The Vanishing Subject: Climate Displacement and the "Right to Have Rights" in India, Bangladesh, and the Pacific

Abstract

 Even as international law is still trying to come up with a definition for "climate refugees," people in their millions in South Asia and the Pacific are in a state of legal uncertainty. This "protection gap" is not just a problem arising from the international treaty law but also, in a way, a deep revealing of the "Right to Have Rights," as Hannah Arendt put it, that we are dealing with. When a state’s physical territory is either submerged due to rising waters or the soil is so dry that it cannot support any living beings, the person who was once a citizen of that country faces a serious threat to his/her legal being. This Article puts forth the view that the 21st-century constitution has no choice but to evolve in order to pierce through this conundrum. The first step is to examine very closely what is going on in India with the judicial activism of the courts, an activism that is represented by the 2024 M.K. Ranjitsinh ruling which, in fact, has recognized a right against climate change. The court here is not only considering human beings but is also enlarging the concept of life and equality to encompass stability in the environment. On the contrary, Bangladesh is opting for resilience-based governance as represented in the Mujib Climate Prosperity Plan, which has the at least ideal of "zero climate-induced migration" by implying adaptation in the developmental constitutional mandate. The Pacific Island States, such as Tuvalu, are probably the most extreme in their actions as they have gone ahead and made changes in their constitutions to declare "Perpetual Statehood." This has been such a legal move that it has liberated sovereignty from land and has guaranteed the "right to a place in the world" even if the land does not exist anymore. While taken individually, it is hard to see these legal developments as anything more than a not very rare occurrence in the process of adaptation of law to changing ecological conditions, but when viewed collectively as a whole they seem to produce a different impression. They indicate that protecting the climate-displaced would not suffice with uncomplicated humanitarian aid; rather, it would demand a constitutional re-imagining of belonging that allows one to remain part of the community despite the borders of a warming world being drawn ever closer.