Assam NRC Row: What We Can Learn From Philosopher Hannah Arendt

Philosopher Hannah Arendt rightly called ‘statelessness’ the “newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history”.

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India, the rising star of Asia, economic and military superpower of the 21st century, strong candidate for UN permanent security council, declared on 30 July through the publication of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) list in Assam, that it is going to declare four million people stateless.

The question of who is Indian and who is a foreigner (or Bangladeshi) based on who crossed the Indian borders by 24 March 1971 (a day before Bangladesh’s independence) is not a simple one.

But the Indian government’s answer has obviously caused more than a one-third increase in the number of stateless people in the world.

Beyond Right-Wing Rhetoric

The UN Refugee Agency estimates the presence of 10 million people globally who are not recognised as citizens by any country. It says that statelessness “is often the product of policies that aim to exclude people deemed to be outsiders, notwithstanding their deep ties to a particular country,” something that can be witnessed in India at the moment.

Right wing media, politicians and Twitterati find the NRC in Assam as the perfect cause célèbre of our time that needs to be replicated elsewhere in India, supposedly to protect its demography and character.

Given that very few believe that Bangladesh is waiting to welcome four million refugees on its border, the idea of ‘standalone detention camps’ comes in handy for the Indian government to deal with ‘non-nationals’.

But how can we think of these people beyond the right-wing rhetoric of ‘parasites on a country’? It is not possible here to explore the legality of the citizenship claims under NRC, but let us go back to German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose work posed the most serious questions that humanity must answer on the plight of the people who are not claimed by any nation-state in the modern world. Statelessness is a problem which affected millions in the 20th century, and Arendt rightly called it the “newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history”.

What Hannah Arendt Wrote About Stateless People

Arendt’s ideas on the stateless people were the product of her time and her own experiences of living under the Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930’s Germany. She closely witnessed their sustained campaign against the Jewish community that culminated in the Holocaust where more than six million were killed. The story of Hannah Arendt’s life is important because it shows that how by sheer luck and immense help from friends and strangers, she survived the harshness of camp life, or possibly avoided death unlike many of her Jewish counterparts.

Hannah Arendt’s greatness as a major 20th century philosopher lies in the particular conceptualisation of the stateless people as a category who are outside the norms or legal framework of any nation-state.

To be a stateless person means that one is “unprotected by any specific law or political convention” as she stresses in most of her writings on this matter. It is a life with no value, a human with no rights, a person without any affiliation to any polity thus stateless persons have no world around them. And that is why she reasons in her book The Origin of Totalitarianism, “Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people.”

Hannah Arendt criticised the much-touted 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its Article 15 where it says, “Everyone has the right to a nationality” as an unenforceable right as they are not rooted in any legal context and prone to violation.

The problem of statelessness people in Assam are manifold today.

India has signed neither the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol, which has 140 signatories, an overwhelming majority of the world’s 190-odd nations citing security and demography threat.

Who is a Refugee?

‘Refugee’ as a political category in contemporary India has reached new dimensions with its Hindu majoritarian politics. The proposed Citizenship Amendment Bill in Parliament, in the aftermath of NRC, would redefine ‘illegal immigrants’ in India by excluding stateless people of Muslim origin. It has the potential to change forever the Indian constitution’s original idea of citizenship through birth (jus soli) and not by blood descendants (jus sanguinis).

It also raises the question of who belongs where, and especially in Assam.

Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), an ally of BJP in Assam who have threatened to quit the government if BJP goes ahead with the amendment bill, stresses that Assam belongs to the Assamese, and ‘illegal immigrants’ – of any religion should be denationalised. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sees politics in the NRC exercise, and thinks of it as a ploy to evict Bengalis from the state who are poor and have little documented-evidence of belonging.

Hannah Arendt’s idea of citizenship rests on the concept of civic nationalism, and not just belonging to any bounded categories like religion, ethnicity or language.

Only through the ideals of the civic nation, mutual recognition of groups is possible. She said the question of stateless people will remain unsolved till we recognise that every human being has the right “to belong to some kind of organized community”. More than human rights, it is important that humanity above all, recognises that every person on earth has “the right to have rights” as she famously coined the term.

(Adil Hossain is a DPhil, International Development student at Merton College, Oxford. He can be reached at @adilhossain. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)