COMMENTARY STATELESSNESS, DETENTION CENTRES AND THE OTHERISATION AAKASH CHANDRAN * TABLE OF CONTENTS The National Register of Citizens and India ......................................................... 259 The Judicial Culpability ........................................................................................ 261 Detention Centres and the ‘Others’....................................................................... 263 THE NATIONAL REGISTER OF CITIZENS AND INDIA The rise of populism, conservatism, the politics of hate and the rhetoric of ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ haunts India now more than ever. The heightened and charged move by the state to accelerate the process of rendering a portion of its citizens stateless has received the support and legitimacy of the Indian judiciary. The National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) is a Supreme Court-monitored exercise of updating the 1951 Register of Citizens of the State of Assam to identify, locate and strip ‘illegal migrants’ of Indian citizenship. 1 The preparation of the NRC was triggered in 2014 by a petition challenging the legal validity of s 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955 in the case of Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha & Ors v Union of India. 2 The petition argued against the said provision as it facilitated the extension of citizenship to the ‘outsiders’ and posed a ‘threat to the security of people and that of the state’. 3 Section 6A was introduced into the central legislation through a 1986 amendment that granted citizenship to Bangladeshis who entered India between 1 January 1966 and 24 March 1971, a day before Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan. 4 This provision was added against the background of the 1985 Assam Accord, an agreement signed between the Government of India, the Government of Assam and the representatives of the All Assam Students * 1 2 3 4 Aakash Chandran is a New Delhi-based lawyer and international law researcher. He holds a Masters-in-Law (LLM) in international law from the Faculty of Legal Studies, South Asian University (SAARC), India. The author would like to thank the Journal’s guest editor for their helpful comments and the production team for their brilliant edit support. All errors of substance and style remain that of the author. Email: chandran.aakash@yahoo.in Mohsin Alam Bhat, ‘On the NRC, Even the Supreme Court is Helpless’, The Wire (online, 7 January 2019) <https://thewire.in/law/nrc-supreme-court-crisis>. (2015) 3 SCC1. ibid [30]. Anupama Roy, ‘Ambivalence of Citizenship in Assam’ (2016) 51(26–7) Economic and Political Weekly 45, 46 (‘Ambivalence of Citizenship’).