2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) torture and crimes against humanity. 45 However, it is the United States that has notoriously followed the ‘detention as deterrence’ policy since the 1980s and its new manifestations have been against the Mexican and Central American immigrants. 46 While the purpose of civil detention is to facilitate the removal of ‘illegal immigrants’ from the country, the symbolic objective is to put an end to illegal movement and to send a message that the borders are closed. 47 Similarly, the NRC and the consequent indefinite detention are being implemented for three inherent objectives. First, as a check against illegal migration within the state. Second, to curb the potential movement of people into India. Third, to build trust and confidence in the present Government. This tripartite goal is reflected in a statement by the Governor of Assam, where he proudly claimed that the NRC has contained the fresh influx of illegal immigrants. 48 Instead of promoting the ‘risk of death or injury’ associated with illegal immigration as a tool for deterrence, the usage of ‘actual bodies’ in incarceration as state policy is problematised by Kevin Scott Jobbe within the context of the United States of America. 49 In the context of Assam, the irremovability of the detainees causes their prolonged detention within the camps. The possibility of deportation only comes into the picture when the detained persons are proven to be of a different nationality. But the NRC exercise applies a negative test and only establishes a person to be ‘non-Indian’, without successfully establishing their Bangladeshi (or any alternative) nationality. This public spectacle of prolonged detention is practiced and promoted in the name of deterrence even when it has minimal results on the ground. The detention camps are often seen as the place where the ‘state of exception … becomes the rule’ and the state operates directly upon the ‘bare life’. 50 The power of the state to regulate not just political life but also the condition of a human being is reflective of the ‘state of exception’. 51 This control and the subsequent deprivation of life is facilitated by the conception of illegal migration as a ‘security threat’ by the Court in the Sonowal case. 52 The reduction of the legal being to illegal and the elimination of the ‘unwanted population’ is carried out by the state in the name of ‘the citizens’, which is then stamped by the judicial institution as the lawful discharge by the sovereign. This violence of law in transforming a citizen into an alien creates the ‘Other’. Drawing from what Professor Sundhya Pahuja calls ‘defining exclusion’ with regards to the paradox of international law, it is through the exclusion of ‘foreigners’ that the defining 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 Kevin Jon Heller, ‘ICC Communication About Australia’s Mistreatment of Refugees’, OpinioJuris (Web Page, 15 February 2017) <http://opiniojuris.org/2017/02/15/icc-filingabout-australias-mistreatment-of-refugees/>. Julia Preston, ‘Detention Center Presented as Deterrent to Border Crossings’, The New York Times (Dilley, Texas, 15 December 2014), 18. Margaret Taylor, ‘Symbolic Detention’ (1997) 20 In Defense of the Alien 153, 156–8. ‘NRC's Biggest Success is Stopping Influx of Illegal Bangladeshis into Assam: Mukhi’, Outlook (online, 24 February 2019) <https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/nrcs-biggestsuccess-is-stopping-influx-of-illegal-bangladeshis-into-assam-mukhi/1484811>. Kevin Scott Jobe, ‘The Militarization of Care: the Military-Medical Gaze and the US-Mexico Border’, Critical Legal Thinking (online, 20 May 2015) <https://criticallegalthinking.com/2015/05/20/the-militarization-of-care-the-militarymedical-gaze-and-the-us-mexico-border/#_ftnref9>. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, tr Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998) 168–9, 8. ibid. Sonowal (n 16) [38]. 264