2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) The status of these non-citizen subjects is one which creates powers and rights over them by state authority, while at the same time, generating no reciprocal duties. In terms of legal theory, this deformed status, which Chandran in following Agamben refers to as ‘bare life’, very much compares citizenship as rem (thing) to persona (legal person) — with the former enabling administration, while the latter demands government. Chandran brings to the fore how this process of ‘otherisation’ of the ‘hyphenated citizen’ in India has led to (and been further facilitated by) the most paradigmatic of sites for abandoned/exposed life — the detention centres or the camp — in which interned subjects get transformed from lesser citizens to being dehumanized, as exposed ‘bare life’ or ‘things’ over which the state exercises absolute power sans any protection. 26 One recalls Agamben when he writes of the concentration camps and their interned inhabitants: Insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation. 27 Poignantly, as Chandran narrates towards the end of his piece, it is only in death that this sovereign authority releases these ‘bodies’ that it had abandoned in life. 28 Taking my cue from Chandran’s example of thinking about the Indian citizenship and statelessness crisis through the theories of Agamben and Hannah Arendt, I want to make note of Agamben’s observation that it is only with the emergence of modern (European) nation-state, with its foundational affirmation of formal equality of its citizens, that the presence of ‘the other’ in the nation emerges ‘as an altogether intolerable scandal’ 29 — one that demands an urgent response. Relatedly, as Arendt observed, the social and welfarist responses to this scandal of division aimed at ultimately closing this divide by assimilating the other and thereby ‘producing a single and undivided people’ 30 was one response to this perceived ‘scandal’. We find that this response very much held the ground in India between Kapur’s ‘throwback’ and Chandran’s ‘camps’, through the project of national economic development. 31 That project and modality of the postcolonial nation-states’ response to its ‘others’ has since entered a period of decline and transformation — as we noted in the aforementioned discussion regarding the 26 On the association between the promulgation of laws on denationalisation and the emergence of camps see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press 1998) 175. 27 ibid 171. 28 As I write this, reports are coming in from Assam regarding how the State Government is carrying out violent ‘mass eviction drives’ against Muslims of Bengali descent – even those who have very much been ‘verified’ as citizens by the NRC – all in the name of clearing ‘encroachments’ from Government land to allow for ‘organic farming’ by ‘unemployed young people’. The brutality and the manner of these actions (in which at least two people were killed by the police – including one person whose dead body was then “trampled on” by a government photographer accompanying the police party) suggest that the ‘camp’ paradigm of government/administration through exception has now well extended beyond the ‘physical camp’ itself. See ‘Assam: Video captures police firing that killed two during eviction drive’, Scroll (online, 23 September 2021) <https://scroll.in/latest/1006061/assam-at-least-threefeared-dead-in-police-firing-during-eviction-drive-in-darrang>. 29 Agamben (n 23)179. 30 ibid. 31 See Mohamad Shahabuddin, Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (Cambridge University Press 2020). 182