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Learning to co-exist with the flawed workings of a government document used to be an undesired yet critical part of coming of age in India. Your father is Mohammad in the passport, Md on the voter identity card and Mohd on the ration card. Your mother ages a decade between two voter lists. Your address is spelt three ways, none of them correctly. For seventy years we called this an Indianism, shrugged and moved on. The state made the errors and the state forgave them. Not anymore. The errors are still the state’s but the penalty is now yours.

In the past decade, two exercises have transformed this penalty into policy.

Completed in 2019, Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), required every resident to prove that they or their ancestors were in India on or before 24 March 1971. The more recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began in Bihar in 2025 and has since extended across more than a dozen states, requires voters already on the electoral rolls to link themselves to an earlier roll, or produce documents, to stay on the roll. Both were sold to the public with the same vocabulary. Those elected to the highest offices in the land speak passionately of “infiltrators” and “illegal immigrants”.

The prime minister warns of ghuspaithiye and Amit Shah once called Bangladeshi migrants “termites”. Nobody was fooled about who these words were aimed at. The dog whistle was audible to everyone and many cheered. Once understood as election-season politics of exclusion, this dehumanisation has been turned into a form, a hearing notice and a deletion list which keeps showing up in different formats every few years.

Assam spent about Rs 1,600........

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