Those excluded from the NRC in Assam are left with no forum to even assert their ‘right to have rights’
In 1943, Hannah Arendt began a narrative that had the potential to confer a sense of identify on millions of people who faced the misfortune of not only having lost a home, but also the impossibility of having to find a new one. She challenged the framework that made access to citizenship the sole prerogative of the state. Through this framework, the ideas of ethnical and racial homogeneity were propagated. This subsequently linked the idea of being a rights-bearing individual to the concept of citizenship. More specifically, the narrative of citizenship being the sole prerogative of the nation state linked the idea of a rights-bearing individual to the idea of belongingness to a particular formalised political community.
Inclusion, a precondition
The predicaments that such…