In an effort to “reform” and fundamentally redefine who gets to call themselves a rights-bearing citizen of India, the BJP government introduced the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). January and February of 2020 saw riots across India over the issue of NRC and CAA. The Indian government made a decision by passing CAA, which stated that Muslims from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh could not become citizens of India. The decision also resulted in the Shaheen Bagh protests where Muslim women organized a dharna, “sit in,” for weeks to protest this draconian decision. NRC/CAA meant that many Muslims who were born in India but could not produce proper documents of being from India would not be regarded as lawful citizens of India. Many Indians below the poverty line have limited access to resources such as literacy that safeguard documentation. These Indians are not limited to their religious backgrounds yet NRC/CAA targets only Muslim citizens. NRC/CAA has led to widespread debate about how citizenship is framed and the legality of the law itself. Leaders of the BJP made several speeches where they framed Muslims as outsiders and “takers” who drain Indian society.

There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.