The book ‘Refugee Law in India, The Road from Ambiguity to Protection’, written by Shuvro Prosun Sarker, published in the year 2017 by the Springer Nature in their Palgrave Macmillan imprint, richly deserves a review. This is even more so in light of the recently amended legislation on citizenship which will impact the lives of refugees living in India. The Citizenship Act, 1955 (‘Act’) was amended by the Parliament in December 2019. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 stipulates that non-Muslim minorities (namely, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians) entering into the territory of India on or before December 31, 2014 from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh shall not be considered as illegal migrants.1 Additionally, it also provides that such exempted illegal migrants shall be eligible to apply for citizenship of India subject to other conditions mentioned therein.2 In this book, Sarker seeks to address the question on the legal status of refugees which continues to persist in the absence of a concrete law on refugees, who are often wrongfully characterised as illegal migrants. Sarker’s work highlights the need for a regulated segregation of the class of refugees from those of infiltrators or illegal migrants.
