2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) furnishing documentary proof of citizenship (dating back to before 24 March 1971, which was the date that the state of Bangladesh was created) either through their own birth or, alternatively, through proving citizenship of their parents. Of this requirement, which signals a dilution of the jus soli principle that earlier underpinned Indian citizenship law, they observe: The requirement of proving lineage is inherently patriarchal and puts an insurmountable barrier before women who may not have documentary proof of being their parents’ child. 18 This insight into the barriers created by this move towards a documentary identity regime no doubt allows us to also notice the connections and overlaps between the emergent documentary regimes progressively seeking to transform and control access to and delivery of social welfare goods in India, and the NRC and its determination of access to Indian citizenship itself. In social welfare or development goods delivery provision, we again encounter the marked ‘fake citizen’ — who is deemed to be ‘parasitically feeding’ on welfare provided as ‘entitlement’ — as against the ‘empowered citizen’, who is more a (desirable) consumer of welfare. 19 The underpinning of these documentation-based citizenship determination and welfare provision exercises by what are essentially moral categories (deserving) — rather than more legal categories (entitled) — suggests that while these processes, such as the NRC, might adopt the quintessential legalist form of premising the benefits associated with citizenship entirely on formal documentary proof (and thus leaving out the sociological or lived experiences of this status), this is a formalism that fronts a more fundamental ‘moral demand’. Namely, one asking whether you belong in the collective of the deserving nation — a moral organic category, marked by race, class and gender — or are you morally repugnant (‘untrustworthy and unbelievable’)? This might explain how the formality of these documentary exercises, including in the ‘adjudicatory’ setting (with the FTs), invariably stretches to a breaking point in the various grounds for rejection provided in their ‘orders’ that are examined by Sabhapandit and Baruah. The impossible demand made of the morally ‘marked’ citizen is one which ultimately distrusts their various documentary proofs to such a degree that even the appearance of formality eventually gives way to performances of bureaucratic whimsy. THE SECURITISATION OF CITIZENSHIP: OR HOW THE STATE OF EXCEPTION IS NOT EXCEPTIONAL As several of the authors show, the NRC exercise mobilises a discourse of national security to legitimate itself. National security is globally a widely prevalent mode of legitimising acts of citizenship deprivation. While we are often quick to depict this association as exceptional to the present and its particular ‘global threats’ (chiefly ‘global Islamist terror networks’), it is worth reminding ourselves of the long history of states depriving certain already ‘hyphenated citizens’ 20 of their 18 19 20 ibid 255. Niraja Gopal Jayal, ‘Reconfiguring Citizenship in Contemporary India’ (2019) 42(1) South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 33, 33. Aakash Chandran, ‘Statelessness, Detention Centres and the Otherisation’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 258, 259. Chandran borrows this terminology from Anupama Roy: see Anupama Roy, ‘Ambivalence of Citizenship in Assam’, (June 2016) 51(26) Economic and Political Weekly 45. 180