Pre-publication draft September 2023 performative aspect is writ large in the cases of Rahima and Dulali. Without formal revocations, and through complex workings of administrative rules and procedures, fundamental rights attached to citizenship have been rescinded. Interpreting precarious citizenship in places like India as irregular citizenship has distinct theoretical advantages. Irregularization allows us to appreciate how state practices weaken citizenship transnationally. Much attention has been paid to how states, especially in Europe and North America, subject immigrants to legal standards that produce insecurity of status. It has often been implicitly assumed that states adopt such practices in case of non-citizens. Scholars also sometimes assume that the weakening of status of citizens is frequent only in the Global South. Irregular citizenship bridges this geographical divide, revealing that states, in Western or non-Western contexts, weaken the status of citizens through very similar tactics. As Nyers notes in the context of Canada and the United States, governments irregularized the citizenship of numerous individuals on grounds of national security and terrorism, in the background of increasing racialization and exceptionalism.90 India’s case resonates with these instances, perhaps differing only in scale and quantum. Irregularization also allows us to appreciate the harm of citizenship policies and their relationship with legality. States may claim to be addressing background problems of migration and status verification. But rather than merely enforcing existing rules of citizenship, they constantly re-create the boundaries between citizens and foreigners through insidious legal processes. Scholars have recently shown that states strategically ‘manufacture’ statelessness as ‘statecraft’ by implementing neutrally framed and subtle citizenship laws that have discriminatory impact on groups.91 Irregular citizenship adds another dimension to these accounts, by further appreciating the precise role that the legal process plays in weakening citizenship. Irregularization shows how the problem of precarity is not only about formal loss of status. Precarious citizenship is rather a condition of insecurity despite the formal persistence of legal status. While the state defends policies in the language of the law, it shares a paradoxical relation with the rule of law. Hidden behind the stories of Rahima, Dulali and innumerable other precarious citizens is the systematic way in which India’s institutions, especially judicial institutions, have refused to extend standard norms to judge what the legal apparatus is doing to their citizenship. Despite assertions of the application of traditional legal principles and safeguards, precarious citizenship is marked by their suspension. This logic leads to confounding results, for instance, in the case of Rahima, who rather than legally questioning her disenfranchisement has to bribe officials to be taken to tribunals, even at the risk of being declared a foreigner. Conclusion This chapter has argued that the Indian state has weakened citizenship of its nationals in profound ways without formally revoking citizenship status. It has irregularized citizenship of 90 91 ibid. Neha Jain, ‘Manufacturing Statelessness’ (2022) 116(2) AJIL 237. See also Michelle Foster and Jade Roberts, ‘Manufacturing Foreigners: The Law and Politics of Transforming Citizens into Migrants’ in Catherine Dauvergne (ed), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration (Edward Elgar 2021) 218. 20 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014