Pre-publication draft September 2023
a large population through insidious legal processes. Precarious citizens facing irregularization
may not formally lose their nationality, but they lose fundamental social and political goods
attached to their status. Most of all, they lose any semblance of stability and security of
citizenship status, which in turn severely harms their well-being. This irregularization has
occurred in the background of increasing racialization of Indian citizenship. While the Indian
government and courts have sought to justify irregularization in the language of the rule of law,
racialization and exceptionalism have permitted them to not apply ordinary legal standards to
these citizenship policies. Irregularization — as opposed to formal revocation of citizenship —
allows the Indian state to politically instrumentalize citizenship policies at the cost of
citizenship security, without facing the obvious domestic and international repercussions that
denationalization often invites.
This account raises some key questions for the global understanding of citizenship
insecurity, including statelessness. The first question is how, and to what extent, can the
evolving interpretation of the right to nationality accommodate such policies of citizenship
attrition? The attrition of citizenship I describe in this chapter is not in the form of formal
deprivation. But, as I have argued, it is in the form of the suspension of citizenship status
through insidious legal means, often through various discriminatory yet hidden modalities of
procedural implementation, non-enforcement of ordinary legal norms, and legal evasion.
Second, how can religious discrimination in nationality policies be addressed legally? This has
remained an underdeveloped area for international legal norms.92 This chapter articulated the
concept of racialization in the context of irregular citizenship in India. Racialization captures
the intersectional and dynamic nature of discrimination towards ethnic, religious, and racial
groups. This notion of racialization — with its appreciation of the historical and political
processes of discrimination against religious groups — may offer some resources in this
direction.
92
See E Tendayi Achiume, ‘Governing Xenophobia’ (2018) 51 Vand L Rev 333, 355.
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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014