Pre-publication draft September 2023 Irregular Citizenship What do these racialised and exceptionalist official practices mean for the lives of precarious citizens? What is the condition entailed by the production of irregularization? I answer these two questions by invoking two vignettes from my field visits in Assam that I collected during 2021 and 2022 as part of my participation in legal aid interventions in the state.83 I start with the case of 40-year-old Rahima Begum, an unlettered woman who belongs to a poor family of daily-wage workers in a small village in Assam’s Barpeta district.84 When Rahima went to cast her vote in 2001, the election officials informed her that she could not exercise her democratic right. The officials told her that they had marked ‘D’ next to her name. Not fully comprehending the implications of this, Rahima did not pursue the matter, thinking of it as a bureaucratic error. She did not know that in 1997, the Election Commission had taken the unprecedented decision of disenfranchising 370,000 ‘D-voters’, which included her. Rahima, over the following years, slowly started to understand what being a ‘D-voter’ could mean for her. She heard numerous stories of the police ‘picking up’ D-voters and lodging them in detention centres. Rahima’s life was completely disrupted. The thoughts of being detained away from her family started hounding her. Rahima found herself in a confounding situation. She never received any official communication from the Election Commission, the police, or the Foreigners Tribunals. But just a whisper of the police entering her village was enough to make Rahima run and hide in the nearby forest for several nights. Her mental health started deteriorating. She started to attempt suicide. Her family members could not leave her by herself. Befuddled and paranoid, her husband approached a lawyer for advice. The lawyer assured them that he would ensure that the ‘D’ is removed from Rahima’s name, provided they paid him a hefty sum. Rahima’s family paid the lawyer but did not hear back from him or any official. Years later, in 2021, when I met Rahima and her family, it became clear to everyone what had really transpired. The lawyer had used part of the money to bribe the police to issue a ‘suspected foreigner’ notice to Rahima, so that she would be asked to prove her citizenship in the tribunal. Ironically, Rahima had unwittingly paid money to be taken to the tribunal just so that she could escape her uncertain condition. The last time I met her, Rahima had not received any notice. She had lost her right to vote and continued to live under the immense threat of captivity. Take the second case of Dulali Barman, a 77-year-old Hindu Bengali woman from an extremely impoverished family in Guwahati, Assam.85 The Foreigners Tribunal registered a case against Dulali in 2011 on the ground that election officials had classified her as a D-voter. Dulali succeeded in proving her Indian citizenship and received a favourable order from the 83 84 85 The legal aid interventions were associated with the legal clinical project Parichay. Parichay was formed in response to the release of Assam’s NRC and was based on a collaboration among Indian law schools and students to provides legal representation and support to persons facing citizenship deprivation. It has worked with communities, lawyers, and activists, and participated in status determination proceedings, strategic litigation at the appellate level, research and documentation. See ‘Our Vision’ (Parichay, 1 October 2019) <www.parichay.org.in/our-vision> accessed 1 March 2022. Her name has been changed in the interests of her privacy. A team of legal aid lawyers at Parichay and I interviewed Rahima and her family through community workers in the Barpeta district on 13 January 2021. The details of Dulali’s struggles are drawn from her writ petition in Dulai Barman v State of Assam, Writ Petition (Civil) No 990 of 2022 (on file with author). 17 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014