Published Paper Details:

India has hosted successive refugee movements for more than seven decades--from Partition (1947) and Tibetans (1959) to Sri Lankan Tamils (1980s-2000s), Afghans, Chakma-Hajong communities, and, most recently, Rohingya from Myanmar. Yet India has neither acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol nor enacted a national refugee law. Protection, therefore, relies on a patchwork of constitutional guarantees, ordinary immigration statutes, executive practice, UNHCR's limited mandate operations, and case-by-case judicial interventions. This paper critically examines India's refugee policy through a human-rights lens. Methodologically, it synthesizes constitutional doctrine, statutes (especially the Foreigners Act, 1946), Supreme Court and High Court decisions, UNHCR practice in India, and recent executive measures, including the rules operationalizing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). It finds persistent structural gaps--legal uncertainty around status determination, risks of detention and deportation, uneven access to socio-economic rights, and gendered vulnerabilities--exacerbated by a securitized approach to "illegal migration." Results indicate that while Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution have provided a floor of protection, their application remains contingent and inconsistently enforced across refugee groups. The paper argues that adopting a rights-based, uniform refugee framework--aligned with India's constitutional values and international obligations--would reconcile humanitarian commitments with legitimate security concerns. It concludes with actionable reforms: a comprehensive refugee statute codifying non-refoulement, procedural safeguards against arbitrary detention, clear roles for UNHCR and domestic institutions, calibrated use of the CAA to avoid discrimination or statelessness, and regionally coordinated burden-sharing.