AMIDST the violence which accompanied partition, the governments of India and Pakistan, which disagreed with each other on most things, agreed to exchange their ‘lunatics’. In a powerful story about how this exchange unsettled the lives of ‘lunatics’ living in asylums, Saadat Hasan Manto wrote of Toba Tek Singh – a place name which became synonymous with a person – and eventually became a trope for forced movement across the freshly crafted borders. The refusal of Bishan Singh or Toba Tek Singh – the man who stood on his feet for fifteen years – to be transported to India, was not taken seriously by officials on the Wagah border. He was a harmless old man, confused in mind, they thought. No one could unequivocally tell him where his village was – in India or Pakistan. Bishan Singh died an anguished death in the no man’s land between the two countries.

Another inmate of the same asylum climbed atop a tree, completely clear in his mind that he did not want to live in either country. He was going to make the tree his home. Yet another inmate, a person with an engineering degree – an otherwise pensive man in the habit of taking long walks by himself – was so perturbed by the prospect of being allotted to one or the other country that he took off all his clothes and thus shorn of all identifying accoutrements, ran into the garden.¹

Defying the common sense that a lunatic asylum is not a place where action is determined by ‘reason’, the responses of the inhabitants open up powerful moments of interruption of the custodial power of the state. They also tell us of the blurred zones that exist between law’s distance and proximity, which are important for understanding the relationship between legal rationality and the force of law. In these zones citizenship becomes entangled with law’s capacity to destabilize and recode ideas of belonging by affirming and simultaneously masking the power of the state to elicit obedience from citizens.

Over the past several years, studies of citizenship have taken an anthropological avatar,² drawing attention to its distinctive capacity to connect dispersed and often disparate sites to present a continually replenishing project of transformative citizenship. In this essay I would attempt to bring the citizenship law in India to anthropological scrutiny, retracing the life of the Citizenship Act of 1955 to relocate it in the ‘matrix… of historical experience’.³ I would consider the citizenship law in India to be an accumulation of successive citizenship regimes which have in the contemporary moment culminated into a clearly identifiable tendency towards the association of citizenship with descent and blood ties. I argue that this tendency produces power-effect of the state through the deployment of the force of law.

 

With independence in August 1947, Indians were no longer British subjects under the British Nationality Act but citizens of a sovereign country. The passage to citizenship was part of a collective commitment to democratization of power and the preservation of conditions of dignity and fraternity within the framework of constitutional democracy. The ethics and consciousness of citizenship was sought through democratic elections and a constitutional order which established popular sovereignty. This took place alongside state formative practices, the structuration of institutions and the elaboration of democratic processes. The question – who is a citizen of India – became critical in two domains which involved different logics of sovereignty: the identification of citizens as voters representing the logic of democracy founded in popular sovereignty; and mapping and buttressing the territorial state to control the movement of people across borders founded in the sovereign power of the state.

Citizenship at the commencement of the Republic was associated with birth, descent and domicile, so that anyone domiciled in India or born in its territory or outside it to Indian citizens, would be an Indian citizen. At the same time the Constitution also recognized as citizens those who crossed the border from Pakistan or returned to India after having gone to Pakistan, with the intention of making India their permanent home. Interestingly, the physical borders were congealed instantaneously but they remained temporally flexible to accommodate different kinds of movement of people across borders. If 19 July 1948 became the constitutional deadline for those who had made the decision to return to India to avoid having to apply for citizenship to an officer appointed by the government, anyone who had migrated to Pakistan before 1 March 1947 could return to India on a permit of resettlement and permanent return.

 

In 1985, an amendment in the Citizenship Act of India 1955 made 24 March 1971 the cut-off date to identify those who had entered Assam from Bangladesh after 1 January 1966, to be eligible for Indian citizenship. Another amendment in the Citizenship Act of India in December 2019, introduced the cut-off date – 31 December 2014 – for persons belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Jain, Buddhist and Parsi communities who had fled Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan before this date to escape religious persecution. These persons would no longer be considered illegal migrants and could apply for Indian citizenship.

In 2015, the 119th amendment to the Constitution of India, following an agreement reached between India and Bangladesh, allowed the exchange of 51 Bangladeshi enclaves in the territory of India with 111 Indian enclaves in Bangladeshi territory. Indian citizens residing in the Indian enclaves in Bangladesh could either continue to stay on in the swapped territory and become citizens of the country which was now under the jurisdiction of Bangladesh, or move to Indian territory if they wished to retain their Indian citizenship.

 

The partition had ushered in a period of deep uncertainties about belonging. The legal rules and procedures to resolve them ranged from devising ad hoc rules to deal with contingencies, reciprocal arrangements and agreements for the exchange of people and property, to an exponential buttressing of the police force and the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The minutes of a meeting of the Standing Advisory Committee held in Delhi on 14 November 1949 under the chairpersonship of the Minister for Home Affairs Vallabhbhai Patel, give an insight into the augmentation of the policing activities of the state and the expenditure being incurred on it – the passport check posts on the newly installed borders, the employment of extra police officers for the security of the sessions of the Constituent Assembly and additional police for the eviction of persons occupying evacuee property, the recovery of abducted persons,⁴ and the ‘sudden expansion of Delhi and the increase in its population’ (due to the migration from Pakistan), to mention a few.⁵

The legal ensemble pertaining to citizenship, as laid down in the text of the Constitution of India and subsequently the statutory framework constituted by the Citizenship Act of 1955, sought legibility through a range of identifiers such as duration of residence, facts about domicile, dates of entry and departure, birth, and lineage/descent. These identifiers drew upon and corresponded to significant constitutive moments in the life of the nation, the imperatives of locating the legal sovereign who had the final say in matters of citizenship and state formative practices which involved both the enactment of law to facilitate the identification of citizens and designation of institutions responsible for implementing them.

 

Citizenship as a legal category was framed through two periods of interregnum between the formation of the Indian nation state (1947) and the commencement of the Constitution (1950), and subsequently between the commencement of the Constitution (1950) and the Citizenship Act of India (1955). The interregnum between the enforcement of the Constitution and the enactment of the Citizenship Act of 1955 generated spaces of liminality in the closures brought in by the constitutional deadline. While the Constitution opened up the closures which came into existence with the drawing of territorial boundaries, the Citizenship Act of 1955 held out the promise of legibility to those who occupied the space of liminal and indeterminate citizenship between 1950 and 1955.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the manner in which citizenship of people moving across borders in the period intervening the deadline set by the Constitution of India and the enactment of the Citizenship Act in 1955, returnees on resettlement permits and long-term visas, the minority population ‘displaced’ or ‘evacuated’ from Pakistan, and alien/Pakistani wives of Indian nationals who needed to be registered as Indian citizens after the enactment of the 1955 Act, was resolved. Unlike ‘abducted persons’ which was a legal category put in place by the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act 1949, ‘displaced persons’ was an administrative category, which figured in governmental files, opening up the possibility of new modalities of bureaucratic action. Their legal absorption into Indian citizenship was to be facilitated through their expeditious registration as citizens and their urgent inclusion in the electoral rolls.

 

The Ministries of Home, External Affairs, Rehabilitation, Law, and the Election Commission of India, acted in concert to complete the registration of displaced persons as Indian citizens expeditiously. Assurances were given in Parliament that the registration of such persons would be done with the least inconvenience to them. This meant, making arrangements for their registration, in all places where they resided in reasonably large numbers, e.g., towns, villages, refugee camps, and settlements. A note on the instructions issued to state governments circulated for discussion among the officials of the Home Ministry directed that exception to the Citizenship Act and Rules must be made, and strict adherence to the requirement of documentary evidence waived, to treat the displaced persons as a separate category for registration under the Citizenship Act of India.⁶

Apart from the legal absorption of displaced persons as enfranchised citizens, laws were framed to transform the displaced into productive citizens. The Bihar government, for example, promulgated an ordinance – the Bihar Displaced Persons Rehabilitation (Acquisition of Land) Ordinance – ‘to provide for the speedy acquisition of land for the rehabilitation of displaced persons from Pakistan’.⁷ This extraordinary legal measure was required to fulfil the commitment of the state government to ‘receive and rehabilitate 50,000 displaced persons from Eastern Pakistan’, about 50 per cent of whom were agriculturalists. Over the years the legal absorption of displaced persons through administrative measures has given way to legal regimes of citizenship that have marked out specific patterns of migration as ‘illegal’ while congealing a notion of blood ties as the foundation of belonging in a ‘national order of citizenship’.⁸ Yet, the installation of a national order has been contested where the articulation of citizenship, as in Assam, has taken recourse to non-national legacies of belonging.

 

In October 2019, Dulal Paul, a 65 year old villager from Alisanga in Assam, who had been declared a foreigner in 2017 and had since been in detention in a camp in Tezpur, died in Guwahati Medical College Hospital. Paul’s family refused to take his body home unless the government declared that he was an Indian citizen. How could they accept the body of a Bangladeshi man as their own family, they asked? Dulal Paul’s name had not figured in the final National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was published on 31 August 2019. All his family members, including his son, found a place in the register. Despite possessing all documents from 1965, his son claimed, Paul was declared an illegal migrant and remained in detention until his death.

The NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 represent contending tendencies in the contemporary regime of citizenship in India, which cohabit the legal assemblage of citizenship space, conjoined in their particularistic articulation of citizenship. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 purports to extend the protection of citizenship to those facing religious discrimination and simultaneously puts in place a regime which discriminates on the ground of religion. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is premised on the assumption that it is possible to distinguish between citizens and aliens on the basis of documents as evidence of citizenship. If the CAA has installed an exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship, the NRC as it has unfolded in Assam has congealed together the relationship between legal status and blood ties.

 

The present regime of citizenship can be traced to the significant changes made in the citizenship law through an amendment of the Citizenship Act in 2003. The 2003 amendment constrained citizenship by birth, limiting it to only those whose parents were Indian citizens or one of the parent was an Indian citizen and the other was not an illegal migrant. The amendment also put in place the requirement of identification of citizens based on documentary practices which have long been associated with the structuration and standardization of state power, state-formative practices, and the intensification and accentuation of state authority internally and externally.

While citizenship is understood as a condition of equality, it is dependent on a prior status of membership, and the distinction, therefore, between citizens and non-citizens. The association of citizenship with legal status is a continuing legacy of passive citizenship of the absolutist states which were concerned with imposing their authority over heterogeneous populations. Yet, citizenship is also about identity and belonging which are both constrained and enabled by the understanding of citizenship as legal status, which is determined by the modes through which people acquire citizenship and the conditions in which they can retain, relinquish or lose it.

 

The idea that citizenship can be passed on as a legacy of ancestry and descent has become part of the contemporary legal landscape of citizenship in India. It transmits the idea of blood as an organizing principle of a bounded political community and citizenship as inheritance. These can be traced across generations and establish ties with a homeland that holds the promise of return, generating ideas of belonging which construe citizenship as a natural and constitutive identity.

The responsibility given to the state to establish and maintain a National Register of Citizens and issue national identity cards through the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2003 and the rules framed under it, require the central government to carry out ‘house-to-house enumeration’ and collect particulars of individuals and families, including their citizenship status. Making an exception to this procedure, the NRC in Assam was prepared by inviting applications from all residents with particulars relating to each family and individual, including their citizenship status, which was based on NRC 1951, and the electoral rolls up to the midnight of 24 March 1971.⁹ With the tracing of the pedigree of Indian citizenship to an Assamese legacy, the citizenship act opened up the possibility of hyphenated citizenship, hitherto alien to the political vocabulary of citizenship in India.

The data of the 1951 NRC and the electoral rolls published in Assam up to 24 March 1971 cumulatively comprised the legacy data. Finding an ancestor in the legacy data to trace direct descent was made necessary for inclusion in the NRC for those who were not themselves its part. The NRC 1951 was an outcome of a flawed and perfunctory exercise of enumeration confined to Assam. The rules devised for the preparation of the NRC gave the 1951 NRC legitimacy by inscribing it in a national identification regime and installing it as core around which incremental electoral rolls could cluster. This process of establishing legacy involved a humungous bureaucratic exercise of compilation of legacy data by consolidating dispersed data into a single computerized database.

 

The statutory publication of the legacy data on 27 March 2015 inaugurated the process of updating the NRC in Assam plunging the state into a prolonged identification drill. Applications to be placed in the NRC were made on the basis of specified documents which alone could prove citizenship. The power of evidence assumed by documents drew from their capacity to establish linkage with the legacy data. After an ancestor had been traced in the legacy data, the computerized database assigned to the applicant an 11 digit number called Unique Legacy Data Code, providing the applicant a numerical link with the ancestor. The legacy code embodied a personal claim for verification for the applicant but also acted as a legacy trace linking the applicant with others who had been allotted the same code because of a common ancestry. The legacy trace could be authenticated only through ‘linkage documents’ carrying the names of the applicant and the ancestor who was present in the legacy data.

In an inversion of the relationship between documents and citizenship, the evidentiary paradigm invoked in the preparation of the NRC in Assam listed documents which would, under specified conditions, become proof of citizenship. The meaning of documents such as the voter ID card which are identity documents that can be obtained only by citizens changed as they became part of the identification regime associated with the NRC in Assam. These documents acquired evidentiary worth only by becoming part of a serialized link in relationship with other documents. Significantly all these documents which were discrete in their origin and purpose were connected together to serve another purpose – to establish the lineage of the applicant which would henceforth constitute the proof of citizenship. Indeed, categories such as ‘legacy’, ‘legacy documents’, ‘legacy data’, ‘legacy trace’ and ‘unique legacy data code’, were innovations which made documents meaningful or irrelevant for the purposes of NRC.

 

In this process documents got re-inscribed in a register alien to their original inscription and purpose. When it was being prepared in 1948, the electoral roll came to be seen as an extraordinary and unprecedented ‘act of faith’. It inserted ‘the people’ into the administrative structures of the state by linking the abstract text of the Constitution to their everyday lives as a popular narrative and prepared the ground for ‘the conceptions and principles of democratic citizenship’.¹⁰

Writing about the first general election in India in a short story titled ‘The Election Game’, R.K. Narayan recounts the election fever that seized the people participating in what he called a ‘large scale rehearsal for political life.’ No one, young or old, was left untouched ‘as though a sense of sovereignty [was] aroused even in the most insignificant of us’.¹¹ The coincidence of citizenship with voting rights and universal adult franchise, involved a governmental activity of identification different from any other such exercise since its objective was not the enhancement of the governmental power of the state, but the affirmation of popular sovereignty and transition to a democratic republic.

 

As a legacy document the electoral roll was recalled on a different register which changed its authority from a text embodying popular sovereignty to a document providing legacy trace, to serve the imperatives of the identification regime of the state. The worth of the legacy document depended on the extent to which it strengthened the regime of legibility and evidentiary framework of which it was now a part. This was evident in a recent Guwahati High Court judgement that rejected a petition by Babul Islam against a Foreigners Tribunal order pronouncing him a foreigner. Babul Islam had placed before the court his Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) as proof of citizenship. While the EPIC is a voter identity card and not a citizenship card, the fact that only citizens can vote, makes for a stable relationship between the two.

The Guwhati High Court refused to recognize the EPIC as evidence of citizenship on the ground that it did not possess the attribute of ‘due’ proof which could make the EPIC ‘admissible’ evidence. The EPIC could be ‘evidence’ of citizenship only if it could be effectively inserted in the chain of validation linking it up with the pre-1971 voter list.¹²

 

Close on the heels of the judgement in Babul Islam’s case, the same bench of the Guwahati High Court rejected a petition by Jabeda Khatun, a 50 year old woman from Guwahari village, refusing to consider the 15 documents she had submitted as proof of citizenship. These documents included land revenue payment receipt, bank pass-book, voter list and Permanent Account Number (PAN) Card but none of these could link her to her parents as legacy persons.¹³ Both Jabeda Khatun and Manowara Bewa, whose citizenship claims too were turned down because of the absence of appropriate legacy documents, had submitted certificates by the Gaon Bura (village headman).

The court, in the case of Jabeda Khatun rejected the certificate on the ground that it could be admitted as evidence only to prove that she had shifted after marriage to her matrimonial village as per the Supreme Court judgement in Rupjan Begum vs. Union of India (1 SCC 579 2018). In the case of Manowara Bewa, the judge rejected the certificate issued by the village panchayat on the ground that the petitioner failed to establish the authority of the documents through a corroborating oral testimony of the issuing authority in the court. In both cases the court had refused to accept the testimony of relatives as evidence of relationship with the legacy person.

It is significant that affirmation of blood ties according to the court could only be done through ‘public’ documents. According to Section 74 of the Indian Evidence Act, ‘public documents’ are documents ‘forming acts or records of the act – (i) of the sovereign authority, (ii) of official bodies and tribunals, and (iii) of public officers, legislative, judicial and executive…as well as public records kept in any state of private documents.’ Certificates by gaon bura pertaining to relationships by marriage could not be considered public until they were also heard by the court as an attestation of their veracity.

In the Manowara Bewa case, considering the legality of a certificate issued by the gaon panchayat secretary certifying that the applicant resided in the area within his jurisdiction, the Guwahti High Court ruled that the certificate of residence issued by the gaon panchayat could not be considered a ‘public document’ for a range of reasons. That the certificate was not issued from a record that the panchayat maintained, under the provisions of the 1994 Panchayati Raj Act and Rules, was among the most significant. It could, therefore, only be a ‘private’ document expressing personal knowledge. Its ‘truthfulness’ had to be attested by the officer in the court, who was expected to take ‘full responsibility’ for the contents of the certificate. In case the officer of the gaon panchayat was not believed by the High Court, and the certificate holder was indeed a foreigner, the officer would be considered guilty of ‘harbouring an illegal migrant’ and guilty of ‘gross misconduct’ exposing him to ‘departmental action’ besides attracting penal consequences.¹⁴

 

The contemporary landscape of citizenship in India is an assemblage of tendencies that make for a practice of citizenship based on descent and an idea of national citizenship which for the first time makes religion a legal basis for making a distinction between citizens and aliens. Significantly, the ordering of citizenship on a national scale has been presented as necessary and indispensable for containing the ‘dangerous consequences of large-scale illegal migration’ from Bangladesh. The Joint Parliamentary Committee which gave its recommendations on the Citizenship Amendment Bill, argued against ‘misconceived and mistaken notions of secularism’ coming in the way of stopping this influx.¹⁵

 

Earlier, on 17 December 2014, Justice Ranjan Gogoi and R.F. Nariman of the Supreme Court of India, had delivered a judgement in the case Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha and Others v. Union of India and others¹⁶ laying down the modalities and the schedule for updating the NRC in Assam. In its administrative guidelines the Supreme Court followed its decision in Sarbananda Sonowal (2005) in construing the ‘influx of illegal migrants into the state of India as external aggression.’ The correspondence drawn between indiscriminate (illegal) immigration as an act of aggression against state sovereignty – its territory and people – is a trope commonly used across the world in election campaigns and for creating grounds for making changes in immigration and citizenship laws.

In November 2018, President Trump used ‘invasion’ as a metaphor to refer to the caravan of thousands of asylum seekers approaching the American borders along Mexico: ‘It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border… These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.’¹⁷ The invocation of a crisis ridden border, the need to deploy troops and to install a wall along the border, along with the attack on birth right citizenship has been a common refrain by the President.

 

In her novel Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie writes about the estrangement of young Muslim men and women born and brought up in England in the post 9/11 and rise of the ISIS contexts.¹⁸ Religious and cultural othering was, however, only part of the narrative of estrangement. Deeper and more consequential was the complete withdrawal of state protection and the refusal of a right to return to a young man who joined the ISIS and subsequently wanted to exit. While Shamsie’s fictional rendition of the conditions in which citizenship can be reduced to a privilege is evident in most countries, it is especially significant for the emphatic turn towards strengthening provisions that facilitate the deprivation of citizenship for public good and in the national interest. The loss of citizenship in such contexts relegates the political relationship between citizens and the state, to revert to a stage where citizenship becomes a privilege that can be withdrawn.

A distinction can be made between those who deserve protection and those that do not depending on what is construed in contemporary contexts in India and elsewhere – the capability of a person to show sufficient and effective allegiance to the state and conformity to an idea of citizenship which is aligned with constitutive conditions of belonging, such as ancestry and culture. By forming a community of descent through citizenship, the state no longer establishes its authority as the primary source of universal membership by standing above and independent of other local communities of belonging, but itself becomes a community to which citizens are tied constitutively.

 

The insertion of legacy in the NRC in Assam has shown how citizenship has become a condition of constitutive belonging. Ranabir Samaddar¹⁹ has seen this constitutive power of citizenship unfold in two ways: as a procedure to arrest the power of the family through the construction of a legal myth called legacy, and the pruning of the power of the individual to claim citizenship as a person. Samaddar calls this ‘technical power’ that drives a wedge in the ‘broad continuum of the family reaching up to the state.’

Following this argument, it is possible to see both these practices working through contradictory logics – the substitution of the power of the family to absorb the ‘awkward’ citizen to make her inaccessible to the state and on the other hand, reinstalling the order of the state through the power of legacy traced through the family tree verifiable by public evidence. The expulsion of the individual in the new identification regime reinforces the power of the state through its capacity to unsettle the family by its power of summoning individual members as nodes that make the family suspect.

Writing about the forms of legal and sovereign power in the colony, Achille Mbembe points at the manner in which colonial power was constituted as the colonizer’s right to exercise absolute dominion over the native. Mbembe identifies three ways in which violence was imbricated in the imaginary of ‘command’ specific to state sovereignty in the colonial context – foundational violence which assumed a right to conquest, the legitimation of violence through narratives of justification in terms of a necessity, and finally, sustaining it as an enduring form of rule by everyday practices in which the state did not stand apart from, but had a specific relationship with society in a shared life. It was in this shared life that the colonized was required to subject himself willingly. Anyone who desired another form of interaction, which challenged the authority of violence and questioned its protocols, was declared a savage and an outlaw, and treated accordingly.²⁰

 

The invocation of ‘crisis’ in citizenship generated by the spectre of indiscriminate immigration and the risks presented by ‘strangers’ among us,²¹ has become the source for extraordinary legal regimes of citizenship. These regimes have recalled the sovereign’s power to command by controlling the borders in the interest of a national community based on social cohesion, trust and shared interests. Yet, the moments of crisis are also one of iteration of constitutional moments – of ‘re-discovering’ the set of principles that came to be adopted by ‘We, the people’22 – that have the power to ‘break the causal chain of process and launch something unprecedented’.²³ These moments embody powerful acts of political courage that have the power to reiterate not just a constitutional order but a democratic order as well.

 

* Anupama Roy is the co-author of Election Commission of India. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Footnotes:

1. There are several English translations of ‘Toba Tek Singh’, a short story written by Manto in 1955. Among them is one available on www.sacw.net, February 1998 (accessed in 21 February 2020).

2. Catherine Neveu, John Clarke, Kathleen Coll and Evelina Dagnino, ‘Introduction: Questioning Citizenships/Questions de citoyennetés’, Citizenship Studies 15(8), 2011, pp. 945-964.

3. Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies (Vol. I). Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1982.

4. Letter dated 29 May 1948 from the Home Secretary to the Chief Commissioner of Delhi to the Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs. File no. 16/44/48 Police (I), NAI.

5. Minutes of the Standing Advisory Committee, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. File no. 16/31/49, NAI.

6. Note dated 18 July 1958, Ministry of Home Affairs (Indian Citizenship Section). File no. 10/1/56, MHA-IC, NAI.

7.Note of the PRO, Ministry of Agriculture, dated 23 August 1950. File no. 17/143/50 MHA-Judl, NAI.

8. Sanjib Baruah, ‘The Partition’s Long Shadow: The Ambiguities of Citizenship in Assam, India’, Citizenship Studies 13(6), 2009, pp. 593-606.

9. Section 4-A. Special provisions as to National Register of Indian Citizens in State of Assam.

10. Ornit Shani, How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and Making of the Universal Franchise. Penguin/Viking, Gurgaon, 2018, p. 7.

11. R. K. Narayan, ‘The Election Game’, The Hindu, 3 February 1952.

12. Writ petition (WP(C)7426/2019) by Babul Islam against an order of the Foreigners Tribunal, where he was declared as a foreigner of post-1971 stream. See also, ‘Gauhati High Court Says Electoral Photo Identity Card Not a Proof of Indian Citizenship’, India Today, 17 February 2020.

13. Writ petition no. WP(C) 7451/2019) before the Gauhati High Court. Also, ‘Land Revenue Receipts, PAN Card, Bank Documents No Proof of Citizenship: Gauhati High Court’, The Hindu, 18 February, 2020.

14. Judgement dated 28/02/2017, WP(C) 2634/2016.

15. JPC Report 2019, p. 12.

16. Writ Petition (Civil) No. 562 of 2012.

17. Meagan Flynn, ‘"An Invasion of Illegal Aliens": The Oldest Immigration Fear-Mongering Metaphor in America’, The Washington Post, 2 November 2018.

18. Kamila Shamsie, Home Fires. Riverhead Books, New York, 2017.

19. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Migrants, NRC, and the Paradox of Protection and Power’, The Wire, 12 April 2019.

20. Achille Mbembe, On The Postcolony. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2001, pp. 6-7.

21. David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst. Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass and London, 2016.

22. Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991, p. 5.

23. H. F. Pitkin, ‘The Idea of a Constitution’, Journal of Legal Education 37(2), 1987, pp. 167-169.