8 - Doubtful Citizens

Summary

There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.