Citizenship as Burden of Proof: Voting and Hiding Among Migrants from India’s Eastern Borderlands

ABSTRACT

Millions of people from India’s northeastern state of Assam have to defend themselves against suspicions that they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh. I explore how one such group of individuals, who work as waste pickers in Delhi, protect their citizenship against the combined vulnerabilities of being Assamese, Muslim, and residents of an unauthorized slum. I show that they develop a split relation with the government, defined by a costly requirement to vote in their borderland villages, and by avoidance for all matters linked to everyday life. By working hard in an occupation shunned by everyone else, they seem to uphold this citizenship of extraordinary political obligation and minimal entitlement. But when this equilibrium unravels around the debt that they contract to pay for basic services and for the trip home to cast their ballot, the price of their condition determined by suspicion, is revealed.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• suspicion
• elections
• borderlands
• India

Introduction

Each time elections loom in the state of Assam, along India’s northeastern border, residents of a Delhi slum are preparing to make the 2000 kilometer-long journey to cast their vote. The trip takes three days, and its reported cost per household is more than most of them make in a month from segregating waste. Even so, nearly half of the 300 families are about to leave when I visit the slum shortly before Assam’s 2016 Legislative Assembly elections. ‘We have to prove that we are Indian’, one man explains. ‘If we don’t vote, people might think that we are Bangladeshis’, says another.

These worries were pervasive among the slum dwellers, who combined vulnerabilities linked to several major faultlines that run through India’s society. They were not from Delhi, and although the constitution grants the right to move within the country, administrative and economic hurdles compromised the legality of their stay. Like many poor people who can only afford to live in unauthorized settlements, they could easily be evicted and were not formally entitled to basic services (Dupont 2008; Roy 2010, 164; Tarlo 2003). Nor did their work as waste pickers offer a stable ground for the relations of patronage which slum dwellers usually rely on for protection (Carswell and De Neve 2020; Chatterjee 2001; Das 2011; Heller et al. 2015; Roy 2011). As Muslims, they also belonged to a minority that faces widespread discrimination in interactions with officials and in everyday life (Carswell, Chambers, and De Neve 2019; Chatterjee 2017; Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012). Within this minority, their link to the country’s porous northeastern borderlands further singled them out as outsiders.

In a region where documentary proof of national identity is often disputed (Sadiq 2009; Srivastava 2012), these combined vulnerabilities had long exposed the slum dwellers to extra scrutiny and harassment. In the years leading up to the 2019 publication of a new register of citizens, furthermore, this climate of suspicion culminated in the demand that all residents of Assam demonstrate their family’s connection to India for a minimum of 40 years.¹ In Delhi, meanwhile, leading politicians were pledging to expand the register to the entire country, singling out Muslims as the main target of this exercise.

How do the slum dwellers defend their citizenship against these multiple vulnerabilities? Drawing on ethnographic research, I describe how, for poor people who often have no other documents than their voter identification cards, appearing on electoral registers is often the only way to uphold a fragile proof of national belonging. Citizenship, I argue, rigidifies into a costly injunction to be ‘seen’ (Scott 1998) casting their ballot in faraway villages, while hiding from the state in all matters of everyday life. This split relation leaves no scope for the negotiations through which other slum dwellers across India make claims on the government or on power brokers. Their citizenship consists of a political obligation divorced from all entitlements, and which, even in this minimal form, remains exposed to further erosion.

Instead of their national belonging, their ability to survive unsupported through their work as waste pickers becomes a way to justify their presence in Delhi. For a time, the slum dwellers seem to succeed in balancing the demands of their unprotected lives with their aspiration of resettling in Assam. However, when they add up the debts that they have accumulated, it emerges that, for all their hard work, the cost of voting and renouncing government services undermines any prospect of leaving the slum. After repeating their intention to go back, the most candid acknowledge: ‘How can we, if we don’t have money?’ This impossibility is the price of their citizenship defined by extraordinary political obligations and minimal entitlements. Beyond the aspiration of a return, this trap of renouncing services and paying for costly electoral participation affects their existence, sometimes over several decades and beyond the life chances of their children.

Ethnographically attending to these conditions, I argue, makes several related contributions to our understanding of such precarious citizenships. In India, first, Assam’s register of citizenship has attracted much attention and its importance as a laboratory for a countrywide transformation often been highlighted (Gopal Jayal 2019; Roy 2019). Empirically grounded studies of how this institutionalized suspicion has impacted ordinary lives, however, remain rare. My exploration adds to this nascent strand of inquiry (Bhatia 2021; Mathur 2020; Punathil 2022; Sharma 2022) and also speaks to the broader literature about how overlapping disadvantages of religion, caste, and class determine the experience of citizenship (Carswell, Chambers, and De Neve 2019; Chatterjee 2017; Hasan and Menon 2004; Roy 2010). Beyond the wider vulnerabilities of being Muslim and poor, I show that the slum dwellers’ belonging to Assam distinguishes their situation from other excluded groups.

Beyond India, my analysis adds to several related theoretical discussions about such forms of citizenship defined by documentary uncertainty (Reeves 2013; Srivastava 2012), restrictive laws (De Genova 2004; De Genova and Roy 2020), and racialized discrimination (Holston 2021; Kabeer 2006; Roy 2010). I describe how suspicion comes to pervade this precarious and fractured condition, and I expose the price that the slum dwellers pay for it, generation after generation.

Slum dwellers, Muslims and borderlanders

My exploration draws on 12 months of fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, and several visits and interactions since. In a slum of some 300 families, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 20 respondents and spent considerable time talking informally with them and other residents.² In parallel, I spoke with their employers and landlords, policemen, politicians, activists, and neighbors. To support this ethnographic evidence, I also used a survey to gather information about socio-economic conditions and the expectations of the state from 41 households and their 199 members.³

The shacks were located on the very periphery of the city, beyond a resettlement colony built to accommodate people evicted from central slums. On disputed grounds at the edges of the colony, waste entrepreneurs had bribed the police into tolerating the presence of their workers and goods. Residents of these sites said they came from villages in Assam’s borderlands. Previously, some of them had been subsistence farmers, others artisans. Often, they had abandoned these livelihoods after an accident or an illness in their family forced them to sell off land or contract a loan that they could not repay. Moving to Delhi, they joined a community bound by multiple ties of kinship, origin, and economic dependence. Newcomers often lived with a relative until they could afford their own shack and ‘beat’, that is, their dedicated area for the door-to-door collection of waste. While men rode their bicycle carts to these faraway middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, women stayed back, jointly sorting the previous day’s material.

In monetary terms, their monthly income of $115 per household was low, but in keeping with poorer sections of the resettlement colony’s population.⁴ On all other accounts, however, they fared markedly worse than even these deprived neighbors. There were no drains in the slum, no public toilets, or drinking water delivery. Nor could families avail themselves of subsidized food from the government or their children attend the local schools, because they were still registered in Assam. Evictions were a constant threat. During the year I spent there, the police destroyed 20 of the 300 shacks. A further 50 households said they expected to be expelled imminently because their contractor had run into financial troubles. Since then, police raids became even more frequent, and by 2021, most of the slum had been cleared and its inhabitants dispersed.

Their work was punishing, as was evident when looking at their hands, which bore deep scars, or dark crusts where their fingernails should have been. It was also work that no one else wanted to perform, not even the neighbors who belonged to the deprived Valmiki caste from which many waste workers have traditionally been recruited. In a pattern observed elsewhere in Delhi (Kornberg 2019), local municipal sweepers from this community subcontracted their ‘beat’ to a slum dweller, while retaining their government pension and up to two thirds of their salary. They had managed to leave the highly discriminated occupation often associated with their caste by transferring it to people who came from different, less marginal professional backgrounds, but who were all Muslims of Bengali descent. In the low-income settlements around the slum, most subcontracted sweepers were also single women, who had no husband to collect waste for them to sort, and for whom the trip to more lucrative ‘beats’ was also too dangerous.⁵

There is a large body of studies about some of the vulnerabilities that underlie these conditions. Most slum dwellers face threats of eviction (Das 2011; Dupont 2008; Roy 2010, 165; Tarlo 2003) and frequent hurdles when applying for documents or services (Carswell and De Neve 2020). As a result, it is usual for them to depend on powerbrokers for protection (Chatterjee 2001; Heller et al. 2015; Roy 2011). It is also known that caste and religion play into these vulnerabilities (Carswell, Chambers, and De Neve 2019). Muslims, in particular, are often forced to regroup in cramped neighborhoods (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012) and precarious occupations (Chatterjee 2017; Kazim 2018; Mhaskar 2018) in response to widespread discrimination.

More than these shared disadvantages, however, the dimension that featured most prominently in the slum dwellers’ account of their condition was their Assamese and Bengali descent. At first, it surfaced in their anxious insistence that they were Indians and could show me their voter cards as proof of their national belonging. When they started trusting my reassurances that I was just a researcher with no connection to the government, the same fears manifested in their narratives about their journey to cast their votes. They could also be felt in the rumor that some 20 families had been picked up and sent to the border after their shacks burnt down. As I would eventually learn from two of these families, the police had ‘merely’ razed the remains and told them not to return. The rumor, however, attests to the fear that defined life in the slum.

In the resettlement colony, meanwhile, some neighbors claimed that the police had acted after several complaints from their quarter. The slum, they explained, was not just a health hazard for all, but also a hotbed of drug trafficking, prostitution, and a home for ‘illegal Bangladeshis’. These allegations were common and often repeated by influential political figures. They were, however, refuted by other people, not least the area’s police superintendent, who spoke of the cluster’s residents as Indians from the northeast. Amidst, the confusion, one certainty remained: the eviction took place, and such raids would multiply over the next few years. Speculations about the slum dwellers’ identity were part of the local geography of protection and repression, which could shift with a change of leadership in the police, political and legal pressures, or bankruptcies among contractors.

Uncertain borders and the institutionalization of suspicion

This vulnerability cannot be understood without considering the political landscape around India’s border with Bangladesh. While there is not enough space here to do justice to the region’s complicated history, selected insights from the literature help define how the question of citizenship applies in this paper. They outline a geography that speaks to the wider recognition that frontiers exist beyond checkpoints and fences, in the policing of people suspected of being foreigners across the country (Johnson et al. 2011; Jones and Johnson 2014).

In Assam, the porousness of the border has its roots in the colonial period, when today’s India and Bangladesh were part of the British Empire. Wanting to increase revenues from this once sparsely populated region, its rulers encouraged migrants from nearby Bengal to join the ranks of the administration and farm its land (Weiner 2016). By the time an international frontier came to separate India and East Pakistan in 1947, thick ties of kinship and economic dependence existed between the two territories (Samaddar 1999; Schendel 2005). Unlike on the western side of the subcontinent, where large-scale violence and displacements suddenly tore these bonds apart, the split occurred progressively in the east. It was a ‘protracted’ (Roy 2013, 3; also see: Baruah 2009) partition whose effect, I will argue in this paper, is still playing out.

In a state that was also one of the country’s poorer ones, this history of migration generated a profound feeling of dispossession (Dasgupta 1990; Weiner 2016). For native Assamese speakers, the use of the Bengali language, in particular, crystallized tensions related to jobs and educational opportunities. While these antagonisms were set aside to welcome millions of Hindu refugees during Bangladesh’s war of independence in 1971, the underlying grievances continued to fester.⁶ Within a few years, local leaders had harnessed widespread sentiments of alienation to sustain a six-year-long agitation. The movement, which started with protests and strikes, grew increasingly violent until it peaked tragically, in the massacre of several thousand people, most of them Muslim peasants, in and around the village of Nellie in 1983.⁷

At first, hostilities against foreigners had not been about Muslims alone. Many of the initial grievances had concerned middle-class Hindu settlers more than Muslims, who were often poorer (Weiner 2016). This changed after the war in Bangladesh, when the number of Hindu newcomers fell, and Muslims came to embody the figure of the ‘constitutive outsider’ (Roy and Kumar Singh 2009, 37). As the leaders of the anti-foreigner agitation exploited fears of a demographic takeover in ever more virulent terms, even people whose families had arrived generations ago were viewed with mistrust. In the words of a landmark Supreme Court judgment (about which more below), they were suspected of being part of an ‘invasion by a large horde of land-hungry’ Muslims, whose influx was in ‘direct correlation with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism’ in Bangladesh.⁸

Many in Assam accused the government of inaction, or worse, of favoring illegal immigration for political gains, but the conflict had deeper roots. As elsewhere in India, the only register of citizens, made in 1951, was unreliable. Other identity documents were scarce and their legitimacy frequently called into question because of discrepancies and fakes (Baruah 2020; Sadiq 2009; Srivastava 2012). Nor had successive measures, from the distribution of passports to the introduction of biometric cards, addressed this underlying uncertainty. Enforcing the border, in such conditions, necessarily involved a large degree of arbitrariness, and a readiness to disenfranchise even individuals who belonged to India in all but their papers.

At first, the central government resisted this step. When the violence in the state was at its peak, it passed a law that introduced such stringent safeguards around expulsions that it effectively ruled them out (Baruah 2009; Roy and Kumar Singh 2009).⁹ Tensions lingered, and as political proponents of a harder line gained more influence, they progressively did away with the law’s protective measures, and replaced them with others that institutionalized suspicion.

In this shift, voter lists played an important role, as they also did more widely in the conflict around cross-border movements. For many poor people, who have no identification documents, they were the only available proof of belonging. As such they had, from the very beginning of India’s democratic existence served as an alternative to a register of citizens (Shani 2018). However, they were also subject to repeated accusations that corrupt politicians were enfranchising foreigners for electoral gains. As a result, violence had often peaked around election times, most tragically so in the 1983 Nellie massacre mentioned above, which was triggered by alarm over a sudden increase in registered voters.

Even after a peace settlement between protesters and authorities put an end to this large-scale violence, electoral rolls remained a focus of suspicion. From 1997 onwards, this translated to the practice of identifying voters whose nationality credentials were deemed unreliable. In a process that has been criticized for its many errors and biases, the misspelling of a name or a failure to vote several times in a row could be enough to attract suspicion (Punathil 2022). Tens of thousands of people had their records marked with the letter ‘D’ for ‘doubtful’ and were referred to a ‘foreigner tribunal’ where their cases often stayed pending for years, if not decades.

Beyond voter registers, several Supreme Court judgments would play a role in broadening the focus of suspicion.¹⁰ In 2005, a first ruling dismantled the special legal safeguards that had been introduced at the height of the anti-foreigner agitation. Several other rulings followed, including one in 2014 that set the state’s authorities a deadline to complete a new register of citizens for which all residents of Assam would have to prove their family’s connection to the country for a minimum of 40 years. By 2019, when the register was published, 1.9 million out of the 33 million people who had submitted documents were missing from the list. As in previous, smaller-scale attempts to identify outsiders, reports soon emerged about how the verifications had disadvantaged specific sections of society, among them poor people, internal migrants, and women (Bhatia 2021; Mathur 2020; Punathil 2022). In Bangladesh, meanwhile, the authorities insisted that anyone who had been excluded was Indian unless proven otherwise. With no resolution in sight, the ‘suspected foreigners’ were pushed further into a limbo of non-rights.

The deadlock notwithstanding, ruling politicians pledged to expand Assam’s experience through a countrywide register and, at the same time, amended the Citizenship Act to open a path towards regularization for all except Muslims.¹¹ In Assam, the prospect of regularizing Hindus triggered protests, while elsewhere, Muslims backed by opposition forces resisted their exclusion. The central government stayed firm, however, and the project is now a threat hanging over the citizenship of millions more people.

In contrast to the rich legal and historical literature referenced above, there are few empirically grounded studies of how these tensions affect everyday life. While the new Assamese register of citizens has attracted much attention, in-depth ethnographic analyses of the matter remain rare. Most insights, instead, have stemmed from neighboring states, which have not played quite the same role in the institutionalization of suspicion. They too, however, depict how a Muslim name or other racialized traits of appearance can compromise a person’s ability to navigate the uncertain paperwork and shifting relations of patronage upon which his or her citizenship relies (Ghosh 2019). In these borderlands, and increasingly in urban centers across the country, Muslims of Bengali descent are exposed to constant scrutiny, frequent harassment and recurring episodes of politicized violence (Datta et al. 1990; Jones 2009; Schendel 2000).

Voting and the requirement of visibility

This background was echoed in the slum dwellers’ comments about their votes. Initially, it surfaced in their anxious insistence that they could show me their elector card as proof of their Indian identity; later, in how they spoke of the journey back to cast their ballot. ‘If we don’t vote, people might think that we are Bangladeshis’, declared one of the men quoted in the introduction. Faizan Imtiaz was more specific: ‘If we don’t vote once it’s all right, but if we don’t do it three or four times, it raises suspicions, and we risk being removed from the voter list’, he explained, referring to the administrative practice of disenfranchising people who fail to vote repeatedly or labeling them ‘D-voters’. For him and his neighbors, who rarely had other proofs of their nationality, such institutionalized practices of suspicion had, for many years already, turned regular attendance at the ballot into an obligation. Amidst the obscurity of borderland citizenship, it demanded that they be ‘seen’ by the state to perform as voters in election after election (Scott 1998).

This injunction was more stringent because the documents that encoded their political identity were themselves compromised. Not only did Faizan have to vote regularly, but he also had to do it in Assam, despite having lived nearly 30 years out of his 40 in Delhi. ‘If I vote here and my first wife is registered there, they might find it suspicious’, he reflected. An elderly man who had spent even longer in the city explained: ‘I could have made two [elector] cards easily, but I would not have been able to use them, because it raises suspicion’. With contacts and money, Faizan and his neighbor could have registered on Delhi’s electoral rolls, which would have spared them the journey back to their village. It would also have been a first step towards accessing much needed basic services, but their fear of raising suspicion prevented such arrangements.

Officials played a role in these fears, as Faizan’s reference to the government practice of disenfranchising voters attests. But multiple intermediaries also had an interest in the slum dwellers’ votes. One resident who willingly spoke about these powerbrokers was Imtiaz Islam, who introduced himself as the local leader of the All-Assam Labor Union. The contractor, he explained, was getting $300 for his cluster’s vote. Imtiaz himself had tried to lobby elected representatives in Assam to pay for the trip. He said he was unsuccessful, but he continued to encourage his neighbors to vote. ‘It’s expensive for us. Still, I tell people, “Go and vote in the village, that is where we are from”’.

Again, these relations of patronage are a well-known feature of life in slums across the country. Much has been written, for example, about how these clusters are constituted into vote banks as power brokers in and outside exchange their residents’ political loyalty for protection and services (Auerbach and Thachil 2018; Heller et al. 2015; Roy 2011). It is also known that identities of caste and religion often play an important role in these collectives (Chandra 2007; Witsoe 2013). This applied to the slum, but in ways that were influenced by the suspicion surrounding them. Imtiaz went on:

Our problem is that people think we are Bangladeshis. Too many people have crossed into India and are taking advantage of state pensions and benefits. It creates problems for us, too. This is why we founded this organization the All-Assam Labor Union. When someone asks us for help, we first check the voter registers back in Assam. If we don’t find their names, we tell the police.

These denunciations anchored the fear of raising suspicion in exchanges with fellow villagers. They also brought the threat closer in a context where the government alone did not have the power to follow the whereabouts of all individuals with uncertain identity credentials. As factions among the slum dwellers took on the injunction to denounce suspected foreigners, Foucault’ (1975) theme of state surveillance and discipline evolved into something particularly pervasive. Some fellow country people became involved in enforcing the obligation to go back to vote. In that involvement, they forged precarious alliances with the contractors and politicians who had an interest in the slum dwellersvotes, together forming a network of patronage and constraints around them.

There was yet another twist to this practice of denouncing others. Imtiaz told me that none of his 18 kin had voted for several years. Four of his relatives confirmed, explaining that they had lost their elector cards during a fire that had destroyed the entire slum in 2015. This was a plausible explanation. The fire did occur, and poor people in India often face considerable hurdles when trying to make new papers (Carswell, Chambers, and De Neve 2019). Several other neighbors had lost their documents and, while some of them had since managed to obtain new ones, all complained about the difficulty of doing so. Whether Imtiaz’s situation reflects how easily a person living in these conditions can lose the status of citizen or how non-citizens protect themselves, therefore, I would not venture to guess. As far as tactics go, however, this example shows how denouncing others can be a way to protect one’s own compromised citizenship. It also illustrates how such tactics become entangled with what separates one subgroup of residents from another.

Whereas above, citizenship depended on voting, it appears even more uncertain in this final passage a struggle between factions and against multiple hazards that work to erase a person’s national identity. The erosion had started well before the register of citizens got under way, with the practice of identifying ‘D-voters’. Neither has the register’s publication had immediate consequences for those who did not feature on it: they could continue to vote until further notice, and their electoral card remained an important but disputed token of national belonging. While the register was a threat looming over the slum dwellers’ lives, the imminent danger came from political and economic pressures on their protectors.

Dependence and hiding in everyday life

Although the slum dwellers spent considerable time and money on the trip back to vote, they avoided the state for all matters of daily life. Except for one family, no one I spoke to had used any of the basic services available from the government in Delhi. Their survival in the city was the flipside of a relation to the state defined by two opposite logics, often discussed separately in studies about migrant hiding (Coutin 2005; De León, Gokee, and Schubert 2015) and citizen exposure to the state (Street 2012): on the one side, a covert logic characterized by everyday hiding; on the other, an overt logic centered on the injunction to be ‘seen’ voting (Scott 1998).

In these arrangements too, their contractors played an essential role. They bought the police’s selective blindness to their workers by paying the bribes without which the force would not have tolerated their presence. They also rented shacks, organized medical care, and lent money to those who needed it. In this dependence again, the suspicion that surrounded the slum dwellers’ identity played a defining role. With their votes tied to their village, they lost the power of collective bargaining that is often essential for such struggles to secure basic entitlements (Gaikwad and Nellis 2021; Heller et al. 2015). This disadvantage, combined with the hostility of the neighbors, prevented them from reaching out to the politicians, activists, and strongmen who brokered services in the colony across the road. Whereas these neighbors sought help from different power brokers, sometimes turning away from those who did not perform, the slum dwellers had to rely on their contractor for every aspect of their daily lives.

One expression of this dependence was the debt accumulated by many families. About half of the households in the survey acknowledged that they owed money to their employer. The figures that they quoted for these loans were substantial, at anywhere between $430 to $5,000 for an average monthly income of $115 per household. They also changed from one interview to another, and the numbers were much higher than those reported by the contractors: ‘$45, at the most’, said one of them, ‘we don’t give them more, because they can’t pay it back’. Whether the slum dwellers had lost track, or the contractor minimized figures to avoid any appearance of debt bondage, I do not know. Either way, these uncertain figures were symptomatic of an uncompromising dependence.

Most loans were taken out for food or medical expenditures. Even otherwise healthy people spent large amounts on the medicine required to treat the strains of chikungunya, dengue and malaria that spread in the slum’s waterlogged grounds during the monsoon. Like subsidized food, free healthcare is one of the entitlements of citizenship in India. While the reality is different in much of the country, residents of the resettlement colony across the road could access treatment for minor conditions, including most waterborne diseases, in a new government dispensary nearby. Unlike access to subsidized food, healthcare would not even have required registering in Delhi. What the law did not forbid, however, the contractors discouraged. ‘They would just make them wait’, a site supervisor said about government health facilities, ‘we prefer to send them to a doctor we know’. The contractor paid the doctor, then added the amount to his workers’ debt in the book he kept locked away from them.

One further consequence of this dependence was that even residents who had spent most of their life in Delhi had nothing that could serve as a proof of address. In a city where electricity bills often play this role, the contractor paid the bill and deduced the amount from their pay. The lack of a proof of address was a major hurdle to navigating the administrative procedures aimed at obtaining local subsidies or services. While this hurdle applies to many poor people across India, the slum dwellers’ fear of raising suspicion if they failed to vote in Assam also deprived them of an important political bargaining chip. Similarly, their avoidance of the state discouraged them from invoking either the law or principles of rights, as residents in other unauthorized settlements do to fight violence and neglect at the hands of officials (Das 2011; Eckert 2006).

In a country where every citizen’s right to move from state to state is enshrined in the constitution, each of the disadvantages above combined to tie them administratively to Assam. Their citizenship had rigidified into an obligation to vote dissociated from the basic entitlements through which the Indian government protects the lives of its most vulnerable subjects. Even in this minimal form, it was forever exposed to further erosion, through an eviction, a denunciation, or the looming threat of the national register of citizens.

Survival and belonging on a dump

The slum dwellers seemed to internalize this rupture of the basic relation of care that binds a state and its citizens. When asked about what they expected from the government, many replied ‘nothing’. Some added: ‘Why should they give us anything? We are not from Delhi’. Others, like Faizan, explained: ‘We work, we can take care of ourselves’. The assertion refuted common accusations that they were foreigners usurping the country’s welfare services, but there was more to this emphasis on self-reliance. Asked about their relation to the contractor, for example, they insisted that they were ‘self-employed’. They sold their waste to him but chose how they went about collecting and segregating it. They said this even as they stressed, ‘no one who has a choice comes here’. It was self-reliance amidst adversity rooted in a minutely calculated economy of work and rest. Faizan explained:

Every month, I make a fixed amount of $35 to $40 from my ‘beat’. The tips get me to $100, and I make between $65 and $70 every second month from selling waste in bulk. I leave at 5 a.m. It takes me two hours to get there. I work for four hours, and I take one hour of rest, then I work three more hours. On my way back, I stop for five minutes to get water. I take Sundays off. The body has to rest, hasn’t it?

Faizan took one day a week off, younger neighbors one day every two weeks. For all of them, work and rest were part of an austere self-discipline consisting of a constant arbitration between the need for money and the body’s requirements to endure the grueling work. This labor was the condition of their survival, but it also opened onto wider societal claims. ‘The city would not be able to cope without us’, said workers and contractors alike. Often, this comment was combined with a spatial metaphor that located the slum’s peripheral grounds at the heart of India’s capital: ‘See, the entire city ends up here’, they said, pointing to the waste around them. According to Faizan:

Some fellow Muslims tell me, ‘You should not do this work, it’s for Bhanghis’ [a derogatory reference to the Valmiki caste]. But why shouldn’t I, if I need it? If I do this work, it’s because I am a laborer. Someone must do it, or there will be no development.

The quote displays the stigma attached to the work of waste pickers in a country where ritualized caste identities entrench the inequalities of livelihoods (Gill 2012; Harriss-White 2017). But in the sentences that follow, the necessity of individual survival for Faizan combines with the necessity of this work for the country’s development to reject the stigma of the occupation and justify the slum dwellers’ existence.

In Faizan’s India, furthermore, the word ‘development’ was loaded with political meaning. ‘All together, development for all’, ran the campaign slogan that led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a resounding victory in the 2014 general election. Since then, the same BJP had promised to expand the register of citizens and take the fight against illegal migrants to the entire country. When Faizan claimed a role in the country’s development, his work became a quiet opposition to a politics that further undermined the foundations of his national belonging.

Having mentioned development, he continued: ‘Delhi is the capital of all Indians. We have a right to be here. We are Indian, after all’. The word ‘right’ (haq in Hindi) used by Faizan is the same as that analyzed by Das (2011, 331, note 1) in a paper about another group of slum dwellers in Delhi. Beyond formal conceptions of rights, it stands for a common ‘allegiance to the idea of preserving life’ (2011, 330) that can trump the law and provide a ground to fight eviction and obtain basic services. The same idea of preserving life was also central in Faizan’s discourse above, but unlike the slum dwellers in Das’ analysis, it was pegged on an affirmation of self-reliance. It was a request to tolerate those who can survive unsupported, and through their labor serve the country’s development.

The price of suspicion

The price of these attachments became clear when the slum dwellers reflected on intimate dimensions of belonging. All of them were adamant that they would return to Assam as soon as they could afford it. ‘Two years, and I want to be gone’, said Faizan. For him, the village was a place where there was ‘space and clean air’, and where his family used to own land before his father’s death plunged them into poverty. Like his neighbors, he worked towards a return. The plan connected his daily toiling to his aspiration, and it linked the two to the longing for a life he recalled as gentler. When he outlined his routine of work and rest, therefore, he also spelled out an arbitration between his long-term hope and immediate physical needs. He had to give his body enough to keep it going, but as little as possible to avoid compromising the prospect of a return.

At first, it seemed that this discipline could bring the slum dwellers’ attachment to the village into harmony with their services to the nation. As they worked to clean Delhi, they also bought themselves out of the slum. The harsh but hopeful equilibrium, however, soon gave way to a more distressing reality. For in the slum, the body grew old too fast, and its ailments interfered with work. ‘How old do you think I am?’ Faizan asked. ‘Tell me’, he insisted, staring at me for an uncomfortable moment longer while neighbors looked on silently. ‘I am 40’, he said at last, then paused again, before looking away with a sad smile.

I look a lot older, don’t I? This work is harsh on us. My skin and my body have become the skin and body of an old man. Sometimes, my leg hurts so much that I can’t go out. Still, it’s all right for me to be here. It’s my life and I make some money. But it’s hard to see the children. Their future lies ahead after all, and they don’t get anything out of being around. They don’t go to school. All I want is to stay healthy and make sure my two daughters get married into good families.

Above, the body was the focus of a toiling towards a return. Here, it reflects the harshness of an environment that accelerates the race of a lifetime and compromises the children’s future. This adverse relation to time was one more motivation to leave as soon as possible, but the body’s vulnerability also upped the stakes of the fragile balance between work and rest. Faizan knew this all too well, having been plunged into poverty by the death of his own father. Staying healthy, therefore, was also a condition for not replicating in his daughters’ lives the shock that had driven him into the slum. When he linked this hope to the desire to marry his daughters into good families, ‘keeping healthy’ became a requirement to achieve what, in his culture, is the major responsibility of a father. As previously, but in more intimate ways, the discipline of the working body was the basis of an ethos of decency amidst adversity. More than previously, this ethos was haunted by the precariousness of such unprotected lives.

There was yet another price attached to these conditions. Loans had to be repaid before going back. When the slum dwellers went into debt to cover basic expenditures that the government offered either more cheaply or for free in the colony across the road, the constraints linked to their borderland belonging turned against their goal of going back. The body, in these moments when it fell ill, became unable to support the tense arbitration that allowed their aspirations to overlap with servicing the nation. It ceased to be the leverage of self-reliance and instead turned into an object of suffering, and the place where hope and belonging faltered. Similarly, when the slum dwellers paid for the expensive journey back to vote, the cost of their connection to the village worked against the long-term aim of buying themselves out of the slum.

This, then, was the price of their citizenship defined by extraordinary political obligation and minimal entitlements. Even as individuals engaging in an austere rationalization of their labor, they could not balance the accounts. In the slum dwellers’ reflections about work and belonging, the consciousness of this grim reality was never far away. When Faizan spoke about how someone had to do his job, then concluded with an assertion of his right to be in Delhi, his brother interrupted bitterly: ‘Of course, the city could not do without us’. No one was mistaken, his defiant voice signified: this service should have brought them something else than this life of hardship.

Even Faizan expressed this sobering reality in one of my last encounters with him. He, who had repeated his resolve to leave within two years, acknowledged: ‘I don’t have plans. Of course, I want to go back, but how can we, if we have no money?’ Soon, however, he returned to the line that linked him to the village. Of his voter registration, he said: ‘What would I get from transferring it? I do not have anything here’. In that moment, he might have been expressing a need to cling to a place of belonging, far from this field of waste where he grew old too quickly and feared the loss of his children’s future.

Rather than an actual plan, the aspiration of a return was a ‘horizon of hope’ (Appadurai 2004, 75), linking the longer-term perspective of an idealized past with a more lenient future. All of this, for a village that the slum dwellers had to leave because of poverty and which, along with their Muslim and Bengali roots, exposed them to the suspicion that they were foreigners. The terrible paradox, then, was that the continued attachment to their borderland homes was a subjective necessity, but one associated with such constraints that it effectively compromised the prospect of a return. As they went on working in Delhi, defending their right to do so as Indians, the different dimensions of their belonging could not be reconciled. In everyday life, their claims of belonging were bound to an occupation and geographical location they wanted to leave behind, while in many other aspects it remained inextricably tied to their Assamese voter identification.

Conclusion

From the initial fear of raising suspicion to this final contradiction, I describe how the slum dwellers develop a split relation with the state, defined by a costly injunction to be ‘seen’ voting in Assam, and by avoidance in everyday life. This leaves no scope for the negotiation used by other informal urban residents across much of the country to make claims on the state and, through these claims, acquire new grounds of legality. Similarly, it drastically reduces the possibility of seeking better terms of protection by turning to different power brokers. The slum dwellers’ citizenship rigidifies into a burdensome obligation to vote, divorced from all entitlements and which, even in this minimal form, remains exposed to further erosions.

By exploring these conditions, I hope to make several contributions to scholarly discussions about these experiences of citizenship under duress. In India, first, my inquiry speaks to an evolution that is widely seen as critical not just for Assam, but also for the entire country (Gopal Jayal 2019; Roy 2019). Amidst pledges to expand the register of citizens and exclude Muslims from being regularized, the northeastern state is the laboratory for a countrywide renegotiation that threatens to disenfranchise many more people. While the moment has attracted much attention, ethnographic accounts of its real-life implications are limited. By describing how the slum dwellers respond to suspicions that they are foreigners, I contribute to the nascent body of studies on the topic (Bhatia 2021; Mathur 2020; Punathil 2022; Sharma 2022). I also add to the wider literature about citizenship and overlapping disadvantages of religion, class, and caste, by showing how the slum dwellers’ connection to Assam undermines their citizenship in a distinct way. Their regional origin places suspicion at the heart of everything, from their negotiations around uncertain identity papers to their interactions with powerbrokers and fellow villagers.

Beyond India, my exploration speaks to wider theoretical discussions about citizenship in situations where it is eroded by documentary uncertainty (Ghosh 2019; Reeves 2013; Srivastava 2012), restrictive laws (De Genova 2004; De Genova and Roy 2020), and racialized discrimination (Holston 2021; Kabeer 2006; Roy 2010). I show that the slum dwellers internalize the rupture of the relation of care that binds a state to its citizens. Their work in the harsh sector of informal waste collection becomes a way to justify their presence in Delhi, and a fragile assertion of their right to exist. For a moment, it seems as if this defense can reconcile their dignity as laborers, their contribution to the nation, and their hope of returning to their villages. However, when this equilibrium unravels around the debt that they accumulate to pay for the trip back to vote and for basic services, the real price of their condition is revealed. In Faizan’s reflection about growing old too fast and fearing the loss of his children’s future, it controls decades of his own existence and beyond the life chances of his offspring.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Anu Rani, Tarini Mahajan, Nayan Jyoti and Arjun Claire for their assistance with research. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments, as well as Tania Burchard, Stuart Corbridge, Camille Pellerin, James Putzel, and participants of the conference ‘Democracy in and from the Margins’ at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. For funding, I thank the Swiss National Science Foundation and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation under Grant P2SKP1_191387; and a fellowship from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes on contributors

Lucy Dubochet

Lucy Dubochet is a postdoctoral fellow at Wolfson College, the University of Oxford, and a research associate at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Her work focuses on everyday practices of politics in low-income neighbourhoods of India.

Notes

1. There are two threshold dates (1966 and 1971), but for such legal details see, Roy (2010, 2019) and Roy and Ujjwal Kumar Singh (2009).

2. All names and places are anonymized. Given the vulnerability of respondents, I avoided cross-referencing interviews in discussion with other residents or outsiders.

3. Since the purpose of the survey was to support the ethnographic evidence, I used a basic sampling method that relied on approaching every fourth household of the slum. The survey also covered 65 individuals and their 243 household members from the colony across the road, as I briefly allude to below.

4. In my survey, their income stood at $115 per month per household on average, compared to $104 among the lowest quartile of respondents in the resettlement colony.

5. These internal disparities are an aspect I cannot develop in the limited space of this article but explore in a forthcoming book chapter (Dubochet Forthcoming).

6. Estimates put the number of people who sought refuge across the border at between six and eight million, but the figure is uncertain and frequently politicized.

7. As with figures about migrants, the number of people killed during the Nellie massacre is uncertain. An official figure put it at 1383, estimates by local officials at 4000 (Weiner 1983, 281; as well as Anupama Roy 2010, 103, footnote 13), and unofficial figures at above 10,000.

8. Paragraphs 2 and 37.20.4, Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha & Ors vs Union Of India & Ors., Writ Petition 562 of 2012, Supreme Court of India, 2014.

9. The Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India, No. 39, 1983.

10. These judgments include Sarbananda Sonowal vs Union of India, Writ Petition 131 of 2000, Supreme Court of India, 2005, as well as Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha & Ors vs Union Of India & Ors., Writ Petition 562 of 2012, Supreme Court of India, 2014. For a discussion of the judgments and the broader evolution they represent, see Gopal Jayal (2019) and Roy (2010, 2019; as well as Roy and Singh 2009).

11. Indian Citizenship (Amendment) Act, Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India, No. 47, 2019.