Border, Citizenship, and the Minority Question in Contemporary India
Salah Punathil
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
India’s migrant population registered an unprecedented increase on 31 August, 2019, when the official report of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) listed 1.9 million people living in the northeast state of Assam as illegal migrants from Bangladesh. The NRC constituted an extensive bureaucratic undertaking aimed at distinguishing citizens from undocumented migrants through the verification of documentary evidence to establish legal residency or ancestry. Bengali-speaking Muslims constitute a substantial proportion of this group, although precise religious demographics have not yet been published. The list was severely criticized for its obvious procedural errors, prejudice, and arbitrariness, as well as the possible consequence of Indian citizens losing their rights.
But that did not stop the Indian Parliament from passing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) just a few months later, on 11 December 2019, sparking another controversy across the nation. The act grants citizenship to illegal migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan who are persecuted on religious grounds—but only to Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, and Christians, not Muslims. The central government then announced the nationwide expansion of the NRC and the implementation of the CAA, which would drive out ‘illegal migrants’, a dual process that will directly impact the citizenship rights of India’s minorities. Little has been said about the emergent conjunction between the document-based citizenship policy of the Indian state, informed by the NRC in 2019, and the ‘biometric citizenship’ enacted through Aadhaar In 2010, India introduced its first national biometric ID, called Aadhaar, in the hope that this apparently forgery-proof ID would facilitate more efficient population management. The ID comprises a unique 12-digit number linked to the owner's biometric data (10 fingerprints and 2 iris scans) and skeleton demographic data (such as name, date of birth, address, phone number. This essay shows how majoritarian politics operates when power is exercised through silently shifting between different registers: the legal and the extra-legal, the formal and the informal. I focus on the border region of northeastern India, where the state's desperate attempts to curb ‘illegal migration’ illustrate with particular clarity how legal instruments are twisted towards semi- or extra-legal use, particularly to discriminate against minorities. While efficient governance is the main trope through which this program has been implemented, scholars have exposed flaws in Aadhaar’s functioning, raising concerns about misuse of individuals' centralized personal data, exclusion of marginalized populations, increased surveillance, technical errors and discrimination, and intrusion of geopolitical interests. However, the essay also shows the subversive actions of residents who use their access to Aadhaar to pass themselves off as citizens and thereby access entitlements reserved for citizens.
A Case from the Field
Nazma Apa, a 62-year-old Muslim widow from Chengduar village, located about 15 km from Silchar city in Assam, recently discovered that her Aadhaar card remained frozen. This was the case for 2.657 million residents of Assam. The cards had been frozen after the second round of NRC verification. Nazma Apa’s family of six lives in a modest two-room bamboo-and-tin house that has weathered over the years, its once-golden hue faded to a dull grey. The roof is a patchwork of rusted tin sheets loosely nailed together. During the monsoon season, rainwater seeps through the gaps, forming small puddles inside. Plastic sheets and old tarpaulins cover the roof to block the rain, but offer little protection. Dripping water echoes through the cramped space, a reminder of the family’s vulnerability.
The household is headed by Nazma Apa, who lives with her younger son, Alom, her elder son, Abdus, her daughter-in-law, Raziya, and three grandsons. Abdus, who grazes cattle for a living, explained that the family’s living conditions have been severely affected by his mother's lack of a functional Aadhaar card. According to him, they are unable to apply for the PM Gram Awaas Yojana to build a proper house because Nazma Apa, as the head of the family and intended beneficiary, does not have an active card. The scheme requires Aadhaar details, along with the beneficiary’s bank or post office account information, to be registered on the e-Fund Management System portal for direct credit transfers, with all transactions tracked at the district level. Without Aadhaar, the process comes to a standstill.
The frozen Aadhaar has also prevented Nazma Apa from accessing her own bank accounts. Despite holding two accounts, she is unable to withdraw money, update her passbooks, or even obtain new ones, as Aadhaar authentication is mandatory for these services. Abdus pointed out that his late father had an account with Allahabad Bank, where his Life Insurance Corporation payments were deposited. As Nazma Apa is the nominee for this account, she should have been able to access the funds after his death, but the frozen Aadhaar has left that money inaccessible.
Numerous state-level government schemes have also become out of reach. The Swahid Kushal Konwar Sarbajanin Briddha Pension Achoni, which provides an old-age pension of ₹250 through direct transfers, and the Orunodoi Scheme, which grants ₹1,000 per month to women who are primary caretakers of households, are among the benefits she has lost. Her name was struck off the ration card in 2020, and she is no longer eligible for the PM Ujjwala Yojana, which previously provided cash assistance of ₹1,150 for LPG cylinder purchases.
Even land-related transactions have been affected. Years ago, Abdus registered a piece of land in his mother’s name. Now, if he wishes to sell it, the absence of a valid Aadhaar card makes the transaction impossible. The combination of bureaucratic entanglements and the frozen Aadhaar card has left Nazma Apa and her family excluded from essential welfare schemes, financial entitlements, and basic services, compounding their economic hardship and deepening their sense of marginalization.
Documents and Biometrics during Majoritarian Rule
Nazma Apa’s case reveals the crisis of a large number of marginalized populations. The state’s attempts to distinguish citizens and illegal migrants based on documents showing a familial genealogy of national belongingness, as in the NRC, feed into the digital framework of Aadhaar and create new forms of surveillance and exclusion in India.
To understand this, we need to go beyond the predominant understanding of the ‘biometric state’ as opposed to the ‘documentary state.’ Instead, links between documentary and digital practices of citizenship governance are part of the majoritarian politics of our time. While there have been limited attempts to understand how documents form the basis of digital governance efforts in the South Asian context, I focus on how Aadhaar produces new forms of surveillance and inequalities, in opposition to its original purpose as a facilitator of welfare services. The state is transitioning from a politics of document-based citizenship—modelled through the NRC and proposed punitive security measures of detection, detention, and deportation or removal of alleged ‘illegal migrants’—to different exclusionary tactics: the denial of Aadhaar. This has become a vital mode of differentiating citizens and non-citizens, preventing the latter’s access to welfare measures and thus a fuller life. Oddly, however, a large number of those denied Aadhaar were also found to be citizens in the final NRC list.
Subverting Surveillance
Given the extreme consequences of not having an Aadhaar number, people find ways to circumvent the rules as part of their survival strategies. While majoritarian power discriminates against certain communities for political gain and a large segment of the population undergoes severe crises, people fight for their survival through subversive practices. The struggle in India’s border regions demonstrates informal ways of acquiring Aadhaar and using it to claim rights and services. While states try to effectively control and produce violence against certain populations, vulnerable people find their own ways to obtain fake documents. Such practices render the notion of a forgery-free ID absurd and prove how even heightened surveillance through documentary citizenship and the biometric state can be evaded. Such practices prompt us to reconsider the assumption that Aadhaar is foolproof, offering a way to rethink the notion of deduplication. Since its inception, Aadhaar has been projected as a mechanism to ensure inclusiveness, transparency, and a unified, centralized, and corruption-free approach to delivering citizen welfare. A hallmark of the program is de-duplication to prevent fraud. The scenario in Assam reveals how the politics of migration and citizenship become entangled with biometric identity. It offers a deeper understanding of the state’s role in reproducing majoritarian practices that impact the everyday lives of minority inhabitants in border regions. At the same time, subversive practices at the ground level offer paths to counter majoritarian practices in contemporary India.
Salah Punathil is a Sociologist and teaches at the Centre for Regional Studies, University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include ethnic violence, migration and borderlands, citizenship, minorities in South Asia and the intersection of archives and ethnography. His book ‘Interrogating Communalism: Violence, Citizenship and Minorities in South India’ was published by Routledge in 2019. He has published articles in journals such as Citizenship Studies, History and Anthropology, Third World Quarterly, Asian Ethnicity, Migration Politics, South Asia Research and Contributions to Indian Sociology. His edited book ‘Lines and Passages: Reimagining Migration and Borderlands in South Asia’ (Routledge) was released in 2026.
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Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.