Formless Punishment and Exclusion: Criminalizing the Migrant Through the Indian National Register of Citizens

Abstract

By engaging with the National Register of Citizenship (NRC), it is possible to write about the new forms of affinity between citizenship and the criminal law in India, often compartmentalized in both kinds of literature of citizenship and criminal law. In the case of preventive detention/administrative detention in India, there are no set procedures for keeping people under detention. There are no laws and no specific guidelines to detention under the NRC, making it a formless punishment. People were detained for the reason that they “vanished” and mingled with the general public. Moreover, the purpose of deportation is not present in the NRC process as it is claimed to be an “internal affair”, but deportation as a purpose is used in the case of detention of NRC victims to legitimize that detention. In the absence of that purpose, the detention is a legal punishment. This paper will show how the NRC process, with its roots in Assamese Nationalism, allows us to show not only the affinity between citizenship process, nationalism, and criminal law but also how criminal law and administrative grounds of detention are often crisscrossed and misused in the NRC process. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.