The Shifting Sands of Citizenship: Dispossessions, Constitutional Ruptures and Borderlands*

Abstract

This article looks at dispossession through four trajectories—segregation/‘untouchables’; eviction/‘encroachers’; de-citizenisation/‘illegal interlopers’; occupation/ ‘anti-nationals’—each of which destabilise the foundational basis of citizenship, and contain gendered reverberations. Violence and structural inequalities lie at the core of state practice, temper constitutional prerogatives and fuel dispossession. Impunity lies at the heart of these processes. Each of these four methods speak to a historical specificity, have distinct consequences and afterlives, different affects and engender distinct modes of resistance. The articulation of the basic idea of dispossession in these terms I argue is itself recall of the tremendous corpus of writing from the borderlands and recall of border imaginings that help us make meaning of territories by dispossession. The four-pronged rupture of constitution-speak jeopardises the constitutional imagination of the nation and affects the very claim to citizenship in the borderlands as set out within the contours the constitution.