: Opinion: Hotspots and humanitarianism #IndiaNEWS #News By Pramod K Nayar Since 2015-16,the European Union, faced with large movements of migrants, adopted what it officially termed the ‘hotspot

Opinion: Hotspots and humanitarianism #IndiaNEWS #News
By Pramod K Nayar
Since 2015-16,the European Union, faced with large movements of migrants, adopted what it officially termed the ‘hotspot approach’. A 2015 document from the European Council announced this approach and while it refused to define what it meant by a ‘hotspot’, the approach itself was spelled out:
“characterized by specific and disproportionate migratory pressure, consisting of mixed migratory flows, which are largely linked to the smuggling of migrants, and where the Member State concerned might request support and assistance to better cope with the migratory pressure…�?
A member state has to request assistance at a specific hotspot and the EU would come to the assistance of the state. At the hotspot, humanitarian actions are undertaken. The hotspot approach alters significantly the geography of aid and humanitarian efforts.
Caring for Distant Strangers
Humanitarianism appears, at first sight, to be at odds with the colonial project for it emphasised care and compassion towards the less fortunate and colonised subject. But this model of caring, tied as it was to the modern state, was also a form of population control. Unlike colonialism’s brutal control over territory, humanitarianism sought and acquired control over people through relief and aid measures. The fact that care and charity required extensive documentation and classification of degrees and kinds of destitution even during famine, implies the colonial state’s quest for even greater control and a meticulous ordering of the people.
This is the reason why, official writings such as the Report of the Central Executive Committee, Indian Famine Charitable Relief Fund (1898) provide statistics of the type and number of people who received aid: “respectable poor�?, artisans, persons clothed, children in poor houses supplied with milk, etc. In other words, humanitarianism was also a form of surveillance, scrutiny, classification and control.
Humanitarianism was always a global project and, spatially speaking, expansive, bringing the world into the ambit of the aid society and the European organisation.
Geographies of Aid
In the 19th century, the heyday of colonial empires, the European states set out to alleviate the misery of the natives in the colonies (forgetting the fact that quite a lot of this misery stemmed from their own, colonial, presence in the region!).
As scholars have noted, the humanitarian movement from the late 18th century focused initially on anti-slave trade campaigns, later expanded to movements for the protection of Aboriginals, the temperance and reform movements. From European capitals that collected information about disasters or distress in the colonies, the movement for aid and care reached out to outposts, producing what geographers David Lambert and Alan Lester term ‘cartographies of colonial philanthropy’.

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