Until recently, India’s electoral regime has been characterised by a laudable anxiety and democratic imagination to ensure that the election authorities planned for voters’ adversity, precarity, dispossession and even their emotional ties. In other words, voters were considered to be ordinary residents.
What the narrowing confines of ‘real’ Indians means
This administrative openness is now deliberately being narrowed down. The voice of citizens has become something to be legally proven with an unprecedented stringency. This bureaucratic constriction demonstrates that India is entering a dark new terrain.
It is also important to remember the non-documentary ways in which belonging and identification work in practice in the Indian state.
The starkest example of this is the recent crackdown on Bengali-speaking migrants across India. Bengali migrants have been detained in Rajasthan, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and recently several have left Delhi and Gurugram before they were accused of being “illegal” Bangladeshis.
Similarly, thousands of Muslims in Gujarat – many of whom possessed the supposedly correct documents – were recently rendered homeless after a similar crackdown.
Being documented or holding the correct papers – including the much-vaunted Aadhaar – does not anymore qualify anyone for Indian citizenship nor protect them from violence. What India is seeing today is the creation of a new category of people whose citizenship is suspect because of caste, class, gender, name, language, occupation and, even, speech, dress and deportment.
What both Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision and Assam’s National Register of Citizens demonstrate is that even the most heavily documented could be swallowed up by the bureaucratic machine and spat out as inadequate.
What is clear is that documents and identity cards have assumed monstrous powers over marginalised lives and that the state is clearly going further down the path of sorting out who can and cannot belong in New India.
by Nayanika Mathur & Tarangini Sriraman
20/08/2025