India's Approach to Refugees: Policies and Challenges • PolSci Institute

India does not have a single law that defines who a refugee is, yet it shelters one of the largest displaced populations in Asia. People fleeing Tibet, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Myanmar have all sought safety here over the decades. This creates a striking paradox: a country that has consistently opened its doors to those escaping persecution has never built a formal legal framework to receive them. To understand how this works, we need to look at the laws, the historical record, and the political calculations that shape India’s response to people seeking refuge.

A major host country without a refugee law
How refugees are governed instead
A history of welcoming the displaced
Tibetans and the long exile
The 1971 Bangladesh crisis
Sri Lankan Tamils and protracted limbo
The moral commitment meets pragmatism
The principle of non-refoulement
Security and political concerns
The Rohingya question and recent tensions
The Citizenship Amendment Act
The cost of having no clear rules

A major host country without a refugee law

India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, the two core international instruments that define refugee rights worldwide. It sits alongside Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia as one of several major non-signatory states in South and Southeast Asia. Despite this, the country hosts a substantial refugee population. United Nations estimates have placed the figure at over 200,000 refugees and asylum seekers, most originating from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, China, and Myanmar.

Why did India stay out of the Convention? During the drafting process in the early 1950s, the Indian delegate objected to the treaty’s geographical limitations, which would have excluded the millions displaced by the Partition of the subcontinent. India and several other newly independent nations viewed the Convention as a product of European priorities that failed to capture the realities of displacement in the post-colonial world. Instead, these states chose to treat refugee protection as a domestic matter rather than an international obligation.

How refugees are governed instead

In the absence of a dedicated law, refugees are handled under general legislation meant for foreigners. The two main statutes are the Foreigners Act of 1946 and the Passports Act of 1967. These laws define anyone who is not an Indian citizen as a “foreigner,” regardless of why they came. This is the heart of the problem. A tourist who overstays a visa and a family fleeing genocide are placed in the same legal category, even though their situations and needs are completely different.

The Foreigners Act also gives the executive branch wide power to detain and deport non-citizens with limited judicial oversight. It makes no special recognition of the unique position of a refugee, so a person who entered with improper documents while escaping danger can still be prosecuted on those grounds. This conflation of distinct categories is the structural weakness running through India’s entire approach.

A history of welcoming the displaced

Despite lacking a formal system, India has hosted several large refugee movements, each handled differently. These episodes reveal both the country’s humanitarian instincts and the political logic that guides its decisions.

Tibetans and the long exile

The arrival of Tibetan refugees is often cited as India’s most successful example of refuge and integration. In 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India following a failed uprising against Chinese rule, and more than 80,000 Tibetans followed him across the Himalayas. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government granted asylum and helped establish agriculture-based settlements across states like Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Arunachal Pradesh.

This support was generous, but it was also shaped by policy. Nehru framed India’s stance around three factors: protecting national security, maintaining relations with China, and sympathy for the Tibetan people. Over time, that balancing act tightened. In 1963 the government stopped legally recognising newly arriving Tibetans as refugees, and those who came in later waves faced far greater difficulty obtaining the registration certificates needed for residence, work, and travel. The shift reflected India’s careful management of its relationship with China.

The 1971 Bangladesh crisis

The single largest refugee influx India ever faced came in 1971. As West Pakistan’s military launched a violent campaign in East Pakistan, an estimated 10 million civilians fled into India over roughly nine months. This was the largest single displacement of refugees in the second half of the twentieth century. India set up camps along its eastern border and coordinated a massive relief operation with the United Nations.

What makes this episode distinct is its resolution. After India’s military intervention helped create the independent state of Bangladesh, almost all the refugees returned home. The episode became one of the United Nations’ earliest and largest repatriation campaigns. It also showed how a refugee crisis can become entangled with war, statehood, and regional power politics rather than remaining a purely humanitarian event.

Sri Lankan Tamils and protracted limbo

Sri Lankan Tamils began arriving in Tamil Nadu after ethnic violence erupted in 1983, with later waves following as the civil war intensified. More than 60,000 Tamil refugees have lived in over 100 camps spread across Tamil Nadu, with tens of thousands more living outside them. Shared ethnic and linguistic ties meant local communities often welcomed these refugees.

Yet decades later, many remain in a kind of permanent waiting. Although refugees can hold residence visas and work permits, prolonged camp life leaves them feeling they belong neither to Sri Lanka nor to India. Repatriation has happened in phases, slowing sharply after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 changed the political atmosphere. The Tamil case demonstrates how, without a clear legal pathway, refuge can stretch into indefinite uncertainty over citizenship and the right to fully rebuild a life.

The moral commitment meets pragmatism

India’s approach is best understood as a blend of humanitarian openness and hard-headed calculation. The country has historically taken pride in offering shelter, but it has always reserved the right to decide who receives protection and on what terms. This discretion is the defining feature of the system, and it cuts in two directions.

The principle of non-refoulement

Even without signing the 1951 Convention, India is not entirely free of international obligations. The principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits sending people back to a place where their life or freedom would be seriously threatened, is widely regarded as part of customary international law that binds all states. India is also a party to other instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Indian courts have at times read these obligations into the Constitution. In a 2021 case, the High Court of Manipur held that the right to seek protection from persecution is connected to the right to life under Article 21, which extends to non-citizens. The Supreme Court has similarly noted that the rights under Articles 14 and 21 apply to all persons, whether or not they are citizens. These rulings show that constitutional protections can fill some of the gap left by the missing refugee law.

Security and political concerns

At the same time, the government weighs national security and domestic politics heavily. Refugee movements across porous borders raise fears of illegal immigration, demographic change in border states, and infiltration. These anxieties are not new, but they have grown sharper in recent years, and they often determine which groups receive a warm reception and which face suspicion.

The Rohingya question and recent tensions

The treatment of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar has become the most contested test of India’s policy. The government treats them as illegal migrants under the Foreigners Act and has argued in the Supreme Court that it does not accept the refugee cards issued to them by the UN refugee agency. Officials have repeatedly cited national security as the basis for seeking their deportation.

This has put the principle of non-refoulement under strain. Human rights organisations argue that non-ratification of the Convention cannot justify returning people to danger, since the obligation flows from customary international law. The legal battle continues, and it captures the core tension in India’s model: constitutional and customary protections on one side, executive discretion and security claims on the other.

The Citizenship Amendment Act

The debate took on a sharper edge with the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. The law offers a faster path to citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Parsis who fled persecution from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Critics point out that the framework leaves out Muslims, including the Rohingya, and links protection to religion rather than to the fact of persecution itself. Supporters argue it addresses specific historical injustices faced by religious minorities in neighbouring countries. The result is that the question of who counts as a deserving refugee has become tied to identity in ways that earlier waves of refuge did not openly involve.

The cost of having no clear rules

The absence of a dedicated refugee law produces one consistent outcome: inconsistency. Because protection rests on administrative discretion rather than statutory entitlement, different groups receive very different treatment. Tibetans got land and settlements. Sri Lankan Tamils got camps and work permits but no clear route to permanent status. The Rohingya face detention and the threat of deportation. The same country, the same broad humanitarian tradition, but radically different results depending on the politics and diplomacy of the moment.

This is why many scholars and advocates argue that India needs a proper refugee law. A clear statute would separate genuine refugees from other foreigners, establish a fair process to assess claims, and reduce the role of arbitrary decision-making. It would also align India’s practice with the constitutional and customary obligations its own courts have recognised. Until such a framework exists, refuge in India will continue to depend less on settled rights and more on shifting administrative judgment.

What do you think? Should India enact a dedicated refugee law that applies uniformly to all groups, or does flexibility through administrative discretion better serve a country managing complex regional pressures? And can protection for refugees ever be truly fair if it depends on national security and political relationships rather than on a clear legal standard?

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Table of Contents

A major host country without a refugee law 🔗

How refugees are governed instead 🔗

A history of welcoming the displaced 🔗

Tibetans and the long exile 🔗

The 1971 Bangladesh crisis 🔗

Sri Lankan Tamils and protracted limbo 🔗

The moral commitment meets pragmatism 🔗

The principle of non-refoulement 🔗

Security and political concerns 🔗

The Rohingya question and recent tensions 🔗

The Citizenship Amendment Act 🔗

The cost of having no clear rules 🔗