Imperial Genealogies of Minority Management and Protection

Abstract This article provides imperial genealogies for two legal measures associated with the intensification of the ongoing crisis of citizenship for religious minorities in India: the citizenship verification exercise referred to as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 (CAA). By resituating these exercises within the mid-nineteenth-century emergence of practices of delegating administrative authority sans responsibility with the modality of indirect rule in the British Indian Empire, and the emergence of a European imperial modality of exercising universal capitulary jurisdiction in the name of “humanity” concerned with protecting select subjects of the Ottoman Empire, the article illuminates the relationship between these contemporary exercises. Furthermore, it describes the effects of their reactivation and correlation through universal jurisdictional exercises organized around “Hindutva” and the neoliberal decentralization of public administration in “New India,” focusing on how this transformed conduct of authority has reconfigured how citizenship status functions, especially for religious minorities.