Pre-publication draft September 2023 tribunal in 2014. Despite this, the election officials did not remove her ‘doubtful’ classification, due to which she was unable to vote. Her representations continued to not be heard. The situation deteriorated when the government in 2019, suddenly and without any notice, stopped providing food benefits that Dulali’s family was legally entitled to receive under India’s food security law. The government had made ration provisions contingent on the beneficiaries linking their names to their national identity cards. When Dulai applied for her card, the authorities rejected her application since she was still classified as a doubtful voter. Desperate without food for her family, Dulali approached numerous government officials, all in vain. In January 2022, she approached Assam’s High Court for redressal through public interest lawyers. ‘Till date’, her petition stated, the ‘authorities are sleeping over the representation’. These vignettes reveal the character of precariousness that India’s citizenship policies — such as the ones creating ‘doubtful’ voters — have produced. The Indian state has not formally revoked the citizenship status of either Rahima or Dulali. Like other D-voters, Rahima is formally a citizen, but there is a question mark on her status. She is threatened by the possibility of citizenship revocation, but she has not even been subjected to a formal status determination process. While it may appear that Dulali succeeded in the formal proceedings against her, the state continues to not affirm her Indian nationality. These precarious citizens may not have formally lost their citizenship status, but they have lost fundamental goods attached to citizenship. They have lost their political and social rights as Indian citizens. And profoundly, they have lost any semblance of security and stability of citizenship status. Short of formally revoking citizenship, the Indian state has introduced complex legal procedures that independently and conjointly have serious consequences for citizenship rights. Working together, these processes have the conjoint effect of both disorienting those who are subjected to them, and lethally affecting their citizenship rights. For example, during the NRC update, government authorities decided to exclude D-voters from the enumeration altogether until they establish their citizenship status in the tribunals. The state, simultaneously, recorded the biometric details of these persons and blocked the possibility of using them for authenticating state services. This included the ability to apply for national identity cards, which are mandatory for receiving several welfare benefits. Since the appeals process against NRC exclusion has not commenced, millions of persons have been left in a materially precarious condition.86 This also explains the strange situation Dulali finds herself in. Being excluded from the NRC as a D-voter, Dulali cannot receive her state welfare benefits despite succeeding in the tribunals. These citizenship procedures are also strikingly unspecific about their consequences for citizenship status. The Indian state has reiterated the existence of routes of legal redress. The normal course of the law, the state has insisted, continues to remain open to people. The state has also consistently refused to specify precisely when — at what stage of this legal redress — citizenship would be formally revoked. 86 ‘Assam: Many Not Getting Aadhaar as Biometric Details Locked Due to NRC’ Mint (Bangalore, 15 March 2022) <www.livemint.com/news/india/assam-many-not-getting-aadhaar-as-biometric-details-locked-dueto-nrc-11647344426066.html> accessed 20 March 2022. 18 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014