‘Untrustworthy and Unbelievable’ IV CONCLUSION For Sabjan Nessa, the road ahead is an uphill struggle. Her status as a D Voter automatically bars her from being included in the NRC. Litigation is pending, and she may be declared a foreigner, and may even be detained, if she is not able to meet the high burden of documentary evidence mandated by the FT system. In a strange twist, she has already been declared a citizen by the FT once; !4? yet, that has not been enough to get her enrolled into the NRC, or have the ‘D’ removed from her name. Of her 12 siblings, she is the only one whose citizenship is under contestation, leading to a bizarre, yet not uncommon, situation where family members of citizens are somehow arbitrarily positioned as foreigners. When we spoke to her, she was distraught; her children were facing the same fate and were stigmatised in their community on account of their mother’s doubtful status. The evolution of citizenship as a right granted by the sovereign has conversely meant that the sovereign reserves the power to take this right away. Despite deprivation of citizenship being described as ‘a form of punishment more primitive than torture’,!5° in India, there has been little hesitation on the part of the authorities in taking away people’s citizenship on flimsy grounds. The judicial process has been influenced by the contentious history of immigration and subnationalism in Assam and this influence is clearly visible in the large number of declared foreigners in the state. There is a tendency not to merely strip away the status of persons who have been residing in the country, but to also punish them through detention. Thus, in Assam, the negative consequences of statelessness are becoming increasingly visible. An intersectional feminist lens is not just desirable, but critical in scrutinising the NRC-FT nexus in Assam. Identity politics frequently does away with the notion of intra-group differences.!>! In examining statelessness from a gendered perspective, it 1s not enough to merely study its impacts on women — a comprehensive analysis must consider the influence of other structural aspects of their identity. In the case of Assam, gender and socio-economic status combine to create barriers for the women who are struggling with their citizenship status. The legal burden of proving citizenship through descent and lineage is inherently patriarchal. Moreover, the segment of women we have looked at find accessing documents difficult owing to their lack of awareness, education, resources and access to legal aid, coupled with corruption and lengthy bureaucracy. Even when they can amass documentation, the next hurdle in their way is the procedural maze of the FT, which presumes that they are foreigners with little basis. This combination of factors serves to push women from these communities on the path to statelessness. While the nationality laws of India are not ostensibly gender biased, there is undoubtedly indirect discrimination, the implications of which are felt not only by women, but also by their family. Petrozziello posits that due to ‘creation of temporary and ad hoc documentation procedures ... descendants of migrants slide further down the slippery slope of citizenship towards statelessness’.!52 This is evident from the Assam example. 149 150 151 152 State of Assam v Sabjan Nessa [2016] FT Case No 377/15 (Foreigners Tribunal 5", Barpeta). Albert L Trop, Petitioner v John Foster Dulles, as Secretary of State of the United States and United States Department of State [1958] 356 US 86, 20 (Supreme Court of the United States). Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’ (1991) 43(6) Stanford Law Review 1241, 1242. Petrozziello (n 50) 224. 257