ARTICLES

1. A walk on the ‘rights’ side: EU citizenship reform based on international human rights law
Thibault Weigelt

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Citizenship, today, is a concept in crisis. At the international level, migration poses significant questions of justice with regard to citizenship as an exclusionary status; while at the regional and domestic level, citizenship is being challenged by growing nativist politics and arbitrary exercises of naturalisation powers. One site where this crisis can be observed is the citizenship of the European Union (EU). First, Brexit has shown that EU citizenship as an inclusive status beyond nationality is fragile and contingent. Second, arbitrary naturalisation by States according to domestic rules ensures that EU citizenship suffers from the same exclusionary problems as national citizenship. These two problems, I argue, are not the prime vices from which EU citizenship suffers. The biggest flaw in the concept of citizenship is found in the absence of citizenship, namely statelessness. By failing to consider the ‘other’, i.e., the problem of statelessness, judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on citizenship and ‘third-country nationals’ leave this problem unaddressed. Existing academic research has suggested a range of solutions, from harmonising norms on statelessness and acquisition of citizenship (Swider and Den Heijer) to relaxing criteria for naturalisation (Swoboda), decoupling of local, national, and regional citizenship (Bauböck), and establishing EU citizenship as a subsidiary status protecting against statelessness (Kostakopoulou). In this article, I propose to review these solutions and the literature on statelessness in the context of EU citizenship. Choosing EU citizenship as an instance of the broader citizenship crisis, I argue that the framework of international human rights provides a way out by further separating the two facets of citizenship—the political facet of citizenship as identity/nationality and the legal facet of citizenship as a status that enables a person to have rights.
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2. Experiencing the violence of law: Contextualising the NRC process in Assam
Anubhav Dutt Tiwari and Prashant Singh
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Assam has been a site for a hugely contested project of (re)determining an Indian ‘citizen’ through a purely identity document–based administrative legal exercise. Verification of citizenship-related documents has been a ubiquitous reality in Assam, almost since India’s independence, but in recent years, more pertinently, as a result of the Supreme Court–monitored update of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. The NRC’s interwoven relationship with the existing legal framework applicable to ‘foreigners’, particularly with the role of the Foreigners Tribunals (FT) in the state, creates a ‘legal’ picture of individuals, based on an incessant reliance on State-recognised identification documents. Law, thus, comes across as highly technocratic, with the potential to ignore the human aspects of deprivation of citizenship status as well as the hardships and anxieties around citizenship determination processes. One of the critical perspectives on such a legal outlook is to divert the spotlight towards the people’s experiences, particularly the marginalised, and their interactions with such legal, bureaucratic citizenship determination processes. Drawing from narratives from a study conducted in Assam between June and August 2018, this article seeks to provide a contextual analysis around the question of the potential legal violence unleashed by the NRC exercise which sought to ‘update’ the register of Indian citizens in Assam and exclude ‘foreigners’ pending appeals before the FTs. It puts forth the argument that certain marginalised and vulnerable persons experienced violence sanctioned by law during the NRC process itself due to the Supreme Court’s ignorance and its preoccupation with the image of the ‘illegal migrant’. Therefore, this article is an attempt to contextualise the potential violent effects of law in identifying the ‘other’ in relation to the Indian ‘citizen’ during the NRC, conducted under the supervision of the Supreme Court, which should also have been concerned with the implementation of fundamental rights under the Constitution for the marginalised and the vulnerable.
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3. Heteronormativity and hierarchy of relationships: The case of South Asian binational queer couples in Canada
Priya Mathur
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The issue of immigration has come to the forefront of global discourse in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, BREXIT, and domestic politics against immigration in the United States. However, what has been missing from this conversation is a focus on ways in which immigration-based adjudication maintains the heteronormative social order across ‘western’ nation-states. To address this broad trend, in this article I analyse the legal narratives of binational queer couples through the ‘sponsorship’ claims of South Asian applicants in Canada. I enquire whether institutions of heteronormativity like marriage and familial kinship are deinstitutionalised in contemporary times with the recognition of civil partnerships, domestic unions, and same-sex marriage, or has heteronormativity further tightened its clutches by incorporating queer couples into the fold through the implicit deployment of heteronormative standards to demobilise the queer constituency. Towards this end, I examine the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations of Canada with special reference to spousal, common-law, or conjugal partner–related sponsorship applications to evaluate if couples are assessed on the merits of their appeal, or is imitation of heteronormative-like values expected from applicants for the success of the sponsorship claim?

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4.Fragile environment, fractured citizenship: Environmental displacement and the erosion of citizenship
Nabanita Samanta
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The conditions of a fragile and unsustainable ecology have added to the complexities of the much-contested notion of ‘citizenship’. Ecological peril, both in the form of extreme weather events and slow-onset impacts of environmental degradation, has serious repercussions for the already prevailing conundrum that the conception of citizenship entails. Proliferation of ‘natural’ disasters and acceleration of environmental degeneration in recent times have caused large-scale involuntary displacement and consequently a rupture in the sense of ‘belonging’, which is the cornerstone of citizenship. Thus, it is imperative that the notion of ‘citizenship’ is reconceptualised in the light of the lived reality of environmental displacement that produces new forms of precarity while disrupting the sense of being-a-citizen. Displacement caused by a fragile and volatile ecology paves the path for a gradual waning of citizenship rights, often leading to loss of avenues for meaningful citizen engagement, thereby making environmental displacement an exemplary case for understanding how ‘citizenship’ operates as a place-based relation. This article will discuss the precarious conditions of environmentally displaced people and delineate the intractable chasm between the ideas of ‘administered’ citizenship and ‘lived’ citizenship. I argue that drawing on ‘processual’ aspects of citizenship becomes imperative against the backdrop of the rapid degradation of ecosystems which calls for a reworking of the ‘political’ sphere and a reformulation of the idiom of ‘citizenship’.
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5. A relook at the principle of uti possidetis in the context of the Indo-Nepal border dispute
Aman Kumar
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The problems regarding borders are more pervasive among the postcolonial states. One of the reasons for this is that the borders of most of these postcolonial states were drawn by their colonisers who paid little to no regard to the local realities. This article is focused on one such colonial border, i.e., the one between India and Nepal. It will highlight the relation between the drawing of borders and colonialism. It will also discuss the complicit role of international law in maintaining these colonial borders, through a discussion of the principle of uti possidetis. The article will highlight the problems with the principle of uti possidetis. The aim is to assess the Indo-Nepal border dispute through the lens of the colonial principle of uti possidetis. The article offers a few suggestions regarding other international law principles which can be used instead of uti possidetis, the principle of equity being one of them. So far no work has been done on the Indo-Nepal border dispute from the perspective of the principle of uti possidetis. This article aims to fill that gap.
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6. The ambivalence of borders: Map art through the lens of North-East Indian artists
Achia Anzi
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Borders and maps came under scrutiny in the last few decades. Accentuating the gap between the map and the territory, critical cartography attempts to unmask the assumed scientific objectivity of maps and to reveal their entanglement with power. Postcolonial theory adopts a similar critical approach towards cartography which replaces the earlier attitude of the anticolonial struggles towards maps and borders. This shift is characteristic of postcolonial theories that focus on signifying practices and presuppose that the coloniser’s power lies in the ability to represent colonised histories, customs, cultures, and territories. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam question the deconstructionist tendencies within postcolonial theory and juxtapose them to the discourse of indigenous thinkers who underscore ‘rootedness’ and ‘affirm borders’. In my article, I examine A-PART—Stories of Lands and Lines (23 July–16 August 2019, New Delhi), a group exhibition that explored borders through the perspectives of artists from North-East India. Curated by Pranamita Borgohain and Vikash Nand Kumar of Zero Gravity Collective, the exhibition featured artists whose voices are not always heard within the mainstream of Indian art. While the exhibition questioned, undermined, and challenged borders, it also foregrounded their productive functions. In my article, I underscore and analyse this ambivalent attitude towards borders.
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7. The border as a space of resistance in the film 5 Broken Cameras
Hannah Zalis-Anzi
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In this article, I explore how the border is represented in the documentary 5 Broken Cameras co-directed by Palestinian Emad Burnat and Israeli Guy Davidi, and describe its effect on the Palestinian resistance movement against Israeli Occupation. I will argue that the border plays a central role in the film and can be seen as its protagonist. The film is an assemblage of ‘home-videos’ shot by Burnat who participated in demonstrations and documented the struggle for the restitution of the confiscated village lands on which the Separation Wall was erected. With his camera, besides documenting the non-violent struggle, Burnat also records his family’s personal moments and incorporates them into the film. This article presents a semiotic analysis of the film and argues that the border does not only function as a divider, but becomes an independent, complex, and stratified space. This hybrid space facilitates solidarity and rebellion and creates an expression of resistance to the Occupation, which would have otherwise remained ambivalent, elusive, and vague.

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8. Chilli powder and resistance: Mirch Masala, Shaheen Bagh, and the politics of space
Uttaran Das Gupta
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My article looks at the events around Shaheen Bagh through the frame of the 1987 Hindi feature film Mirch Masala and analyses the politics of space and gender in both. In late 2019–early 2020, elderly women of Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim ‘ghetto’ in south New Delhi, staged an unprecedented protest against the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). These women had never before been politically active, nor had any support from political or social organisations. However, their protest soon captured the imagination of not only other Indians but also the world. The peaceful sit-in, which survived repeated vilification, attacks, and even a communal riot, created for the first time a significant challenge to the Hindu majoritarian philosophy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In March 2020, as the country went into a lockdown, the government finally managed to evacuate the protestors, but as several commentators have argued, Shaheen Bagh had ceased to be a geographical site and had become a reimagination of the nation itself. Mirch Masala, set in a village in western India in the 1940s, is considered to be one of the first feminist Hindi films. The narrative of the film revolves around a resistance set up by some of the village women against the local colonial official’s lecherous desires for one of them. While there are obviously significant differences between the narrative of the film and the real-life protest, both allow us to study gendered spaces and reimaginations of citizenships.

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9. Exorcisms: Xenophobia, citizenship, and the spectre of Assamese nationalism
Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati
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I have received xenophobia and ethno-majoritarianism in the same nationalist legacy that ignites solidarities for collective subversion. Here, I explore my experiential heritage of Assamese nationalism via some personal sketches, involving people I have met and grown close to in different walks of life. I employ a psychoanalytical lens to contemplate the symbolic underpinnings of sublime patriotic imageries and therapeutically express the traumatic effects of hating Bangladeshi immigrants. Each section opens with a popular song that was freshly reimagined during the 2019 anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests. First, I argue that Bangladeshis, as signifiers of death, kill the Assamese subjectivity while staging a cause to become Assamese in the first place. Their presence represents our inability to recoup Assam’s many losses, inducing melancholic helplessness in the ethnos. Second, I illustrate how middle-class households internalise certain immigrants as domestic helps, appropriating their emotional and material labour in private to claim hegemony in public politics. Third, I demonstrate why Assam is doomed to extinguish its revolutions before they happen. Our nationalism is stuck in a pre-oedipal mess, too infantile to be anything but fearful of whatever seems like a threat to the motherland. Finally, I end on the future anterior that nurses the present with the assurance of uniting with the homeland despite all odds. That our citizenship robs immigrants of theirs, then erecting a mirror showing our own reflections as impossible citizens, is what I wish to portray here.
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10. Kiran Gupta v The State Election Commission & Ors Letters Patent Appeal No. 139 of 2020 in Civil Writ Jurisdiction Case no. 19109 of 2019, Patna HC
Aashish Yadav
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11. On automatic loss of citizenship: Looking into the Alvin Teage Jalloh v Olubanke King-Akerele case through the lens of international law
Arafat Ibnul Bashar
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Matters regarding citizenship fall in the domain of domestic law, and international law has very little to contribute in this regard. But over the years, the all-pervading grasp of international human rights has not let the matter of citizenship go untouched as it has pondered over the issues of the right to nationality, statelessness, and dual citizenship due to the substantial human rights implications stemming from them. Although the decision of the Supreme Court of Liberia in the case of Alvin Teage Jalloh v Olubanke King-Akerele was based entirely on its constitutional norms, the findings of the Court reflect the stand of international law in this matter. Due to the massive legal, social, and political implications of the status of citizenship, the latter has been gradually gaining momentum in the realm of international law. Both Myanmar’s Nationality Law of 1982 and India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) are shrouded in controversy due to their impact on the human rights of a considerable human population. The issue of the automatic loss of citizenship can snowball into a ‘leviathan’ in the contemporary politics of different states. The present case note looks into how this issue was handled by the Liberian Supreme Court and evaluates the decision on the scales of the established principles of international law.
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