‘The Irregular’ and the Unmaking of Minority Citizenship: The Rules of Law in Majoritarian India

Abstract

We are witnessing a global trend of democratic decline and constitutional decay marked by the rise of populist authoritarian leaders and parties. India has increasingly become a central case study of this phenomenon. This article focuses on one important aspect of India’s democratic decline – the ascendance of the Hindu majoritarian state – and its relationship with the law. It argues that the law is central to the Hindu majoritarian project but not only in recognisably formal ways. India’s majoritarian state seeks to radically reconfigure the law in Indian social life by making the rule of law inapplicable to the minorities. Through a series of examples drawn from the everyday socio-legal life in contemporary India, the article shows how arbitrary and extra-legal state violence is endorsed, affirmed, and acquiesced to on the grounds of serving ethnonationalist values and interest. It develops a theoretical novel interpretive framework to capture practices of ethnicization of law, ethnonationalist legitimisation through intense political mobilisation, and the production of subordinated minority citizenship without formal incorporation of graded citizenship. India’s ascendant majoritarian state, the article argues, not only instrumentalises legality but more profoundly delimits the rule of law.

Keywords: authoritarianism, democratic decline, autocratic legalism, rule of law, minorities, ethnocracy, citizenship, India