India and Statelessness: An Introduction protection on account of the perceived ‘security threats’ that they pose. 21 Manav Kapur does an excellent job of troubling this assumption with his pre-history of the CAA, which he, following the historian Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, refers to as the period of the ‘long partition’ (ie, the almost two decade aftermath of the partition of British India into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan). 22 Kapur describes the long history of how certain ethnic minority subjects within the territory of the nascent nation-state were always already ‘marked’, and were engaged with as ‘security threats’, rather than subjects that the state authority is under obligation to protect. The contrast is with others, who are deemed ‘deserving’ of the states’ compassion and protection, despite in some cases being formally under the territorial protection of another state. As Kapur shows, this compassion in its moral selectivity — often formulated in terms of notions of national and cultural belongingness — is at odds with more universally formulated modes of benevolence towards persecuted nationals of other states that are the basis of refugee law. He concludes that, contrary to the claims made by some supporters of the CAA, ‘the CAA is a reversal of the logic of refugee law’. 23 Returning our attention to the discourse of national security and its associated subject who is deemed bereft of any compassion or protection we have Aakash Chandran’s commentary piece. Deftly drawing on the influential scholarship of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, Chandran carefully unpacks the moves through which these ‘originary’ processes of ‘otherisation’ from a nation-state foundation have returned and intensified in the past couple of decades in India, especially in the State of Assam. While not losing sight of the specific history of sub-nationalist agitation in the State, particularly intensifying in the aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh, Chandran brings into focus how the Supreme Court of India and the Central Government have responded to it in the past few decades — through a discourse of national security and the scapegoating of certain religious and ethnic minorities resident in Assam. As Chandran shows, the Court, in a series of judgements, has authorised practices which strip various protections away from ‘marked’ or ‘hyphenated’ citizens, on the basis that their very presence in the territory of the State represents a serious threat of the security of the nation-state (and not just to the State of Assam) and its ‘territorial integrity’. These are depicted as ‘acts of external aggression’ from which the Central Government is under a constitutional obligation to protect ‘the People’. 24 Thus, the domestication of potentially divisive sub-nationalist claims into the singular nation is achieved through the rendering of certain minority subjects into pariah figures. 25 21 22 23 24 25 One is particularly reminded of the figure of the hostis judicatio or ‘public enemy’, so declared by the Roman Senate for threatening the security of the Republic through acts they deemed to be conspiracy or treason against the Republic. Such a declaration would strip Roman citizens (hostis judicatio could only be ex-citizens) of their citizenship status altogether and all rights attached thereto: see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, tr Kevin Attell (University of Chicago Press 2005) 80. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press 2007); Manav Kapur, ‘India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act: A Throwback to Debates around the “Long Partition”’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 207. Kapur (n 22) 232 (emphasis added). Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India (2005) 5 SCC 665, [2], [58] (emphasis added); Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha (n 4). For an insightful reading of these processes and dynamics in terms of racialisation see M Mohsin Alam Bhat, ‘The Doubtful Citizen: Irregularization and Precarious Citizenship in Contemporary India’ (Unpublished Paper, on file with author). 181