Introduction
This article aims to analyze the Islamophobic politics at the heart of citizenship denial in the context of India’s December 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) legislation under the leadership of the Hindu nationalist government led by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The politics of citizenship denial in India thus emerges as a legal tussle between the Muslim minority citizenship rights and Hindu nationalism in India. However, the biopolitical fracture of the Indian nation-state makes the legal ideal of citizenship further complicated for Muslim minority citizens in India. This article further proposes that rather than sticking to the idealism of citizenship, a critical analysis of Islamophobia and its political correlates must attend to the negative position of the Muslim subject with respect to the biopolitical fracture at the core of Indian nationalism and the modern nation-state.
The article proceeds from the theoretical strategy offered by Etienne Balibar’s formulation of the citizen-subject (Balibar 2016). 1 Etienne Balibar argues that instead of reducing the inquiry to the technicalities of citizenship, it is imperative to trace the way in which its underside, the subject, emerges and exists as a gap within any claim to the universal (Balibar 2015, 64-65). The Muslim minority subject is thus transformed into a negativity, 2 in terms of a biopolitical fracture 3 that both politics and law have to necessarily contend with, as can be witnessed in the context of the CAA and NRC. This allows us to develop a perspective that does not dismiss or valorize the strategies of the marginalized Muslim minority in claiming citizenship but sees it in light of the immanent contradictions of the modern nation-state and its biopolitical management of the negativity of the citizen-subject.
The article begins by analyzing the CAA-NRC legislation, its political aims for Hindutva, and legal consequences of the politico-juridical reconceptualization of citizens, refugees, and migrants. While Hindutva politics is rooted in a global Islamophobic logic, it is also distinct from other Islamophobic political tendencies in India, as can be witnessed in a radical move such as citizenship denial. The CAA-NRC thus emerges as a singular political moment in the conjectures surrounding Islamophobia, law, and state. The local forms of Islamophobic violence are further analyzed through the Muslim experience of internal displacement and migrant existence within India in the form of passive citizenship. Moreover, Hindutva effort to deny citizenship for Muslim minorities is not only a technical legal issue but it is closely interlinked to the ideological horizon of Hindutva and the biopolitical turn of the state form in India. The Hindutva project has strong parallels to the sovereign-biopolitics of citizenship practiced in Nazi Germany. This is the very limit of right-based approach to citizenship as it ignores the biopolitical fractures inherent in the conception of Muslim citizenship in India, and the question of nation that Hindutva has monopolized. The right-based approach is internally limited through multiple cleavages within the Muslim citizenship as we see in the distinction between internal displacement of Muslim refugees and the impossibility of being a migrant in the context of CAA and NRC. This shows the salience of new biopolitical development within the sphere of Muslim citizenship in India, where fascist social logic is combined with modern biopolitics in the form of the juridico-political. The article concludes that this new configuration of the Muslim subject position in relation to citizenship politics must enable us to trace the transformed logic of Islamophobia as a form of biopolitical regime of its own and to think through the political-theoretical consequences of such an analysis.
The Legal Politics of Caa and NRC
Citizenship in India originated through many historical processes, including the experience of anti-colonial nationalism during the British colonization and the birth of the nation-states in South Asia. An individual technically gets citizenship in India in two ways: by birth or naturalization (Roy 2010, 32-34). The collective political imagination of Muslim minority citizenship in postcolonial India developed through multiple social negotiations, political mobilization inside and outside the constitutional assembly debates, and Muslim rights struggles as the subjects of the British colonial government at the intersection of religious and minority status (Bajpai 2000, 1817-1845; Jha 2003, 1579-1583). After independence from the British Raj and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the status of Muslim citizenship was by and large settled in postcolonial India, although in an unstable and technical way in the totality of social collective and state form (Shani 2010, 145-173). 4 The recent attempt at denying citizenship to Muslims using the CAA 2019 by Hindutva social and governmental ascendancy, once again brought this instability to the forefront.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019, popularly known as the CAA, was passed by the Parliament of India on 11 December 2019. The Citizenship Act of 1955 prevents “illegal migrants” without qualification from acquiring citizenship in India (Ahmed 2020, 121). The illegal immigrants are defined as foreigners who entered India without required documents or overstayed their visit against the period permitted (Ibid.). The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 redefine the definition of illegal immigrants by giving access to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan and finding ways to citizenship in India (Ibid.). The act was in accordance with the Hindu nationalist agenda of ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This law is only applicable for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians. The law excludes Muslims and does not grant such eligibility to Muslims from other countries. The overt exclusion of Muslims as the criterion of citizenship made CAA one of the most controversial legislations in the history of citizenship in India. This legislation was linked to another controversial legislation titled National Registry of Citizenship (NRC), whereby the state aims to carry out a country wide survey of legitimate citizenship using documentary evidence (Ahmed 2020, 121). In creating a registry of legitimate citizenship, the effective aim of the legislation is to also create a registry of the non-citizen subject marked as illegal migrants and infiltrators. Moreover, the chief of the RSS Mohan Bhagwat proclaims that “no Hindu will have to leave over NRC” (Jaffrelot 2021, 376).
In the context of CAA, where Muslims are excluded from the pantheon of India’s diverse identities with claim to citizenship, the pathway to citizenship through both naturalization and birthright is made impossible (Jaffrelot 2021, 375). Indian citizens including non-Muslims will be affected by the technocratic violence of categorizing the citizen and non-citizen because of the laboriousness of accurate documentary evidence for the mass of marginalized subjects of the nation (Ibid.). However, Muslims are effectively left out without any path to progress from the condition of non-citizenship to legitimate citizenship that can appeal to rights and protections (Ibid.). In the context of NRC, the naturalness of Muslim citizenship is questioned, and in the context of CAA, the possibility of appealing to citizenship is blocked with the aim of rendering the mass of Muslims as stateless and rightless. 5
The next section shows how the emergence of CAA and NRC is linked to the politics of Islamophobia in India. The examination of Islamophobia enables to trace the Muslim subject position within the new citizenship laws in India.
Islamophobia and Citizenship in India After Caa-Nrc
The differential marking of individual citizens on the lines of religion, caste, gender, and nation are already embedded in the paradoxical history of citizenship in India (Roy 2010, 18). A new form of political differentiation can also be seen in the invocation of the terms “extremist,” “fundamentalist,” and “terrorist” developed in the wake of war on terror and subsequent anti-terror legislation that are dominant in Indian secular nationalist discourse further complicating the Muslim right to citizenship (Roy 2010, 22). However, the new citizenship law to de-nationalize Muslims, and thus deny them citizenship, is an attempt to create a new kind of Muslim political subject in the historical legacy of the problem of Muslim citizenship.
Citizenship denial enhances Islamophobic power by transforming it into a legitimate framework and destroys the political infrastructure of social and political rights that make Muslim minority politics possible. Islamophobia hinders the struggle of the Muslim minority subject to exist as a self-styled citizen as part of social contracts within the nation-state. Studies that look at the problem of citizenship and Islamophobia focus on the normative aspect of citizenship and rarely take the biopolitical fracture seriously (Andre and Pratt 2015, 131–132). This is what makes Islamophobia a politically significant problematic in the face of citizenship denial in India.
It is important to make a distinction between earlier forms of Islamophobia practiced by preceding liberal governments in India and its social extensions from the fascist politics of Islamophobia by Hindutva. The earlier forms of Islamophobia materialized in practices of discrimination against Muslims that denied them the full benefits of citizenship, but the politico-juridical basis of citizenship remained and was open to appeal. That is to say, Muslim political subject was tolerated but not fully included. The fascist form of Islamophobia targets the very basis of politico-juridical inclusion of Muslims into Indian polity as protected citizens, thus legalizing violence that is far more lethal than the problem of discrimination.
In other words, the earlier form of Islamophobia was developed through a spectrum position on a Muslim subject via the hybridity of passive citizen, protected refugee, and legal migrant. The new Islamophobia of Hindutva has, through NRC and CAA, rendered the migrant status of Muslims an impossibility, which in turn reduces the citizenship status of Muslims to a political limbo. The inevitable exclusion from NRC for a majority of Muslims could have been resisted with the potential of the migrant subject, but the addition of CAA is designed to foreclose such a strategy of resistance, leading to the near-complete statelessness and rightlessness.
The Impossibility of Being a Migrant: Muslim Citizens and Refugees After Caa-Nrc
Addressing the anti-CAA and NRC protestors on 22 December 2019 in Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed 6 that “those Muslims who were born on Indian soil, whose ancestors are children of Maa Bharti [Mother India], they have got nothing to do with CAA and NRC. They are not being sent to the detention centres” (Jaffrelot 2021, 377). The most important aspect of the denial of citizenship right was the emergence of the Muslim protest movement all across the Indian state from the second week of December. Modi’s speech was addressing the single biggest opposition movement against his regime after he came into power in 2014. Modi was addressing the most frequent political-rhetorical elements of the uprisings. That is the statements of vigilance, in regard to being rendered bare, life or the fear of being thrown into camps, and being taken as refugees in one’s own country (Lahiri 2021, 282). Modi’s speech, which may appear to quell such fears, in fact brings this very ambiguity of Muslim citizenship in India to the forefront, wherein Muslims are divided into legitimate Indian citizens and illegitimate foreigners, and the violence against the latter made legitimate.
There are many historical contingencies to the current citizenship issue, the internal refugee status of Muslim citizens, or the fear of statelessness, detainee or refugee status. An inquiry into the communal riots in post-partition India, and the ways in which it has displaced Muslim subjects to moments of absolute vulnerability, is indispensable to understanding the Indian Muslim minority’s social identity. After the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, 7 Muslims who fled the state have had to settle in refugee camps in different and strange corners of the country. In a sense, these groups have been fundamentally transformed into refugees within the nation-state (Lokhande 2016). The history of internal displacement before and after the pogrom of 2002 is understood between the visthapith (displaced persons) and vatani (country or place of birth) positions (Lokhande 2016, 55-56). Sanjeevani Badigar Lokhande (2016, 56) observes that “In interviews with survivors of the violence and displaced [in Gujarat], especially those from rural areas, the word vatani, which comes from the Urdu word vatan or country and means one who belongs to a particular place, often came up. Many of those categorized as visthapith or displaced, especially those from rural areas described themselves as being vatanis for many generations of the places from which they were displaced.” There was a formal—though superficial—commitment to Gujarat’s internally displaced people in the earlier decades of communal violence that started in the 1960s. The Muslims were the primary victims when Indian National Congress (INC) was in power (Lokhande 2016, 125), and the language of governmental interventions around the internally displaced Muslim minority citizen was posed as “relief” rather than a “right” (Lokhande 2016, 121). After the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, however, the state refused to address the displacement of the Muslim minority citizens. The then state government led by Narendra Modi shied away from using the term “displacement” for those forced to flee their homes (Lokhande 2016, 125). A distinction is necessary here: refugees of communal riots or pogroms are given legal protection by the state, even if only in name.
Thomas Nail (2015, 234) suggests that to move beyond the gridlock of the citizen/refugee binary the primary subject needs to be rearticulated as the migrant. The migrant exists in the in-betweens of the citizen/refugee. The citizen is an exclusively included subject who has a static and stable political existence within the state apparatus, while refugees are not granted existence at all in the polity. Thus, centering the ambiguity of the migrant in political philosophy will enable the dissolution of categorical distinctions by which the power of nation-states constitutes and extend itself (Ibid.). However, in the context of post-CAA India, the state seeks to control and determine the category of the migrant, so as to exclude the figure of the Muslim from the ambiguous potential of the migrants from which political philosophy could be rearticulated.
Between Jews and Muslims: The Historical Precedent of Muslim (NON) Citizenship
The law or constitution has no technical autonomy that provides it the sole power to determine the life of a nation. Rather, it is itself determined by the sovereign composition of a given polity. The structure of a nation-state in relation to the power of Hindu nationalism is significant when analyzing Muslim citizenship in India. The constitution is understood to be common to all members of the nation and is the dominant reference for political discourse in India. The validity of the state’s laws is determined by the constitution. Article 14 of the Indian Constitution reads: “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law, or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India” (Jaffrelot 2021, 374). However, even higher institutions of law, like the Supreme Court of India, were unable to mobilize egalitarian dimensions of the constitution to block the passage of the CAA. What constitutes nationalism is also important in determining citizenship via constitution and state. When a nation determines the state, the ideal of nationalism will become the governing force of the state, law, and constitution (Bernstein 2018, 19). In light of the Nazi experience, Hannah Arendt had foretold this, arguing that in a totalitarian political system the powers that place the nation over the state will prevail (Arendt 1968, 275). In India, RSS’ conception of Brahmanical Hindu supremacist nationalism as a fascist totalitarian project is able to redefine the constitution, the law, and thereby its conception of citizenship. This must be read in conjunction with Hannah Arendt’s argument that the denial of citizenship was one of the major events that led to the Jewish genocide.
The ascendancy of Hindu nationalism has effectively overcome the liberal and republican model of citizenship, 8 to give India its Hindu totalitarian form and content through fascist political logic. The liberal and republican model of citizenship in India relies on the language of the constitution. The Hindu nationalist order has used the moral nationalism of citizenship to make India a Hindu fascist state since the 1980s (Shani 2010: 153). Why haven’t there been such issues of citizenship denial in India before? It was because the national forces that defined the state at that time were adhering to a seemingly settled metaphysics of the nation. The state was controlled by a sovereign composition that was concerned with law and constitutional values in the immanent space of a metaphysics of the pre-settled nation. Thus, citizenship has not been treated on an ethnic basis. However, the RSS-led ruling Hindu nationalist movements have taken over the technologies of the state by re-opening the question of the nation and creating the legal basis for a new antagonism towards the Muslim minority subject.
The early writings of the RSS were inspired by the politics of nationalism and citizenship denial practiced by the Nazi Germany (Leidig 2020, 222-223). 9 The RSS ideologue VD Savarkar wrote Hindutva in 1923 (Bhatt 2001, 106). The book deals with issues of history, civilization, geography, ethnicity, and religion, but with few references to European history and the events of the period. However, as Chetan Bhatt (2001, 105) argues, the rise of Nazism in the 1930s excited Savarkar and he updated his writings in view of the Nazi uprisings in Eastern Europe at the time. In 1938, Savarkar declared that Indian Muslims were equal to Jews in Germany (Bhatt 2001, 106). Savarkar’s claim that Muslims were external intruders to the body politic of the mythical Indian nation is homologous to the Nazi German ideology of anti-Semitism. The examples from Nazi Germany became more and more central to his arguments on Hindu ethnic nationalism. 10 Another RSS ideologue MS Golwalkar 11 transformed Savarkar’s book, Hindutva. Golwalkar seconded the Nazi political proposal of a nation, as a cultural component, dominating and determining the political component of the state. As part of this, since its inception in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Sangh Parivar has called for revoking the citizenship rights of minorities. It is noteworthy that this became a model for Golwalkar’s writings only after the Jews were denied citizenship in Germany in 1935.
The RSS denies legal rights of Muslim citizens along with intensifying already existing socio-political marginalization. Though other political movements may be engaged in the political and social marginalization of Muslims, the legal rights of Muslim citizenship were unconditional at a technical level. Thus, the nationalist ideology of the RSS—and its political wing the BJP—control the state and law forgoing constitutional idealism to make possible the elimination of Muslims from citizenship with legal impunity. However, the rise of fascist nationalism cannot be understood as antithetical to the structure of modern nation-states. On the contrary, the development of fascist nationalism and its modus operandi can be located within the biopolitical fractures at the heart of state, law, and citizenship.
The Paradox of Muslim Citizenship: Between the ‘Right to have Rights’ and Biopolitics
At the heart of the debates and political struggle around the citizenship crisis in India, two symbiotic but antagonistic political paradigms arise. The first, and the predominant one, bases itself on the question of rights, or “the right to have rights,” where the only way in which subjects are granted the right to existence is in the form of citizenship. Here, the denial of citizenship can only be resisted and restored through an appeal to the ethical core of citizenship and the law of the rights. The second paradigm, on the other hand, questions the exclusionary core at the heart of the ethics of citizenship/rights itself (and its double “other” of the non-citizen and the rightless subject) and reveals the limit of such political appeals, and underlines the question what if citizenship is problematic itself.
Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt share the proposition that modern politics remains divided by a fundamental fracture between the subject of bare life and the politics of citizenship. In other words, the naked human life can only become politically recognized by appealing to its legitimacy within citizenship. Thus, human rights are not an inherent condition of the subject; rather it is a qualification received through entry into the polity of the citizens. For Arendt, this is a necessary practical reality, by which stateless and refugee subjects like Arendt have no option but to gain citizenship to become a legitimate subject with rights and protections (Arendt 1968, 300). Arendt thus defines citizenship as the axis of rights, or “the right to have rights” (Arendt 1968, 296-97). For Giorgio Agamben (1998, 134), while agreeing with Arendt in so far as the categorical distinction underlying citizenship is recognized, argues that the problem becomes the sovereign mechanism which has the power to determine and control those who have rights and those who do not have rights. This capacity for banning human subjects from the domain of rights, which in itself develops within the apparatus of citizenship, thus becomes a foundational violence that the political realism that Arendt promotes cannot confront.
The Jews and other minorities of Nazi Germany were pushed outside the law; an outside that was created within and by the law itself. 12 As Hannah Arendt (1968, 297) noted, this was the very condition in which holocaust was made possible, as it could not be registered as a crime within the jurdico-political order, but as a process legitimated within the state. The camp life and refugee status, without legal protection, leads to a new bare life with legal sanction. However, as Giorgio Agamben (1998, 179) has suggested, the Nazi holocaust camps are no exception to the modern nation-state and are part of its own biopolitical logic. When the RSS is in power for the nation and the state, their eliminationist agenda against Muslims becomes a legal possibility after the enactment of NRC/CAA. The problem of the Nazi-style new caste-Hindu nationalist state, therefore, is that it has acquired a sovereign character both within and outside the law.
In contrast to the problem of whether biopolitics or the politico-juridical is important, Indian society presents us with a third problematic of caste, where the autonomy of society needs to be taken seriously, where centralization of life under state may not have been finalized, or not as it generally appears. In contrast to western metaphysics where the King existed as the supreme condition of sovereign determination, the Brahmanic power-knowledge nexus affirmed a space of its own outside the palace, to determine law for both the Kings and the subjects, from which social as an autonomous and the dominant formation against the general sovereign was developed (Vajpei 2009, 313-315). This can be read as a form of politico-juridical that is socially lived, rather than through the state or the generic image of the sovereign.
Citizenship denial holds the potential for fascist politics only insofar as the biopolitical underside of citizenship in the form of a stateless qua rightless subjectivation emerges in the modern political metaphysics. Hindutva violence against its others could, and did, exist without modern politics, in the form of localized segregations, pogroms, and lynchings, but the ability to render its others abject at a collective and national scale upending geographic and cultural limits can only be comprehended within the centralizing capacities of modern nation-states, its governmentality of discipline, control, surveillance, and administration, and the totalizing power of the politico-juridical order.
In short, the problem of citizenship denial cannot be addressed with an appeal to the rights discourse or technicalities of law and constitution via citizenship. In the instance of an appeal to the ideals of rights, it ignores the very foundational exclusion—the exclusion by inclusion—that makes citizenship possible and thus fundamentally an unstable category for Muslims. The proliferation of detention camps and citizenship tribunal originates from the biopolitical fracture at the heart of rights, law, and constitution rather than in its supposed corruption. Furthermore, such an appeal also excludes the necessity of confronting the social politic of fascism—Hindu nationalism—and its capacity to determine the metaphysics of the nation, as well its ability to mobilize violence against Muslims without the terms of law and state in the form of lynching, pogroms and host of other forms of violence. This means that neither the social nor the state can be valorized or mobilized against each other; rather, much like the dual power of fascism, a dual critique and dual resistance must be theorized and practiced.
Concluding Remarks
A discerning feature of the global Islamophobic apparatus from earlier forms of biopolitical exclusion is that it is a heterogeneous form of power and violence refracted on multiple registers of subjection. For example, if colonialism or anti-Semitism mobilized the figure of the savage and other/enemy respectively as the organizing feature of its exclusion by inclusion, in contemporary Islamophobia we see the production of the Muslim subject along different lines of exploitation, exclusion, and elimination. In the context of Europe, the figure of the Muslim is primarily interpellated as an “infiltrating” refugee/migrant; in the “War on Terror,” the Muslim is produced as both a terrorist enemy to be killed and an ungrievable collateral that might be killed; in places like India or China, the Muslim is seen as a fifth column to be eliminated to unify the nation, and so on. In each of these sites, Islamophobia is produced and distributed in diverse and sweeping ways rather than as one question of politico-juridical, fascism, imperialism, or security etc. Here, Islamophobia rather than being another effect of power, could be seen as a sophisticated new development within biopolitics, where the power is both dispersed and centralized within the figure of the Muslim as multiple forms of negativity.
Along with anti-Muslim legislation and politics in India, violence against Muslims was practiced as rural lynching, pogroms, and other non-judicial forms of fascist violence. Moreover, with the war on terror, an aspect of the logic of global Islamophobia and its production of the figure of the terrorist enemy was also institutionalized and popularized in India. Although a collective of scholarship, activism, and NGOs began to address the question of Islamophobia especially as it was refracted by the “War on Terror,” there was still an insistence on the indigeneity of Indian anti-Muslim violence and the potential of progressive constitutionalism to address the grievances of Muslim citizens. But with the latest denial of citizenship to Muslims, such insistence is fundamentally thrown into a deep crisis, wherein even the constitution is rendered inoperative in front of the power that is Islamophobia. In other words, the internal potential of the politico-juridical for exclusionary and exterminationist violence was further activated through the political ontology of Islamophobia. Islamophobia is the new form of biopower, and citizenship denial is its effect, along with a whole host of other subjectivations, of pogroms, mass incarceration, ghettoization, ethnic cleansing, securitization, and super-exploitation of Muslim labor.
The common solution to such a deadlock is to either appeal to the universality of citizenship or to produce a utopian political imagination of citizenship. Hence, the confrontation with the biopolitical fracture and the foundational violence of the politico-juridical order is completely sidestepped or even repressed in favor of idealism over the inclusive universality of citizenship. Instead, this article tentatively suggests taking the negativity of the Muslim subject seriously to subsist in the negative standpoint of the persistence of minoritarian and marginalized struggles, and to not pursue an ideal or utopian resolve to the negative. To think in terms of the citizen-subject rather than citizenship is to see it as consisting of two components: the legal citizen with rights and responsibilities, and the subject as bare life, minor, marginal, and oppressed. Citizen-subject, as a term, underscores the constant dialectical struggle between the domains of the structures of exclusion and status quoism, and the struggle for inclusions and revolutions. This is not a universality of solutions and ideals, but the universality of negations, of protests, antagonism, and critique.