Description
This paper examines the legal and administrative procedures by which an estimated 1.9 million residents in the state of Assam, India have been excluded from the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and thus are at risk for de facto statelessness. Since India’s independence from Great Britain, the struggle to determine who is a citizen or “illegal migrant” has fueled heated conflicts among the Assamese ethnic majority, Bengali speaking Muslims and Hindus who originated in what is now Bangladesh, and the Indian government’s authority over migration (Barua, 2009). Building upon scholarship on the structural violence of bordering through political and social processes where belonging, identity, and rights are negotiated, we consider how the ascendence of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government and new technologies in population surveillance contribute to a shift from liminal to precarious citizenship in this border region. We review how Supreme Court of India decisions and regulations issued by the Government of Assam outline the legal requirements to verify the citizenship. We then contextualize this policy analysis with ethnographic interviews with residents of Assam who were excluded from the NRC and secondary sources on the impact exclusion from the final NRC list published in August 2019. While the NRC’s official purpose is to differentiate between citizens and “foreigners,” we argue that bordering practices associated with the NRC’s implementation produce de facto or administrative statelessness among racialized and gendered “others” who already face long- standing systemic inequality including women, trans people, and religious and ethnic minorities.| Period | 7 Jan 2022 |
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| Held at | UCLA, United States |