To understand the operational logic of contemporary majoritarian governance, we must look beyond the reassuring rhetoric of constitutional democracy and examine the citizen’s physical body. At its core, citizenship is the violent imprint of the nation-state on the human form. Those whose bodies fall outside this sovereign mark are not merely seen as uncivilised or unmapped; they are structurally marked as targets for systemic elimination. As Giorgio Agamben famously observed, the sovereign sphere includes life primarily through its exclusion, defining a body by its capacity to be killed. Consequently, entry into the polis is never unconditional; it is permanently anchored in the structural possibility of expulsion.

This reality thoroughly dismantles the modern fiction that human rights are inalienable from birth. Proclaiming the existence of natural rights obscures a deeper, more troubling mechanism: the law inscribes itself onto your biological form the moment you enter the world, instantly circumscribing existence within parameters policed by a sovereign who arbitrates what constitutes a protectable and worthy life.

This structural stratification has deep historical and cultural roots. In the ancient Greek polis, women and slaves were entirely excluded from political life and relegated to the realm of bare animal existence (zoe). Similarly, the traditional Indian caste system organised society by dividing populations into those with surplus social capital and those without, marginalising Avarna and Dalit communities and reducing them to beasts of burden through a traditional, ritualistic biopolitics.

While modern democracy apparently extends political rights to all, the underlying exceptions persist. Hannah Arendt exposed this systemic vulnerability by questioning the existence of a foundational “right to have rights.” Without this primary, irrevocable guarantee, any specific civil right can be suspended or revoked by the state at will. A body stripped of this structural protection moves from a state of qualified political life (bios) to a phase of bare life, where its franchise is stripped by opaque administrative measures, and ultimately into the “death worlds” of permanent, unlivable conditions. Such a body becomes depoliticised, de-nationalised, and destined for institutional annihilation (like Umar Khalid and other UAPA victims).

This violent gap between abstract legal definitions and brutal lived experience is vibrantly illustrated by the targeted treatment of the politically or physically vulnerable. The tragic incarceration and structural neglect of the late activist Father Stan Swamy demonstrate how state security pretexts are weaponised to deny basic human dignity and judicial empathy, completely severing formal citizenship from actual human existence.

In the contemporary landscape, dissenting intellectuals (labelled “urban Naxals”) and Indian Muslims are subjected to a terrifying mutation of this power, rendered necropolitical citizens. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, the sovereign power to dictate who may live and who must die, the state constructs “death worlds” for politically inconvenient populations.

In life, these populations are pushed to the fringes, harassed by selective administrative tools such as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and the UCC, and threatened with legal exile. Yet a supreme irony occurs at the moment of biological collapse: the state recognises their citizenship primarily in death or through the execution of state violence on their lives. The living body is treated as an existential threat that must be subdued, whereas the deceased body is perfectly safe; it can be seamlessly reintegrated into the legal record through meticulous posthumous processing, inquests, and closed case files. Thus, they become citizen by death; a sort of necropolitical citizenship is emerging.

To maintain this absolute control, the state capitalises on the latent vulnerability embedded in every civic body. By levying sweeping charges of treason, waging war against social justice movements, and branding critics or writers as national security threats for merely possessing radical literature, the sovereign instils a pervasive state of fear. The law ceases to function as an objective arbiter and instead becomes a tool of majoritarian discipline. By systematically assigning disparate values to majoritarian and minority lives, the legal system enforces an ethnic democracy, a political ecosystem in which the state manages populations not to protect them, but to legally manage their elimination.

The Judicial Rubber-Stamp: EVM Opacity and the Legalisation of the SIR hunting

This biopolitical shift from public sovereignty to bureaucratic control is not achieved merely through overt violence; it is systematically entrenched through the legal architecture of the democratic state, where judicial mechanisms increasingly insulate the apparatus of power from public oversight. The erosion of the citizen’s democratic agency is dual-pronged: it targets how votes are counted and, more fundamentally, who is allowed to remain on the voting rolls in the first place.

The first mechanism was legitimised by the Supreme Court’s judgment on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) verification. In that case, the Court rejected petitions led by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) seeking 100% physical verification of VVPAT slips. By prioritising automated efficiency over absolute transparency, the Court detached the biological voter from independent validation of their franchise. Public intellectuals such as Yogendra Yadav noted that reducing voting to a state-managed computational loop isolates the citizen. The Court ruled that popular suspicion of proprietary source code is insufficient grounds to disrupt bureaucratic machinery, affirming that the citizen’s expressive political act (bios) is subordinate to executive design.

However, this electronic opacity forms only the defensive perimeter of the state. The offensive biopolitical manoeuvre is found in the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment upholding the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

Delivered by a Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, the judgment unanimously upheld the ECI’s authority to deploy the SIR under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and Article 324 of the Constitution. The petitioners argued that the SIR was a surreptitious, backdoor move to conduct citizenship screening and mass profiling under the guise of purifying electoral rolls. Under the cover of this non-transparent process, a partisan ECI has conducted sweeping purges of voter registries, deleting more than 10% of voters across multiple states and disproportionately targeting minority populations, particularly Indian Muslims.

The profound danger of the SIR judgment lies in its striking internal contradiction, which exposes the thanatopolitical character of the contemporary state. On the one hand, the Supreme Court attempted to provide an alibi for its decision by declaring that deletion from an electoral roll “does not amount to a declaration that the individual is not a citizen of India.” It framed the deletion merely as the “Commission’s inability to be satisfied” for electoral purposes.

Yet, in the very same breath, the Court directed the ECI to forward all such deleted names to the competent authorities under the Citizenship Act within four weeks, setting a strict deadline for the “adjudication of their citizenship” before the upcoming elections.

This directive turns the foundational presumption of regular citizenship on its head. By sending millions of arbitrarily deleted individuals to executive tribunals under the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Court has institutionalised a mechanism that shifts the entire burden of proof onto marginalised individuals. The biological body is stripped of its political skin (the franchise) by an opaque administrative swipe, and is then forced to prove its right to exist before the lethal apparatus of state citizenship laws.

Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan delivered a strong critique of the verdict, calling the development “very unfortunate for democracy” and explicitly accusing the Election Commission of “working as an agent of the BJP.” Bhushan’s intervention cuts to the core of the institutional collapse: when the apex court validates an opaque, executive-led hunt that strips millions of their political status without prior due process, long after elections have already been altered by these very deletions, the judiciary ceases to be a shield against tyranny. Instead, it becomes the ultimate legitimising organ of fascist majoritarianism.

When the EVM-VVPAT judgment and the SIR verdict are integrated, the full anatomy of Hindutva’s biopolitical state is laid bare. The SIR hunt determines which bodies are excluded from the polis altogether, reducing them to Homo Sacer, bare lives marked for legal and political exile. Meanwhile, the unverifiable EVM matrix ensures that the bodies permitted to remain within the polis are reduced to compliant components of a state-controlled ritual.

Through this dual design, the transition from democracy to an ethnic fascism is completed, not by violating the law, but by rewriting it to ensure that the preservation of majoritarian purity becomes the highest constitutional mandate.

Read the first part of the article here 

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post The Biopolitical Anatomy of Hindutva Fascism: Part II: SIR, EVMs and the Judiciary appeared first on SabrangIndia.

To understand why this matters beyond electoral law, we must place the SIR process within a deeper theoretical framework: the biopolitical understanding of Hindutva fascism. The question of who qualifies as a citizen, and whose body bears the imprint of the nation, lies at the heart of this analysis. When the state deletes a voter, it is not merely updating a roll; it is making a sovereign declaration about whose life is politically legible, and whose life can be reduced to bare existence.

The question of who qualifies as a human being, who attains citizenship, and the intricate relationship between humanity and citizenship is profoundly significant. Fascism, as a historical phenomenon, emerges as a radical redefinition of this relationship, transforming what once were purely anthropological inquiries into politically charged, nationalist, racial, and ultimately fascist projects.

In the ancient context, the distinction between City and Citizen was central to the organisation of society. The city-state, or polis, represented the epitome of political life. A resident of the polis was inherently political, echoing Aristotle’s famous assertion that humans are political animals. However, not all individuals born within the city-state were automatically granted citizenship. Thus, while humanity may be defined as inherently political, not every individual born within the city was considered a political being.

This subtle understanding emphasises the complexity of citizenship and political participation in ancient societies. It highlights the selective nature of citizenship and the hierarchical structures that governed access to political rights and privileges. In fascist contexts, this distinction becomes even more pronounced, as regimes seek to manipulate and redefine citizenship according to arbitrary criteria, including race, ethnicity, and religious ideology.

Ultimately, the question of who qualifies as a human being and who attains the status of a citizen is not merely an abstract philosophical inquiry but a deeply political and historical one. It speaks to the fundamental principles of equality, justice, and democracy and underlines the enduring struggle to uphold these ideals in the face of tyranny and oppression.

The Superimposed Body: From Birth to the Body Politic

In the ancient Greek democratic system, the concept of citizenship was strictly exclusive. Neither women nor slaves were afforded a share in the polis. They were relegated to a subhuman status or entirely excluded from the realm of political humanity. In this framework, reproduction and labour were perceived merely as animalistic qualities, devoid of the political agency (bios) granted to citizens.

The human body, far from being solely a product of nature (zoe), is inseparably entangled with politics and law. It embodies a complex amalgamation of natural and political forces; a synthesis forged in the crucible of societal norms and governance. At birth, an individual’s body becomes imbued with a biopolitical essence, a term denoting the state’s regulation and control over biological life, and a body politic is superimposed on their natural form.

This fusion of the natural and the political renders the body a site of power and control, subject to the whims of the state, fascism, and sovereignty. It is through this superimposed body politic that individuals are governed and regulated, with their rights and freedoms dictated by the structures of power that govern society. Thus, the human body becomes not merely a vessel for biological existence but a battleground for competing political ideologies and systems of governance.

While Rousseau famously proclaimed that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” the truth of this statement is open to interpretation. Indeed, no individual is born into absolute freedom. Every human being is born into a web of preconceived roles and identities, predetermined by factors such as gender, language, nationality, and ethnicity.

The assertion that man is a political animal emphasises that human birth is not only a biological event but also inherently political. Each individual’s entry into the world is inseparable from the socio-political context of their birth. Their very existence is framed within a politico-juridical landscape, in which legal and political frameworks shape their rights, responsibilities, and opportunities.

Sovereignty, Agamben, and the Tragedy of the Declaration

The evolution of citizenship from ancient city-states to modern nation-states marks a profound transformation in the status of individuals, shifting them from subjects to active participants in political life. This shift also extended citizenship to previously excluded groups, broadening political engagement and rights. The transition from the sovereignty of kings to national sovereignty reflects the emergence of public sovereignty, in which the authority of governance is vested in the collective body of citizens.

However, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben highlights the latent risks inherent in this apparently progressive transition. By interrogating foundational documents such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and the development of habeas corpus in England, Agamben reveals the complexities and ambiguities underlying the construction of citizenship in modern liberal democracy. These documents, while intended to safeguard individual rights and freedoms, also reinforce structures of power and exclusion, perpetuating inequalities and hierarchies within society.

The French Declaration of Rights asserts that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” emphasising the fundamental equality and freedom inherent in all individuals. However, the term “man” in this context refers to a specific subset of humanity, namely, the citizen. While seemingly universal, the rights enshrined in the declaration are exercisable only by citizens, narrowing the scope of entitlements to a specific legal and political category.

This transition from the broader concept of “man” to the more limited category of “citizen” marks a shift from a natural or biological understanding of humanity to a legal and political construct. In essence, the declaration replaces the inherent rights of all human beings with the societal framework of citizenship, thereby transforming the abstract notion of “man” into the tangible status of “citizen.”

The transition from God-given royal sovereignty to national sovereignty marks a significant shift from subjects to citizens. However, this transition also brings a profound tragedy: the commodification of birth itself as a point of sovereignty. While all beings are born, not all possess the inherent rights to equality and life. These rights are reserved only for individuals whose bodies are explicitly imbued with citizenship. The metaphor of commodification describes how the modern nation-state transforms the natural, biological act of human birth into a state-controlled asset, a legal registry, and a tool of political currency. When modern democracy overthrew kings, sovereignty shifted to “The People” (National Sovereignty). But this created a massive bureaucratic problem for the new state: Who exactly are “The People”? Where does the state get its legitimacy?

The modern state’s answer was Birth. The nation-state linked political legitimacy directly to human reproduction. It declared that, by virtue of being born within a certain territory (jus soli) or to certain parents (jus sanguinis), a biological body is automatically claimed by the state. This is where commodification occurs. The state steps into the maternity ward, establishes a “territory” in the mother’s womb, and places an invisible, sovereign “tag” on the newborn body. The state turns the most innocent, natural act, a child entering the world, into the ultimate site of sovereign control, policing, and structural exclusion.

If your birth occurs outside the arbitrary criteria of the state, or if a majoritarian state retroactively changes the rules of belonging (like the ECI’s voter deletions or citizenship screenings), your birth is stripped of its political currency. You become an administrative Homo Sacer, a bare life. Your birth is suddenly worth nothing under the law.

According to Agamben, this transformation from biopolitics to “thanatopolitics”, a politics centred on the power to decide who matters and who is marked for death, occurs precisely at the intersection of citizenship, where the distinction between life and death becomes increasingly blurred. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), together with the proposed Uniform Civil Code (UCC), exemplifies this biopolitical shift in contemporary India, raising deep concerns about the potential legal vulnerability and targeted disenfranchisement of Indian Muslims.

The Political Production of the Homo Sacer

When attempting to define citizenship, the concept of identity becomes paramount. Defining citizenship is inherently problematic, as it often involves delineating oneself from the “other.” This process is particularly significant in Indian social psychology, where self-awareness as a Hindu often arises primarily in contrast to the identity of a Muslim. In the political absence of this “other,” the monolithic Hindu identity risks regressing into its internal, fractured realities of caste. To define oneself, one must establish something outside oneself. Thus, majoritarian citizenship can only be comprehended by creating an external boundary through the definition of the “other” and subsequent exclusion.

The answer to the question of citizenship varies with the ideology governing a nation. In some contexts, citizenship is defined by birthright (jus soli): anyone born within the country’s borders is considered a citizen. However, in regimes such as Nazi Germany, Ethnic Israel, and Hindutva India, citizenship is increasingly untethered from the place of birth and is instead tied to racial, ethnic, or religious identity. Hitler’s concept of German citizenship was strictly limited to those born within the Aryan race, excluding others regardless of birthplace.

This racialised or communalised notion of citizenship transforms the human body into a biopolitical entity, in which citizenship becomes a political stamp imposed on nature. Fascism divides society along identity lines, relegating certain groups to the margins through arbitrary definitions of belonging. Yet such exclusionary definitions erode individuals’ inherent humanity, reducing them to mere subjects of political ideology rather than autonomous beings.

In an ethnically defined concept of citizenship, individuals who do not belong to the designated group are considered to be born without rights. They are viewed as “Homo Sacer”, an ancient legal figure resurrected by Agamben to describe individuals whose lives are deemed “bare life,” stripped of legal protection, expendable, and subject to targeting with impunity. In essence, their mere biological existence is seen as a threat to the ideological purity of the state, rendering them legally disposable.

The Democratic Channel to Fascism

With the rise of modern democracy, marginalised lives, women, workers, and the vulnerable were formally integrated into the political sphere, leading to the complete politicisation of human birth and natural life. The modern nation-state rests on a political framework in which existence itself is explicitly managed by law. Consequently, those deemed irrelevant or dangerous by authority can be stripped of their political rights and expelled from the system.

This process renders anyone susceptible to political disenfranchisement, transforming them into Homo Sacer. Agamben’s observation remains highly relevant today: whereas biopolitics in Nazi Germany targeted specific, legally catalogued religious and ethnic groups as scapegoats, today any citizen can be reduced to bare life. The concept of bare life is no longer confined to an exceptional category; it resides within the biological body of every living being, leaving everyone vulnerable to being stripped of their rights and reduced to mere existence at the state’s discretion.

Agamben argues that modern democracy does not eliminate the sacred, banishable life but rather fragments and disperses it across every individual body, investing it in all civic bodies. When definitions change, citizens are transformed into refugees. This is historically exemplified by the plight of German Jews who lost their citizenship following the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, as well as by Rohingya Muslims and Palestinians who were forced into refugee status due to shifting political boundaries and legal classifications.

Modern nation-states and democracies are founded on the biopolitical framework of citizenship, which determines who is considered a citizen. In this context, fascism is not an antithetical force opposing democracy; rather, it embodies the core political logic inherent in modern democracy itself. This explains how democratically elected leaders can transition seamlessly from democratic governance to fascist tendencies. The trajectory from democracy to fascism is facilitated by the underlying structures of democracy, such as majority rule, executive centralisation, and legal codification, which can morph into fascist ideologies when the constitutional coating of democracy is stripped away.

(To be continued)

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post The Biopolitical Anatomy of Hindutva Fascism: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Bare Life |Part 1| appeared first on SabrangIndia.

be a tree sated with fertility, be a tree.

And if you are not a tree, my love, 

be stone saturated with humidity, be stone.

And if you are not a stone, my love, 

be a moon in the dream of your beloved one, be a moon.

(So spoke a woman to her son at his funeral.)

 Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege (2002)

Mahmoud Darwish

To sit with these lines for five years is to realise that Mahmoud Darwish was not writing a poem. He was drafting an ontology of indestructibility. Written during the 2002 Siege of Ramallah, when Israeli forces confined him to his apartment under tanks and demolition orders, these verses are not an elegy. They are a war manual for the soul. A mother at her son’s funeral refuses to grieve as the world expects. Instead, she issues commands. She transforms her dead son into a landscape that cannot be evicted. This is the purest expression of “Sumud” (refusing to be erased or to leave one’s home), the Palestinian art of remaining, not as an act of passivity but as a furious, creative, and elemental refusal to vanish. The Arabic word “Sumud” is a crucial concept in Palestinian identity and resistance. It is often simply translated as “resilience”; it carries a much deeper meaning that bridges the gap between endurance and political defiance. At its core, “Sumud” is the act of maintaining a normal life under abnormal conditions, and refusing to be erased.

The repetition of “be” (the Arabic imperative kun) is not just a request; it is a command of creation. In the Quran, God creates the universe with the phrase “Kun fa-yakun” (“Be, and it is”).

By having a mother use this imperative at a funeral, Darwish is portraying a subversive act of creation. She is refusing to let her son vanish into nothingness. If he cannot exist as a human, his soul will be refashioned into the landscape by the power of language.

The Anatomy of a Siege: Beyond the Blockade

A siege is not merely a military act or tactic. It is a slow erasure of a people’s future. In Palestine, the “plight” is concrete. In the Palestinian context, this “plight” manifests as the systematic and brutal killing of children and young people, the uprooting of ancient olive groves, the restriction of water (the “rain” of the poem), the fragmentation of families by concrete walls, and the fragmentation of bodies by checkpoints. But Darwish teaches us that a siege is also metaphysical. It aims to reduce the human being to bare life, a hungry, terrified, statistically invisible creature stripped of history, name, and narrative.

For the Iranian people, the siege wears a different mask: economic sanctions and diplomatic strangulation. It is a blockade of medicine, knowledge, and global conversation. Yet the Zionist logic is identical: isolate, impoverish, and make the people beg for their own humanity. In both cases, the besieged are told they are temporary. Darwish’s mother replies: You have confused death with disappearance.

Global Sumud Flotilla For Palestine

The Alchemy of Elements: Resistance as Metamorphosis

When the human form is rendered illegal, when a son can be shot and his name erased from a registry, the mother refuses nothingness. She performs alchemy. She reincarnates her son into three elemental forms, each a higher degree of defiance.

The Tree (Rootedness as Land Title):

When the Zionist regime uproots ancient groves to plant Jewish settlements, the mother says: Be a tree. Not just any tree, but one “sated with fertility”, heavy with olives, with memory, with the sweat of ancestors. This is the ultimate rebellion. The tree does not hold a deed; it is the deed. Its roots argue with the bulldozer in a language that predates all modern borders. To become a tree is to say: You cannot deport geography.

The Stone (The Pulse Beneath the Weapon):

The stone is the icon of the Intifada. But Darwish does something extraordinary. He adds, “saturated with humidity.” Humidity is the breath of the living earth, the sweat of the farmer, the moisture that turns dust into clay. This is not the dry, dead stone of a ruin. It is the wet, resistant stone that grows moss and holds the coolness of the morning. For the Palestinian youth facing a military tank, or the Iranian student enduring a morality squad, the stone is the hard reality they throw back at power. But the humidity is their poetry, their cinema, their whispered jokes in the back of a taxi, the life that persists within the hardness.

The Moon (The Unreachable Sovereignty):

If the tree is cut and the stone shattered, the mother sends her son to the moon. Not the moon of astronomy, but a moon in the dream of your beloved one. This is the interior fortress. You can occupy a city, but not a dream. You can sanction a country, but not a lover’s memory. The moon represents a light that requires no passport, no fuel, no permission. It is the sovereignty of the inner life, the space where a displaced family still sings the old songs, where a Tehran artist paints in a basement, and where a refugee draws the key to a house that exists only in the mind.

Aftermath of a bombed area in Palestine

From Ramallah to Tehran: The Shared Geography of the Soul

What unites the Palestinian and Iranian resistance is not a shared history but a shared architecture of survival. Both people have learned that when the external world is blocked, you build inward and downward.

For Palestine, “Sumud” is literal: staying on the land, harvesting the olives under a military curfew, planting a sapling where a home was demolished. It is the insistence that even if the map is redrawn by force, the poetry remembers the original names.

For Iran, resilience takes the form of a cultural fortress. Facing decades of sanctions and ideological isolation, Iranians have turned to a deep well: Rumi, Hafez, and the cinema of Kiarostami and Panahi. They produce art that does not seek Western validation. They prove that their humanity is not a commodity to be granted or withheld by embassies, but a historical fact, an unbroken civilisation that has outlasted every invader, from Alexander to the narcissist Trump.

In both cases, the besieged become metamorphic. They change shape faster than the siege can adapt.

Image from the 2026 Protests in Iran

Art as the Final Frontier: The Ghazal as a Weapon

Darwish weaponises the traditional ghazal, a form of love poetry, for a funeral. He addresses a dead son as “my love”. This is not sentimentality. It is a radical humanisation. The occupier wants the dead son to be a number, a martyr statistic, a security threat even in the grave. The mother says: No. He was the rain I waited for. He was the moon in someone’s dream.

By using the intimate, erotic language of the ghazal, Darwish smuggles tenderness into a war zone. He reminds the world that every political casualty is first a beloved person. The siege cannot calculate grief, and that is its fatal weakness.

The Invincible Landscape

The final reveal: (So spoke a woman to her son at his funeral)- is the most devastating line. It reframes the entire poem as a whisper over a grave. But it is also the ultimate act of defiance. The mother tells the occupier: You have killed a man, but you have given birth to a landscape.

The son is no longer a body that can be buried. He is a tree that will keep fruiting, a stone that will keep striking, a moon that will keep haunting every dream. The siege, for all its military tanks and sanctions, cannot kill what can become something else.

Whether it is the farmer in Gaza planting saplings under drone surveillance, or the student in Tehran memorising Hafez in a blacked-out apartment, they are all following the mother’s command. They are becoming the rain, the tree, the stone, the moon. They are proving that the architecture of survival is not made of concrete and steel. It is made of metamorphosis. And that is why they are impossible to ignore and even more impossible to conquer. The mother in the poem is not just a mourner; she is the custodian of a history the occupier can’t erase. She is the pillar of strength and the stream of the nation’s collective sorrow. The poem is ultimately about refusing the silence of death. In a “State of Siege”, where people are threatened with erasure, the mother performs a ritual of metamorphosis. She ensures her son is never gone, but simply translated into the rain, the trees, and the stone of the home they are defending.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

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