Our Sisters and Daughters: Pakistani Hindu Migrant Masculinities and Digital Claims to Indian Citizenship

Visualizing Citizenship in a Bureaucratic Frame

“…In the case of both these images and the bureaucratic portraits, the free will/forced binary is too simplistic given the wider patriarchal context, where women's choices are constrained and may yield the loss of one's natal family (Asif, 2021) FCM discourse for how it flattens women's agency (Schaflechner, 2018) and reifies patriarchal control (Jamal, 2006;Toor, 2011). See my related discussion (Raheja, 2022), specifically the way that discourses of "love jihad" and "FCM" overlap and diverge. 8.…”

“…While it is beyond the scope of this article to address how the petitions and applications that include these images fare in numerical terms, the Hindu nationalist government's passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and multiple related executive orders permitting these migrants to open bank accounts, enroll in schools, have their medical degrees counted, and so on, suggests that their issues are picked up at national, state, and district policy levels. On the ground, however, the lack of implementation of many promised benefits leads to widespread disenchantment among migrants (Raheja 2022). It is in the context of these contradictions that migrant men take up and circulate forced conversion images of women to demand citizenship.…”

“…My inquiry thus raises broader questions about the aesthetic and visual dimensions of state power, that is, how bureaucratic framing illuminates a kind of life-editing technique in modern liberal governance, describing a material, visual, and ideological limit that state forms of recognition subject upon individuals whose lived realities often exceed the aggregated, cropped frame. (Raheja, 2022). Though caste is a salient social category in Pakistan (Gazdar, 2007), the language of state recognition emphasizes religious majorities and minorities (Asif, 2020).…”

“…When I sent Raj and other men my screenshots of their WhatsApp posts and petitions for this article, they asked if I needed more portraits—gesturing to the prevalence of this type of image and the saturation of its associated archive. Elsewhere, I examine the portraits’ role in Indian citizenship claims with a focus on the affordances of WhatsApp and digital networks, minoritized Pakistani Hindu masculinity, and the mediatization of forced conversion narratives (Raheja 2022). Here I focus on the visuality of the circulated images.…”

“…Raj, like most Pakistani migrants in Jodhpur, is from an Adivasi Bhil background from Sindh and works as a daily wage laborer. Demographic household data from a 2016 survey indicate that most Pakistani migrants in Jodhpur come from Adivasi (Bhil), Dalit (Meghwal, Kohli), Other Backward Class (Mali, Suthar), and dominant caste (Rajput Sodha) backgrounds (Raheja, 2022). Though caste is a salient social category in Pakistan (Gazdar, 2007), the language of state recognition emphasizes religious majorities and minorities (Asif, 2020).…”