Pre-publication draft September 2023 According to the state, being marked as a suspected foreigner by the Election Commission or the NRC does not indicate formal revocation. But what about being declared a foreigner by the tribunals, or failure in further appeals? Instead of formal revocation, the Indian state has relied on the very existence of the legal process to introduce insecurity of status. The existence of legal instrumentalities has not attenuated the severity of precarious citizenship. It has further intensified it. The legal processes aggravate precarity because they are complex, intersecting and insidious. They are treacherous for the precarious citizens to navigate, and overwhelming for others to study and critique. Precariousness is not the by-product of poor implementation of the law. Rather, this Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare is the very essence and culmination of its application. Recognizing this feature of India’s citizenship policies — the introduction of severe citizenship insecurity without formal revocation — is significant for two reasons. First, for the state, it postpones the potentially inconvenient decision of citizenship revocation, while at the same time allowing it to politically instrumentalize citizenship. The unfolding story of the NRC attests to this political instrumentalization. Just as the country was making sense of the Assam NRC’s exclusion of 1.9 million people and the possibility of mass statelessness, the Indian government proposed to extend the NRC across the country. The ruling BJP framed this as an election issue in various states. The government has also remained non-committal on ‘finalising’ the NRC, which would entail the issuance of receipts with grounds for rejection and initiate the appeals process. At the time of writing, the BJP government in Assam — arguably to satiate the demands of politically influential sections of the state — has insisted that the extent of exclusion underestimates the number of foreigners in the state. The government has demanded ‘reverifications’ in Bengali-origin and Muslim dominated districts. Thus, the Indian state has sought to both aggravate and satiate immigration anxieties through disenfranchisement and citizenship enumeration. It has simultaneously maintained a convenient distance from what its actions have meant in terms of citizenship deprivation. Second, claiming to use the instrumentalities of the law has also allowed the Indian state to claim legal legitimacy. India has consistently dismissed the national and transnational civil society’s concerns by emphasizing the legal character of its policies.87 In this process, the Indian state has irregularized its citizens. Describing irregular citizenship, Peter Nyers notes that states not only unmake the rights of citizenship through formal mechanisms of citizenship revocation or denationalization. They also unmake citizenship through ‘irregular’ processes, which are ‘arguably more complex cases where citizenship has not been revoked per se, but where it has been rendered inoperable, or irregularized’.88 Irregular citizenship, as Nyers notes, is not a status but a condition. It is marked by state power unmaking citizenship not through formal revocations, but ‘performatively’.89 This 87 88 89 See eg ‘Statement by MEA on National Register of Citizens in Assam’ (Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 2 September 2019) <www.mea.gov.in/SpeechesStatements.htm?dtl/31782/Statement+by+MEA+on+National+Register+of+Citizens+in+Assam> accessed 1 March 2022. Peter Nyers, ‘Forms of Irregular Citizenship’ in Vicki Squire (ed), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity (Routledge 2011) 184, 185. ibid 189. 19 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014