Avipsha Das
Affiliation: PhD Scholar, Department of Criminology, University of Madras, India
Email: avipsha21@gmail.com
Abstract: Lost between translation and the technicalities of the state and Union government, an incarcerated foreign national prisoner forms a special category within the Indian criminal justice system. This paper brings to light the confluence of immigration and incarceration in the age of rising transnational mobility. The state of Tamil Nadu, far away from the India-Bangladesh border attracts thousands of immigrants from Bangladesh for economic opportunities in the garment industries in the Tirupur belt. Drawing from an ethnographic fieldwork conducted for my PhD, this paper includes 13 interviews from two prisons, illuminating the plight of undocumented Bangladeshi men, women, and children who are incarcerated for years before ending in detention camps. Connecting this empirical data to analysis of the CHRI’s 2019 report and prison manuals, the paper reviews the various legal ambiguities and perpetual uncertainty rendered to the non-citizen status. The paper is divided into four sections: The production of illegality; Everyday life and confinement; The bureaucratic state and carceral logic; and ‘Strangers to Justice’- In the era of Law and uncertainty. The study contributes to the evolving area of ‘mobility justice’ in trying to understand the state’s carceral logic in producing immobility and injustice to certain transborder populations.
Keywords: Foreign National Prisoners; Immigration-Carceral Nexus; Legal Ambiguity; Mobility Justice; Detention; Bangladesh; Tamil Nadu; Undocumented Migrants; Prison Manuals.