The citizenship processes in contemporary India are marked by a remarkable lack of hospitality, an indispensable ethic to imagine a sane society. To understand the risks that its lack poses, something that threatens Indian democracy more than ever, we have to “imagine” citizenship not just as a legal process, but also as a social and political one.

To borrow from Susan Sontag, we need an imagination of the manufactured disasters that people in India are forced to undergo in the name of enumeration and citizenship. A nightmarish infrastructure of acute suspicion and disenfranchisement, something that began in Assam with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), is built around processes that probe the lives of people, whose legitimacy now rests on documents.

That there are parallels between NRC and Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls shouldn't come as a surprise. NRC was marked by an extraordinary lack of hospitality and suspicion. Women, children, and trans people were its worst victims. The same tale threatens to repeat with SIR. Its madness creates a blanket of fear, stigma and doubt that affects people’s bodies and minds. Many were driven to suicide in the NRC. In SIR, Booth Level Officers' (BLO) suicides open a different door of horror. It points to our collective failure to provide minimal care, hope, and hospitality to the victims. The burden rests on both the state and society. 

Time is extremely critical for hospitality. A mass inhospitality was announced when the first NRC list was released at the stroke of midnight December 31, between the years 2017 and 2018. This declaration at midnight was deliberate and symbolic on the part of the state. It announced that state no longer wants to host the excluded. It wants to discard them like waste.

In the process, it imposed a formless punishment that may fall upon anyone. One of the demands of the Assam Movement, detect and delete, was achieved through it, and an arbitrary punishment of deportation and detention that may befall on the stateless was symbolically announced in the middle of the night. This Orwellian drama was not just staged that night.

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In May 2025, 14 declared foreign nationals (DFNs) were pushed into no man's land into the Indo-Bangladesh Border, in the middle of the night. The darkness of the night again, used to throw and delete people in the most hostile way possible. Such brutal acts somehow fail to stir our imagination.

SIR is writing itself as the NRC did, with both designed not to include but exclude. An Intensive Revision (IR) conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in 1997 in Assam identified around 370,000 people as potential doubtful voters or in short, D-voters. A letter D was marked against their names during the electoral revision process if they couldn't provide satisfactory documentary proof – such as a birth certificate, land documents etc.

As the ghost of the D-voter category haunts through SIR, people are being summoned to attend to the errors the system has identified in SIR. When similar re-verification notices were sent to victims of the NRC, they were given only 24-48 hours. Such a limited stamp of time, to present oneself 350-500 km away from home, at the drop of a hat, is nothing but hostile.

It sent the anxiety of those who received such notices through the roof, not to mention running pillar to post to arrange their travel. Not only a vehicle for travel, but also money for it. In 2019, a bus filled with citizenship victims, who were traveling from their home in a hurry to attend to such a notice, met with an accident when it collided with a truck filled with hot molten bitumen/tar. Many accidents involving such travellers were reported from across Assam, leading to multiple injuries, and even deaths. 

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People had to travel to places within Assam where they did not know anyone or had never visited before. A few samaritans from the civil society provided food, water, medicine, and temporary shelter in districts such as Jorhat, Sibsagar and Golaghat for those who were forced to travel on such short notice. Such an act of basic hospitality is what makes us human. Pranab Doley, was one of those samaritans, who is now imprisoned by the Assam government for speaking about illegal construction and land rights of people in Kaziranga. 

Eduardo Galeano couldn't have been more right when he wrote “the crime can never be blamed on the knife.” Assam Movement (1979-85), a mass movement driven by imagined fear of the bidexi/bohiragoto (illegal outsider/foreigner) saw the people of Bengali ethnicity as enemies of Assam and Assamese. It is their demand that gave rise to the form in which we see NRC today.

SIR and NRC as instruments are not just attached to the state, but are enabled and celebrated by a certain kind of majoritarian society, a narrow type of imagined community, that refuses to see suffering and injustice in such processes as well. Speaking up against them is also met with legitimate violence, online and offline, indicating that not only rights associated with citizenship are violated, but duties of a fidel citizen are also violated and gravely undermined through it.

Journalists asking for NRC documents from the evicted, at the very moment of domicide – mass murder of their homes – in a way demonstrate a picture of how far we have fallen. In other words, our hospitality remains eroded, replaced by a certain kind of numbness, disinterest and indifference.

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Hospitality, tolerance, and guilt remain unserviceable in the climate of SIR/NRC. One nightmare follows at the heels of another. As Susan Sontag would have it, people take to news of their doom in diverse ways. One can hope that the collective nightmare and unremitting banality people are put through will generate some imagination of citizenship in the public sphere. 

A Chartist leader, O’Connon remarked in 1838 that ‘‘universal suffrage would at once change the whole character of society from a state of watchfulness, doubt and suspicion to that of brotherly love, reciprocal interest and universal confidence.’’ Almost two centuries later, what we have is citizenship processes looming around with doubt and fear over the citizen-suspect. And as for love and reciprocal interests, not just between individuals but also between the state and its citizens, they remain at a dangerous level of scarcity.

The stigma and fear in which the ‘doubted’, ‘deleted’, and ‘unmapped’ live is beyond the imagination. One can’t, indeed, never blame the knife for the crime. We must tell stories of those who hold that knife to a certain end. Afterall, it is a crime against humanity. 

Suraj Gogoi teaches at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode. 

For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.

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