Blog post by Rishika Verma

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In July 2024, the Supreme Court of India confronted a case that captures, with devastating precision, how India’s citizenship machinery can erase a person long before the law recognises him. In Md. Rahim Ali v. State of Assam (2024), the Court set aside a Foreigners Tribunal opinion that had declared an Indian-born labourer a “foreigner” on no material evidence, forcing him to spend the remainder of his life proving his own existence back to the State. He died before the error was corrected and his Indian citizenship was formally acknowledged only after his death. As the Unmaking Citizens report documents, such stories are not the failure of an isolated process, but the consequence of a governmental architecture that can turn citizens into non-persons. Statelessness, usually imagined as a condition produced by borders, is increasingly being manufactured within them, particularly in modern India.

I. From Security to Citizenship

India’s citizenship machinery is an inheritance of colonial anxieties. The Foreigners Act of 1946, enacted for wartime control, survived independence and continues to grant the Executive unbounded authority to “detect, detain and remove” foreigners. That statute has since been repealed by the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, which consolidates provisions relating to entry, residence, and removal of non-citizens. Yet, the spirit of the earlier law endures. The new framework retains the same discretionary language and evidentiary burden, preserving rather than reforming the logic of suspicion that defined its predecessor. Over time, it has fused with demographic politics and documentary regimes to form a system where exclusion masquerades as verification.

Assam’s experience encapsulates this transformation. The state’s own White Paper of 2012 records that the migration of labourers, traders, and teachers was once integral to nation-building. Yet by the 1960s, administrative programmes like the Prevention of Infiltration of Pakistani Nationals had already begun pushing people across borders without judicial findings. The shift from protection to policing was quiet but complete. Each amendment to the Citizenship Act thereafter, particularly in 1986 and 2003, tied citizenship by birth to parental status, placing entire generations in inherited uncertainty. Children of those once accused of being foreigners found their own nationality placed under suspicion.

II. Adjudicating Belonging: The Tribunal as a Site of Exclusion

On paper, Foreigners Tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies meant to determine who is a foreigner. In practice, they replicate the coercive logics of policing rather than adjudication. Their members work on temporary contracts, which are renewed according to conviction rates. This pseudo-infrastructure is evidently rudimentary, and legal representation remains inaccessible to those most in need of it. Section 9 of the 1946 Act (retained u/s.16 of the 2025 Act) reverses the burden of proof, compelling the accused to establish citizenship through documents that many never possessed.

For those living on the chars, river islands that shift and erode with every flood, records are fragile, names are misspelt, and births often go unregistered. A clerical error can erase belonging. The case of Mohd. Sanaullah, a retired Army officer declared a foreigner before being exonerated, exposes how even service to the State offers no immunity once suspicion becomes an administrative routine. Judicial oversight is narrow; civil courts are barred, and High Court review is limited to procedural lapses. Arbitrariness thus becomes not a failure of the law but its defining feature.

III. The Legal Manufacture of Displacement

In Sarbananda Sonowal (I & II), the Supreme Court described migration as “external aggression,” striking down the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 (IMDT) for affording too much natural justice. The decision collapsed the distinction between demography and security, transforming due process into delay and suspicion into evidence. Since then, the logic of border policing has travelled far beyond Assam: deportation drives in Haryana, voter deletions in Bihar, and identity verification campaigns across urban settlements replicate the same grammar of exclusion.

The contemporary citizenship regime operates less as a legal framework than a bureaucratic ecology, one in which belonging is contingent upon documentation and error is criminalised. When citizenship depends on producing papers that one was never issued, the State’s scrutiny becomes indistinguishable from its neglect.

The new architecture of exclusion is digital. Systems such as the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) promise precision but entrench dependence on databases where identity is indexed, not lived. Data, in such cases, becomes destiny. The Ministry of Home Affairs’ 2021 deportation protocols formalised cooperation with foreign missions, but in practice, deportation often proceeds without acknowledgement from any receiving state. People disappear into administrative limbo, documented enough to be detained, undocumented enough to be denied return.

Humanitarian agencies, including the ICRC and UNHCR, have cautioned that biometric systems in displacement contexts deepen vulnerability: they render exclusion permanent by making it traceable. In India, where data-protection safeguards remain nascent, the risk multiplies. The same infrastructure designed for governance can enable erasure with technological efficiency.

IV. Civil Death and the Stateless Condition

To be declared a foreigner is formally a loss of legal status. In reality, it is closer to a civil death. Detention, denial of welfare, and hereditary exclusion reduce individuals to administrative invisibility. Families become ghosts in their own villages, who are physically present, but without rights. For Rohingya detainees and Assamese Muslims alike, the consequences rival capital punishment in permanence, yet are nowhere recognised as such.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Re: Section 6A of the Citizenship Act acknowledged that “citizenship is the right to have rights.” Yet judicial correction, delivered case by case, cannot substitute for structural reform. When poverty is treated as deceit and inconsistency as guilt, dignity itself becomes inadmissible evidence.

What began as an exceptional regime has now become a prototype. Deportation protocols are cited by states beyond the northeast; police “verification drives” detain internal migrants; and electoral deletions proceed with opaque discretion. The foreigner, once imagined at the border, is now everywhere imagined within. Assam no longer stands apart; rather, it stands ahead.

V. Towards a Statelessness-Sensitive Framework

If the purpose of citizenship law is to manage membership, not manufacture exclusion, reform must re-centre dignity as its constitutional axis. First, procedural fairness must presume participation, not deception. The State should bear the initial burden of suspicion; assistance in document retrieval and translation must be guaranteed. Second, status determination must be institutionally independent. Secure tenure, legal representation, and appellate review must be made essential features to ensure fairness. Third, India must begin aligning itself with international standards on statelessness, even without formal accession. UNHCR guidelines recommend Statelessness Determination Procedures, child nationality protections under Article 7 of the CRC, and data safeguards consistent with the ICRC framework. Embedding these standards would not weaken sovereignty, but help humanise it.

Ultimately, the 1946 Act (and its 2025 extension) must be revisited. Its undefined discretion, reverse burden, and absence of appellate review are incompatible with contemporary due-process jurisprudence. Citizenship cannot be administered through a law written for wartime control.

VI. Conclusion: Reimagining Belonging

A constitutional democracy should not fear belonging; it should structure it. When demography dictates due process and paperwork substitutes personhood, law ceases to protect– it classifies. If citizenship is indeed the right to have rights, our measure cannot be the speed with which we exclude, but the care with which we recognise.

Statelessness is not a condition beyond borders; it is the quiet crisis within them. India stands at a threshold: to continue unmaking citizens through its machinery of suspicion, or to reconstruct a citizenship that begins, once again, from the premise of humanity.

About the Author:

Rishika Verma is a final-year law student at Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi. Her work has centred on human rights, criminal procedure and state accountability, and she has assisted on matters presently before the Supreme Court, the Delhi High Court and the Foreigners Tribunals on cases involving citizenship, detention and death penalty litigation.

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