For many of us, it is incredibly difficult to picture the experience of statelessness. In our everyday lives, we come across several persons with varying traits and characteristics that we can observe. For the most part, we do not explore this idea of ‘people’ beyond its simplest meaning, which is devoid of context and nuance. And yet, the term ‘people’ comprises several individuals who stand out as a result of how they are characterized. The criteria for classifying and characterizing persons into different groups varies from gender to national status. These are sophisticated terms that carry significant weight and nuance. However, there is a simpler, more common approach that we use in profiling persons from our daily interactions. Through this approach, we come to encounter and identify the ‘stranger’.
The use of ‘stranger-hood’ in the context of immigration conversations and policy is not new. Bulent Diken, in his book titled Strangers, Ambivalence and Social Theory (1998), uses the figure of the stranger in the context of nationhood. He defines a stranger as ‘one who is excluded from forms of belonging and identity’ in the nation-state. Accordingly, he views refugees, stateless persons and foreigners through the lens of ‘the stranger’. This idea is contested by Sara Ahmed in her book ‘Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality’. Ahmed argues that the consequence of viewing these categories from the singular perception of ‘stranger-hood’ seeks to eliminate the very differences that constitute these categories. In other words, a refugee is not necessarily the same as a stateless person; both characterizations are a result of unique and distinct experiences. Similarly, a foreigner is not necessarily a stateless person, even though there may be an overlap in some instances. To collapse these categories and the persons subsumed under them into the singular lens of ‘stranger-hood’ serves to obscure their stories and how their unique situations play out. It prevents us from identifying the similarities and fractures that may shape these experiences.
Ahmed’s central argument is that the stranger is not someone who is unknown or unfamiliar in a given dwelling, but as someone who is actively recognized as ‘out of place’ within this space. The stranger is recognized is one by the people who claim a sense of belonging and familiarity to that space. The act of recognizing the stranger helps them strengthen this claim, thereby distinguishing themselves. In other words, the stranger differentiates the familiar from the unfamiliar. The identification of the stranger relies heavily on physical cues. The differences in bodies enables us to realize what is known to us and identify the outliers, ascribing on them the identity of a stranger. An Arab male walking through the streets of a white neighbourhood in America will stand out because their skin colour sets them apart from those who reside there.
This notion of stranger-hood is particularly relevant to how statelessness is visualized and addressed in the Indian context. This approach is embodied both in popular narratives as well as policy.
In the context of preservation of culture and identity, ‘stranger-hood’ plays an important role. This is illustrated by the narrative of Assamese nationalism. The National Register of Citizens (NRC), the largest citizenship determination exercise in the world, poses an acute risk of rendering large numbers of people stateless. The NRC process seeks to identify and deport ‘illegal immigrants’ who pose a risk to the culture of Assam and threaten its identity. This assertion holds considerable weight – Clause 6 of the Assam Accord of 1985 provides for constitutional, administrative and legislative safeguards to protect the identity and heritage of the Assamese people. In this process of identifying illegal immigrants, several others who have not known a homeland other than India are implicated. The stranger is implicated both as an intruder who is a source of potential danger to that which is familiar, as well as someone whose ties are not recognized by law – leaving them stateless and without a home.
In the context of policy, the government of India has the power to regulate the right of citizenship as provided for in Article 11 of the Indian Constitution. This is an extension of the ‘plenary power doctrine’, which vests complete power in the State to decide on the policy of citizenship. The plenary power doctrine finds acceptance in several countries with respect to immigration matters. The NRC exercise is the manifestation of a plenary power doctrine in India along with the law on citizenship, including the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The effect of the policy is to identify the stranger, i.e, the foreigner/illegal immigrant who should not enjoy the rights that citizenship entails. This poses a considerable risk to hundreds of persons whose ancestors were born and have resided and lived as citizens of the country, but do not have access to accepted documents to prove the same.
While judicial review and scrutiny in the matter of plenary power are mostly restricted, the Indian context is a situation where the judiciary has actively supervised the execution of government policy. Largely seen as the protector of fundamental rights and freedom, the Supreme Court set a timeframe within which the Assam NRC process was to be completed. The implication of this collaborative role is that the judicial system becomes complicit in the process of identifying and further stigmatizing the ‘stranger’. There is no specific legislation that deals with statelessness in India; several persons who are either stateless or at the risk thereof are categorized as ‘foreigners’ under the Citizenship Act, 1955. The effect, therefore, becomes that of giving legal sanction to the process of identifying certain persons, who constitute the ‘other’. Whereas, the truth is that these persons are denied acceptance in the space they know as their origins. They are not afforded an opportunity to effectively contest this ascription of strangerhood that alienates them from the context in which their lives have been shaped. More importantly, the stranger does not have any other space which considers them as welcome, familiar and safe. Therefore, the strangerhood discourse is particularly helpful for characterizing the statelessness crisis that looms in this context. The artificiality of this idea must be superseded by shared humanity, where we respect and embrace our own – not banish them to uncertain futures and heightened vulnerability.
