India and Statelessness: An Introduction transformation of the delivery of social welfare and the relationship between the state and the ‘consumer citizen’ recipients. 32 This, in turn, has led to the re-emergence of that other ‘solution’ for overcoming the division, one which Arendt was very familiar with, and with which she associated the ‘decline of the nation-state’ 33 — that of abandonment and denationalisation of the erstwhile ‘marked’ citizens. 34 Crucially, as Andrea Marilyn Pragishini Immanuel, while very much drawing upon Hannah Arendt, articulates in her article, this exposure, and the condition it creates for stateless people, is one of expulsion from humanity itself. This exposed life is what Arendt had in mind when she identified the condition of statelessness with the modern of world of nation-states and citizenship rights. As Immanuel observes: ‘With a loss of nationality, a person does not have any “place in the world” and does not enjoy a dignified life … Their status is unresolved and they remain expelled from humanity’. 35 She further adds regarding the fall-out of India’s NRC exercise: the state without considering alternative ways of protecting national security has decided to expose about 1.9 million people to the risk of statelessness where they could end up with no ‘place in the world’ and expelled from humanity. 36 Here it is important to recognise that this rendering of the ‘other’ as non-human was a position that was never practiced or even conceived in pre-modern polities that were explicitly hierarchical and unequal. 37 It was only with polities formed around the future horizons of equality that the camp emerged as a modality, whereby dehumanisation is the fate of the ‘other’, all the while formally retaining the claim to equality in citizenship along with an asterisk that questions the ‘humanity’ of those who are denied and excluded from this ‘universal regime’. I return to this point shortly. However, drawing upon Kapur, I want to add that this exercise of sovereign authority that dehumanises some (‘others’) to create forms of associational life does not tell us the whole story of how this ‘nation-state in decline’ operates. To the binary dynamic of ‘genuine citizens’ and ‘doubtful citizens’ we need to add the figure of the ‘deserving’ (not yet) citizen. Thus, not only does this form of 32 33 34 35 36 37 Here it is quite instructive to pay attention to the discourse underlying the 1985 Assam Accord, entered into by the Government of India and different Assamese ‘sub-nationalist’ groups, where the Government reproached the sub-nationalist division, seeking to bring them back into the fold of the singular nation-state on the basis of bringing the benefits of national economic development to the state: The Government takes this opportunity to renew their commitment for speedy all round economic development of Assam, so as to improve the standard of living of the people. That developmental basis of integration is entirely missing from the contemporary ‘securitised’ discourse of domestication premised upon achieving the exclusion ‘public enemies’: see Accord between AASU, AAGSP and the Central Government on Foreign National Issue (Assam Accord), signed 15 August 1985 (Memorandum of Settlement). See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin Classics 2017) 349–96; Agamben (n 23) 11–12. On both these modalities of creating ‘an undivided people’ see Agamben (n 23) 179–80. Andrea Marilyn Pragashini Immanuel, ‘The Meaning of ‘Life’ under the Indian Constitution and the Obligation not to Render Persons Stateless: With Reference to the NRC in Assam’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 185, 201. ibid 205 (emphasis added). See Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press 2016); Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reasons (Columbia University Press 2018) 13–54. 183