Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh

Drawing on conceptualization of statelessness and ethnographic research on crucial insights of rightessness, this paper investigates how the politico-geographic-legality constructs statelessness in the enclaves in India and Bangladesh. Following the decolonization process in 1947, both India and Pakistan/Bangladesh inherited more than 200 enclaves, which comprise 80 per cent of the world's enclaves. With improved bilateral relations, India and Bangladesh officially exchanged the enclaves on 1 August 2015, and the enclave dwellers will gradually be granted citizenship rights over the next few years. In this period of transition from statelessness to statehood, this paper can be read as contemporary history. This paper will draw attention to three aspects of statelessness. First, conceptualization of statelessness not only applies to the refugeehood or de-territorialization of people but also relates to the process of constructing transterritorial stateless people. Second, this paper will discuss the condition of statelessness constructed in a politico-geographic-legal trap. And finally, the paper calls for a wider empirical and critical focus on the hidden geographies of de facto statelessness.