This Land Is Mine, I Am Not of This Land Caa-NRC and the Manufacture of Statelessness (Paperback)

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed by the Indian Parliament in December 2019, promises citizenship to migrants of the 'Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan'. By excluding Muslims from the list and not extending the promise to refugees from any of India's non-Muslim-majority neighbours, the CAA makes religion a factor in citizenship for the first time in the history of the Republic. Many fear that this Act, coupled with a countrywide National Register of Citizens (NRC), will eventually be used to disenfranchise India's Muslims, or to trap them in a permanent state of fear and insecurity, which has been the fate of lakhs of Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam.

This Land Is Mine, I Am Not of This Land brings together a comprehensive selection of essays-by scholars, activists, journalists and legal experts, among others that deal with the theoretical, political and subjective aspects of this issue. The first section traces the evolution of the idea of citizenship and what it means to be an Indian citizen, and how we moved from the open arms of the Constitution to the bayonet of subsequent amendments to the Citizenship Act, 1955. The following section deals with the peculiar case of Assam-the bureaucratic travesties unleashed there in the name of protecting the state from 'external aggression', as well as their enormous human cost. The concluding sections expose the superfluousness-indeed, the suspect nature-of the new National Population Register (NPR), pose serious questions about the constitutionality of the CAA, and demonstrate how the CAA-NRC-NPR trinity have the potential to push India into an abyss.