The crisis of citizenship in our time

Dublin City University (Ireland India Conference), 2021

Not being a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol means India does not have a defined policy towards refugees. It leads to, what I call, 'self-fashioning' of refugees by the Indian state. The paper develops a theoretical framework of this self-fashioning against the backdrop of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and probes into its politics of documentation. It argues that stringent measures of governmentality stem from an ‘anxiety of incompleteness’ which the nation-state suffers from (Appadurai 2006, 5). This idea of governmentality consists in the exercise of ‘power over life’ as the human body becomes a site that the state tries to regulate, categorise and define (Foucault 1991). Through my fieldwork experience, I use the methodology of oral history to highlight how the body becomes a text/document that the state re-writes and records, classifies and quantifies. The paper explores this through the narratives of Shajahan Ali Ahmed and Soham Das from Assam who have been affected by NRC. If the documents emerge as a 'unique subset of bureaucratic writing’ (Sriraman 2018), it appears that the ‘political economy of paper(s)’ (Hull 2012) further subjugates lower-caste people. Migrated from erstwhile East Pakistan, the narratives of Bhadro Biswas and Manoranjan Mondal are cases in point. The NRC resurrects to life the documents refugees from East Pakistan received, for instance, border-slip and migration certificate. By doing so, it engenders panic and anxiety, and incites structural violence and marginalisation. The paper argues that rather than legitimising citizenship, NRC often pursues exclusionary methods where ID documents, and also the lack of these, designate individuals as ‘illegal immigrants’ who are eventually rendered stateless.

The Transnational Human Rights Review, 2021

This essay explores the reasons behind describing India's Citizenship practices (now modified through the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019) as 'persecutory'. In doing so, the essay refers to the international law on citizenship conferment and withdrawal that has traditionally been viewed as exclusive to a state's sovereign domain. The essay also looks into the socio-political dynamics, past persecutory conduct exemplified by the Assam-NRC exercise and the lack of protection afforded by those entrusted with the legal duty of conferring and withdrawing citizenship. The essay further uses the Assam-NRC exercise as a case study to claim that there exist well-founded grounds for believing that a subsequent action of this nature will involve real risks for the country's 200 million Muslim population.

The Conversation, 2019

https://theconversation.com/new-laws-weaponize-citizenship-in-india-129027 Nearly two million residents of India’s eastern state of Assam are at risk of losing citizenship. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) published by the state government in August 2019 declares people who cannot prove they came to the state before March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan, to be foreigners. According to Fernand de Varennes, the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, this is potentially “the biggest exercise in statelessness since the Second World War.” Those excluded are primarily poor and marginalized people who can not adequately prove their citizenship. As the 120 days granted to appeal for those excluded from the National Register of Citizens in Assam comes to an end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah have announced they will implement the NRC across the country. This catastrophic move is part of a broader state project to unravel the secular, inclusive basis of citizenship in India by targeting the country’s Muslim minority and other marginalized communities. Included in their plan is the unilateral repeal of Kashmir’s constitutional self-determination in August 2019, and the Citizenship Amendment Act passed in December 2019, which omits Muslim migrants from obtaining naturalized citizenship.

2021

policies are weaponizing citizenship in India today. A pivotal objective of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has been to alter the basis of Indian citizenship. Toward this, the Government of India passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act ( ) and determined to commence an all-India National Register of Citizens. While changes to citizenship are scheduled for enforcement across the country, the BJP's pilot implementation is focused on the state of Assam in the Northeast, with injurious, gendered impact on its sizeable Muslim population. Majoritarian nationalists assert that a large number of Muslims are residing in India "illegally," and are not Indian. Bangla-descent Muslim inhabitants of Assam, fabricated as "foreigners" and "outsiders," are the primary targets. They are subject to discrimination, extreme xenophobia, social violence, and new forms of partition. Those who are unable to meet the government's demands to prove their citizenship, or whose documentary evidence is rejected, are faced with the threat of expulsion, exile, and statelessness. If Bangla-descent Muslims of Assam are not Indians, then who are they? This monograph brings into focus how the illiberal citizenship movement is fortifying legal discrimination based on religion. It spotlights the amendments to the law and the implosive situation on the ground. It chronicles the torment of numerous targeted individuals who have been declared "foreigners," separated from their families and detained, and family members of suicide victims, together with cases before the appellate body. The exclusionary processes directed at Bangla-descent Muslims are emblematic of their loss of agency over life. The "citizenship experiment" signals the onset of absolute nationalism and the advance of an inestimable catastrophe that may conceivably devastate millions of lives. Cover Image: Documents from the Assam Foreigners Tribunal and Illegal Migrants (D) Tribunal Images are courtesy of local communities in Assam.

Third World Alternatives to International Law Review, 2020

The paper sheds light on India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) insidious use of legitimate state power through administrative regulation, constitutionalism, citizenship determination, adoption of international law and neoliberal economic policies, to further its ‘Hindutva’ ideology. This reflection focuses on two aspects. First, we show how, by implementing the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) along with other national documentation regimes, the government is using facially neutral administrative regulations to construct the ‘documented’ Indian citizen. This ‘citizen’ is made to fit with Hindutva ideals by disenfranchising Muslims and threatening the de facto and de jure citizenship of nondominant caste Hindus and other groups that challenge the ideology. While these state actions may seem distinct, they resemble traditional colonial practices that the BJP is skilfully adopting to advance its discriminatory political ends. Second, we show that, with the CAA, the BJP is perversely using the humanitarian principles of refugee law to construct neighbouring Muslim states as savage, and whose victims have to be protected by the Hindutva state. Thus, India is replicating the practices of liberal, democratic states of the Global North that continue to use logics of coloniality, exceptionalism and racism to maintain systemic inequities and embed oppressions.

This essay assesses the gaps in India's legal doctrine on stateless people and migrants in context of the ongoing National Register of Citizens (NRC) project in the Northeast Indian state of Assam, which aims to identify immigrants of East Bengali origin.

Citizenship Studies , 2022

In 2019, India made the unprecedented move of listing 1.9 million people in its northeast state of Assam as illegal migrants from Bangladesh in a new National Register of Citizens before passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which overtly discriminates against the country's Muslim minority. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this paper investigates the reality of precarious citizenship under India's increasingly anti-migrant regime, particularly for Bengali-speaking Muslims. Going beyond the predominant notion that illegal migrants acquire documentary citizenship through fraudulent means after crossing the porous border between India and Bangladesh, this essay reveals a reverse scenario: those living with citizenship rights and in a regular social world are subjected to the gradual process of detection, detention and 'deportability' in India. This paper employs the concept of precarious citizenship to unravel this complex and oscillating world of legality and illegality, citizenship and noncitizenship, and the predicaments of life as a Bengalispeaking Muslim in India.

The publication of the "National Register of Citizens" in Assam on July 31,2018 left 4 million people stateless and unleashed a wave of xenophobia .The paper seeks to examine the social and political implications of NRC .It is a condensed and translated version of my original Bengali paper.

Asie.Visions, No. 114, June 2020, 2020

The objective of this paper is to go beyond the standard story of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, a law passed by the Indian Parliament that offers citizenship to non-Muslim religious communities of three Muslim-majority states (Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan). The paper recognizes the CAA as a political phenomenon and tries to map out the ways in which CAA-related politics is played out. It asks three sets of questions: (a) What is the historical/political background that makes this law highly controversial? (b) What are the legal-technical issues related to this law and what are its political implications? (c) What has been the response of different groups, especially of the Muslim communities? What are their arguments and positions? The paper argues that the CAA is an outcome of a new politics of Hindutva constitutionalism. This politics relies heavily on the legal-technical ambiguities inherent in the post-1980 citizenship framework to carve out a space for itself. The growing centralization and state control to regulate the citizenship apparatus is reflected not only in the CAA, but also in the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register. The CAA, in this sense, stems from the notion of New India, a political doctrine that is based on the desirability of responsive citizens. Second, the CAA is mostly concerned about the BJP’s newly created Hindutva constituency. The non-Muslims coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh will not get Indian citizenship on their arrival. The government has not yet prepared the proper mechanism to determine the level of religious persecution, a precondition of citizenship as per the 2015 rules. In fact, there is no guarantee that these migrants would eventually get Indian citizenship. This technical ambiguity, however, is politically useful. It provides an opportunity to Hindutva forces to reinvent the Hindu victimhood argument. Citizenship to non-Muslims of Muslim countries, in this sense, is a new long-term project of contemporary Hindutva. Third, the opposition to CAA is equally fragmented. The political class does not want to go beyond the established Hindutva hegemony. In fact, except a few parties, the non-BJP groups found it difficult to associate themselves directly with anti-CAA protests. As a result, the creative potentials unleashed by the Muslim-dominated anti-CAA protests could not be channelized to produce any creative critique of Hindutva hegemony.