Pre-publication draft September 2023 their citizenship.6 They are constantly in fear of being detained in prisons,7 pushing several persons to commit suicide.8 The persons classified as suspected foreigners — despite not formally being declared as non-citizens in a legally final manner — have lost their right to vote and access to welfare benefits.9 The fate of these citizens is thus in a state of profound precariousness. Precarious citizenship in India resonates with developments globally. Scholars have shown how variegated, intersecting and complex legal procedures generate insecurity of status, especially among non-citizen migrants. Legal regimes demand that non-citizens navigate formal categories of migrant status — and non-status — and negotiate rules and procedures, often putting them in states of status liminality and uncertainty. In this state of ‘precarious citizenship’, as Noora Lori notes, persons are ‘unable to gain access to secure citizenship rights and instead inhabit ad hoc and temporary legal statuses for protracted periods’.10 Precarious citizenship forces them to occupy a spectrum of legal or quasi-legal statuses that, as she notes, ‘are neither stateless nor fully unauthorized’.11 Focusing on the case of immigrants in Canada, for instance, Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt describe the experience of precarious non-citizens as ‘chutes and ladders’, to capture the ‘trajectories and negotiations within and across legal status categories’.12 ‘Migrant trajectories of precarious legal status’, they note, ‘are non-linear, often lengthy, and can involve moments of irregularization, regularization, and illegalization’.13 States often maintain such precarious conditions by adopting ad hoc measures because, as Lori notes, ‘they represent a strategic government response to avoid resolving larger dilemmas about citizenship, especially questions about the incorporation of minorities, refugees, or labour’.14 This could be the fate 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Abdul Kalam Azad, M Mohsin Alam Bhat and Harsh Mander, ‘Citizenship and the Mass Production of Statelessness’ in India Exclusion Report: 2019–2020 (Center for Equity Studies 2020) 189; Designed to Exclude: How India’s Courts are Allowing Foreigners Tribunals to Render People Stateless in Assam (Amnesty International India 2019) <https://www.amnesty.be/IMG/pdf/rapport_inde.pdf> accessed 1 March 2022; Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh (eds), This Land is Mine, I Am Not of this Land: CAA– NRC and the Manufacture of Statelessness (Speaking Tiger 2021). Salah Punathil, ‘Precarious Citizenship: Detection, Detention and “Deportability” in India’ (2022) 26(1) Citizenship Studies 55; Angana P Chatterji and others, Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India — The Story of Assam (Center for Race and Gender, University of California 2021) 30– 40 <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n> accessed 1 March 2022; Sadiq Naqvi, ‘Fearing Detention, Assam Woman Declared As Foreigner Goes Into Hiding’ Outlook (New Delhi, 22 November 2020) <www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-fearing-detention-assam-woman-declared-as-foreignergoes-into-hiding/347672> accessed 1 March 2022; Ratnadip Choudhury, ‘Left Out of Assam Citizens List, They View Detention Centres With Fear’ NDTV (New Delhi, 13 September 2019) <www.ndtv.com/indianews/nrc-left-out-of-assam-citizens-list-they-view-detention-centres-with-fear-2100599> accessed 1 March 2022. See ‘NRC Suicides’ (Citizens for Justice and Peace, 13 March 2023) <https://cjp.org.in/tag/nrc-suicides> accessed 1 March 2022. Silvia Masiero, ‘A New Layer of Exclusion? Assam, Aadhaar and the NRC’ (London School of Economics and Political Science, 12 September 2019) <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2019/09/12/a-new-layer-ofexclusion-assam-aadhaar-and-the-nrc> accessed 1 March 2022. Noora A Lori, ‘Statelessness, “In-Between” Statuses, and Precarious Citizenship’ in Ayelet Shachar and others (eds), Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (OUP 2017) 744. ibid 745. Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt, ‘The Conditionality of Legal Status and Rights: Conceptualizing Precarious Non-Citizenship in Canada’ in Luin Goldring and Patricia Landolt (eds), Producing and Negotiating Non-citizenship: Precarious Legal Status in Canada (University of Toronto Press 2013) 3, 4. ibid 3. Lori (n 10) 744. 3 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014