The Tata Institute for Social Sciences in collaboration with SHRAM and ICSSR organised a National Seminar on Domestic Migrants “A Dialogue on Domestic Migrants, State and Inclusive Citizenship” .The two-day Seminar had leading social theorists, social scientists, policy makers, development researchers, demographers and civil society practitioners to examine the contested relationship between the state and domestic migrants and its larger implications for discursive and material practices of space, territory, nation-state, citizenship, development and democracy in India. Almost 40 papers were presented by senior and young scholars from India and abroad.

The session on Extending the Franchise laid important conceptual precepts for the discussion on the migrant question in state-society relations in India. Speaking on the business of disenfranchisement. The session chaired by Prof. Ashwani Kumar initiated a critical exploration of the issue of “missing citizens in the federal voting market” and its wider social and political implications.

The effects of this fight over resources are felt by the political apparatus as well, and, as Prof. Kumar pointed out, create unease about extending citizenship rights to migrant populations. The session started following a conceptual opening by Prof. Kumar he said that even while intra-state migration is more widely prevalent than inter-state migration, part of the reason that political parties have yet to respond to the problem of internal migrants within states is that the emerging trend of coalition politics within state governments has offered political parties the opportunity to reach out to internal migrants through more informal ways, and has enabled them to consequently contain unrest through these non-formal transactions.

The first speaker for the session, Prof. E. Sridharan, Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India, provided an analytical framework to investigate possible linkages between political parties and opportunities for electoral mobilisation of migrant communities.

It bears mentioning here that his analytical framework mainly sought to address the question as it pertains to inter-state migrants, where the migration here does not carry only economic consequences, but also involves ethnic contact and interaction between linguistic and other social groups. 

Migrant populations, for example, if spatially, occupationally or ethnically clustered, are easier for parties to reach out to in seeking political support. On the other hand, the character of the party also becomes an important determinant of their propensity and willingness to reach out to migrant communities: clientelistic parties, for example, would be inclined to offering certain material and economic benefits in exchange for electoral support, while left-oriented parties may be sympathetic to marginalised migrant groups. While ethno-centralised parties may either reach out to or alienate certain ethnic migrant communities by virtue of their loyalties, catch-all parties, which carry no inherent affiliations, may mobilise migrant communities that form a substantial electorate. Similarly, the organisational capacity of parties – whether low (as in the case of charismatic leader-driven parties or clientelistic parties), medium or high (as in the case of cadre-based parties) prove an important determinant to electoral mobilisation. The patterns of party competition, whether bipolar, coalition-driven (as in the case of Kerala) or multipolar, also determine possibilities for drawing electoral support from migrants. As Prof. Kumar aptly described them, what Prof. Sridharan had succinctly indicated were political opportunity variables, and presented an interesting framework to gauge electoral opportunities within migrant populations in the country.

Having substantially addressed the problem of ensuring free and fair elections in the country, an emerging concern of the Election Commission, as it was pointed out by Prof. Sanjay Kumar, was investigating the reasons for lack of voter participation and possible remedies to encouraging people to vote.

While voter turnout trends in India have time and again established that urban constituencies register as much as 7-8% lower turnout than rural constituencies, the turnout in big metros such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru registers even lower. This trend is usually conceived of as the result of “middle-class apathy” towards electoral politics. However, CSDS’ research on the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections suggests that the low voter turnouts in the city are more attributable to low participation among the urban poor, and this urban poor can be seen to be mostly comprised of migrants. It was observed that constituencies with higher concentrations of migrants had lower turnout and vice versa. Further, turnout rates reported among Muslim voters were found to be alarmingly low, with only 50 per cent of migrant Muslims being registered as eligible voters.

While enrolment in electoral rolls remains a persistent problem in registering migrant communities as eligible voters, Prof. Sanjay Kumar also pointed out that even among enrolled voters, there are various reasons to explain why the urban migrant poor do not go out to vote during elections. The lack of identity proof, for one, continues to be a limitation that comes in the way of migrant communities being able to cast their votes. Occupational patterns, as Prof. Sanjay Kumar further pointed out, also prevented migrant workers from coming out to vote in large numbers: given that a sizable majority of migrant labourers in the city are daily wage or casual labourers, they fail to reserve the voting day as paid holiday and instead choose to go to work than forego their day’s wage to go and cast their votes. This study, therefore pointed out the various procedural inadequacies in garnering participation of migrant communities in electoral processes.

The third and final presentation of the session was of Rahul Verma, graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Presenting the key questions that emerged from his paper on ‘The Significant Other: The Place of Migrants in Internal Politics’, Mr. Verma’s presentation addressed two issues broadly: the politics of migration at source, and the politics of migration at destination. Relevant questions to probe of migrants with respect to their ‘source’ i.e. their place of origin, were such: enrolment rates of migrants at their source location and the percentage of migrants who return to their source locations during voting season to cast their votes, whether people who participate in voting overwhelmingly belong to certain communities, and the role of family and “political socialisation” in guiding voting choices.

Further, larger questions such as whether the political participation of migrants is limited to only voting in elections were also recognised as theoretical starting points for a discussion on the political citizenship question of migrants in the country. The presentation was concluded with recommendations raising the need for a robust theoretical framework that would help integrate issues of migration with other questions of political science, and the need for systematic data collection to make such insights.

The session culminated with a final question-and-answer session among the speakers and conference participants. Women’s voting power emerged as a pertinent question raised by a participant: on whether voting choices of women were independent and informed, Prof. Sanjay Kumar quoted statistics from CSDS data to demonstrate that almost every state in the country has been witnessing increasing voter turnout among women, and among these states, about ten states registered higher turnout among women voters than men. The reservation for women in political office in Panchayati Raj Institutions, for one, was identified as a landmark moment in the state’s effort to encourage greater political participation among women citizens. According to Prof. Sanjay Kumar, there was reason to believe, from voter surveys, that even independent voting decision-making among women had been rising in the past ten years. Other procedural lapses in the electoral process such as the politics of land occupation and the state’s recognition (or refusal to recognise) slum settlements of migrant communities in Indian cities also emerged as imperative questions to probe in research on political participation and migrant citizens.