional geopolitical tensions and domestic planning imperatives. Rather than reject global governance outright, India redirected it, forcing international actors like the UNHCR to recalibrate their methods. The article places India’s approach within a longer history of how humanitarianism travelled as a language of rule, showing how refugee governance in the postcolonial world was negotiated and detached from rights-based norms.