Populism and foreign policy: India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya

Abstract In this article, we investigate how India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya is implicated in the (re)production of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) populist project. We enhance an innovative contextual intersectional framework, drawing on Ernesto Laclau's conceptualization of populism as a political logic and build on Shweta Singh and Élise Féron's understanding of this populist logic as discursively co-constituted and based on varying intersecting identity constellations including race/ethnicity, religion, caste, class or gender/sexual orientation. Using this framework, we investigate how India's refugee policy towards Rohingya refugees in particular has evolved under successive populist governments led by the BJP. Analysing three key dimensions of India's refugee policy—legal framework, admission and status, and protection and security—we demonstrate significant shifts along these dimensions in India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya, and explicate the populist logic that is reinscribed through these changes at the site of ‘foreign policy’. Our analysis reveals these shifts as co-constituted in and through the populist logic of the BJP-led governments and relying on identity assemblages that emphasized the Rohingya's ethnicity/religion (Rohingya ‘Muslims’), gender/ sexual orientation (Rohingya ‘men’) and class (Rohingya in need of resources/ privileges). Our study opens up grounds for further research on how refugee policy, as a mode of foreign policy, becomes a site where populist governments reinscribe differences between the ‘people’ and dangerous enemy ‘others’ to (re)produce their populist political projects.