In January 2020, residents of a slum in the suburbs of Bengaluru city (Karnataka State) found their homes razed to the ground by the city’s municipality. At the receiving end were internal labor migrants,Footnote ¹ who routinely face such harassment in the cities to which they move for work. Although such evictions are a mainstay of contemporary urban life in India, this particular demolition caused an unusual stir because it reeked of the ominous politics of India’s new citizenship laws. The event was triggered by a viral video shared by a local resident that portrayed the slum as an unhygienic and “illegal Bangladeshi settlement.” Stoking this hysteria, the parliamentarian representing the area (a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party) retweeted the video, declaring that relevant authorities have been “instructed to take action” against the outsiders (Pinto Reference Pinto2020; The Wire 2020). Instigated by such forces, municipal workers broke into the homes of migrants without even checking their identity documents (The Wire 2020). A few days later, approximately 5,000 migrants working in Karnataka’s coffee estates were forced into a National Register of Citizens (NRC) verification drive, triggered by a vigilante-styled intervention by Bajrang Dal.Footnote ² Based on speculation that the coffee estates were harboring terrorists, the police swung into action, rounding up workers for an identity check and unlawfully detaining 500 of them (Mondal Reference Mondal2020). Alarmed by this police action, many housing complexes in Bangalore ostracized all Bengali-speaking domestic laborers from working in their residential complexes (Kadam Reference Kadam2019). These incidents cast light on the insidious politics unleashed by the NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), ostensibly aimed at sacross-border migrants from Bangladesh. The de facto targets of this ambush, however, typically are Indian citizens who migrate within the country for manual work.

India’s 100 million internal labor migrants (Deshingkar and Akter Reference Deshingkar and Akter2009) belong to some of its most stigmatized communities: Adivasis, Dalits, racial minorities from the northeastern parts of the country, and Indian Muslims. Having faced historical discrimination by the Indian government and society, their life conditions have long been incongruous with any substantive notion of citizenship. Internal migrants live like aliens inside their own country—a fugitive-like life condition that came into stark focus especially during the COVID-19 lockdown in India in early 2020. They often must resort to living in open public spaces (e.g., under a bridge and on the pavement) or in unrecognized spaces near private properties (Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Varma, Jayaram, Mehrotra, Subramanian and Sugathan2020). The effect of the citizenship amendments is to expose these communities to greater violence and disruption through evictions carried out under the guise of NRC exercises, as the previous cases illustrate (Chandran Reference Chandran2020). In Karnataka’s case, the police and intelligence agencies arbitrarily identified certain areas as settlements of illegal immigrants. The 30,000 people identified by them (without any transparency in the process used) were largely Muslim labor migrants working as waste segregators, security guards, and domestic workers (Kaggere Reference Kaggere2019), similar to the migrants in the cases described previously (who later were confirmed to be Indian citizens) (The Wire 2020).

Karnataka’s approach to the NRC and the CAA portends a graver danger. The nature of police action in these cases is not isolated and is part of a broader history of state-inflicted violence against migrants, underpinned by vicious forms of ethno-religious, linguistic mobilization. These forces function to manufacture fear of migrants as threatening “outsiders.” For instance, Mumbai’s sons-of-the-soil movement (which targeted laboring communities in states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) showcases how the government and its powerful non-state allies function to create lasting collective memories of migrant citizens as illegitimate outsiders (Singh Reference Singh2015). Citizenship in India has a peculiar dual life. Formally, it may be a unitary feature granting all Indians the constitutional right to freely move around the country. In practice, however, poor laborers moving for work experience a near-total stripping of substantive citizenship. Regarding labor migrants, state borders in India have developed characteristics similar to international borders, steeped in extralegal narratives of “insider–outsider.” Local social fabrics remain invested in a normalized, everyday politics of maintaining the “otherness” of migrants, whose stigmatized social backgrounds, aesthetics shaped by minority cultures, and desperate deployment of tools of resistance and coping against exploitative work together to provoke parochial logics and sensibilities. Although their use and effect may vary according to context, the NRC and the CAA threaten to lend discursive power to these local politics.

A critical aspect of the NRC-related incidents in Karnataka was that “complaints” and “suspicion” from local residents were adequate to instigate violent government action against migrants. This feature points to a vast underground malaise of how dominant classes and the state’s governance machinery have acted in collusion to suspend the citizenship rights of migrants, thereby serving the entrenched interests of capitalist and elite accumulation. Making migrants a subject of popular hate and suspicion makes it easier to evict them from public spaces and to claim them for neoliberal development. Moreover, essentializing migrants as “outsiders” also helps dominant groups in India to deflect the attention of the middle classes from the negative effects of elite accumulation that worsens the quality of life for the majority (Singh Reference Singh2015). This makes the middle classes an ally of elite groups in the class war against poor, laboring migrants. “Complaints” made by “genteel” society against migrants to municipalities and the police for adding dirt, criminality, and crowding to the city are a central device of this class war. The local governance apparatus, in turn, panders to these dominant groups as “tax-paying citizens” while viewing migrants as the archetypal excess of the city: the antithesis of right-holding citizens (Thomas et al. Reference Thomas, Varma, Jayaram, Mehrotra, Subramanian and Sugathan2020).

The NRC exercises in Karnataka were part of a familiar script of exercises—justified in the name of “good governance,” “public safety,” “hygiene,” and “development”—that upend the bare fragments of security and stability that migrants have painstakingly built over time. Thus, the NRC and the CAA are new tools in a very old war of keeping the citizenship of migrants precarious.