Affidavit And Public Legal Representation In Opposition To The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Of Electoral Rolls, 2025

Posted on 31st October, 2025 (GMT 03:54 hrs)

ABSTRACT

This affidavit opposes the 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an unconstitutional and discriminatory exercise that extends the exclusionary logic of the NRC–CAA–NPR regime. Framed as an administrative update, the SIR reproduces a politics of fear, surveillance, communal polarization and bureaucratic coercion—already driving marginalized citizens to despair and suicide. It exposes the State’s transformation of citizenship from birthright to conditional privilege, mediated by data and documents. Against this, the affidavit invokes planetary citizenship—an ethical-ecological vision affirming belonging beyond paper, religion, nation, or algorithm.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

This affidavit arises in response to the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission of India. Though presented as a routine administrative exercise, the SIR poses a grave threat to constitutional democracy, secularism, and human dignity. It subtly extends the exclusionary and communal logic embedded in earlier documentary regimes such as the NRC, CAA, and NPR—compelling citizens to perpetually prove their existence and legitimacy through papers, data, or digital traces.

The violence of the SIR is not metaphorical but measurable — its bureaucratic burden already translating into loss of life.

Across multiple districts in West Bengal, the launch of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has already precipitated a wave of fear and despair. Citizens—particularly the elderly, the poor, and those from marginalized and/or minority communities—are succumbing to anxiety over possible exclusion from electoral rolls. The following reported cases of suicide and attempted suicide demonstrate that the SIR process is not a neutral bureaucratic exercise but a site of systemic violence and civic trauma:

Date	Location	Incident	Source
30 Oct 2025	North 24 Parganas (Khardah, Bengal)	57-year-old man died by suicide; suicide note blamed the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and anxiety over the SIR. The New Indian Express+1	The New Indian Express / The Wire
30 Oct 2025	Birbhum (Ilambazar, Paschim Medinipur, Bengal)	95-year-old man died by suicide; family said he feared deletion from voter list since his name was missing from the 2002 rolls. The Tribune+1	Tribune India / Telegraph India
30 Oct 2025	Cooch Behar (Dinhata, Bengal)	Farmer attempted suicide by consuming poison, citing fear his name would be deleted from the voter list due to a spelling variation in his name. www.ndtv.com	NDTV
30 Oct 2025	Birbhum (Illambazar again)	Another elderly person allegedly committed suicide over fear of electoral-roll revision under SIR. India News Stream	Indianewsstream

These cases illustrate how the SIR process is already generating psychological violence that can escalate into life-and-death outcomes.

In this backdrop, the present document stands as both a legal and moral declaration—affirming the right of every person to belong, to participate, and to live free from bureaucratic coercion. It calls upon all readers, regardless of background or familiarity, to recognize that the issue at hand is not merely procedural but civilizational: Who decides who belongs—the paper or the person?

To the People of India and the Conscience of the World

This affidavit is not a solitary act of grievance but a collective declaration of dissent. It speaks for millions who cannot speak, for those erased by paper, silenced by procedure, and made invisible by the arithmetic of power. It arises in the shadow of the ongoing 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls—an operation of bureaucratic-communal-totalitarian violence masquerading as democratic maintenance.

What the State calls revision is, in truth, exclusion in religious lines. What it names verification is, in effect, surveillance. Beneath its administrative language lies an ideological project—the continuation of the NRC–CAA–NPR architecture—recast in digital and electoral form. The same logic of communal suspicion that once haunted citizenship now stalks the voter roll.

But the new frontier of disenfranchisement runs deeper still—beyond deletion, into distortion. “Vote Chori/Vote Theft” is not a metaphor; it is the method. Numbers morph into narratives, and narratives into rule. The EVM becomes a cipher of power, its arithmetic defying geometry—more votes counted than cast, more absences than presences. India’s democracy now trembles under a quiet coup of computation, where participation is stolen not at gunpoint but at the click of a console.

This document therefore refuses to accept that belonging must be proven by paper, that democracy must bow before data, or that life must justify itself to bureaucracy. It stands against the slow death inflicted by forms and files, against the reduction of citizenship to documentation, and against the conversion of care into control.

As Osibisa once sang in their defiant Afro-rock refrain—Who’s got the paper? Who’s got the power? Who’s got the proof?—this question now echoes through every deleted name, every missing vote, every silenced citizen. The answer lies not with the State’s ledgers but with those who refuse to vanish from them.

To every citizen anxious about their name on a list, to every religious minority, Dalit, migrant, worker, and widow asked to prove what they already are—to exist—this affidavit extends solidarity and voice. It reclaims the moral center of democracy: that the person precedes the paper, that presence precedes proof.

Invoking the spirit of Tagore’s viśva-maitri, Gandhi’s antyodaya, and Ambedkar’s constitutional morality, this declaration affirms a higher law—the law of planetary belonging. For no republic, however powerful, can nullify the simple fact that to live on Earth is already to belong to it.

This affidavit is thus not merely a legal document but a civic covenant: between the living and the disappeared, between the documented and the defiant. It calls upon the judiciary, the media, civil society, and the international community to recognize the SIR not as an administrative event but as a constitutional emergency.

Here, the undersigned affirms that democracy cannot survive on paper alone. It lives in conscience, solidarity, and the refusal to let exclusion speak in the name of order.

In the name of all who have been asked to prove their right to exist—and of all whose votes have been counted out of existence—this is our proof: we resist.

Affidavit And Public Legal Representation

IN THE MATTER OF:
Unlawful, discriminatory, and unconstitutional procedures adopted under the “Special Intensive Revision (SIR)” of electoral rolls by the Election Commission of India.

AND IN THE MATTER OF:
Violation of Fundamental Rights guaranteed under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution of India; contravention of international human rights standards; and coercive reduction of citizenship to a bureaucratic paper regime inconsistent with human dignity and planetary belonging.

I. DECLARATION

I, ________________________, aged ___ years, residing at _____________________________, do hereby solemnly affirm and state as follows:

1. That I am a citizen of India and, in the broader moral and ecological sense, a citizen of Earth. I am competent to depose this affidavit and do so in defense of the inalienable dignity and liberty of all human beings subjected to coercive identity verification under the SIR process.
2. That this representation is made in good faith, with the intent to uphold constitutional morality, the rule of law, and the fundamental right to privacy, equality, and free participation in democracy.

II. NATURE AND EFFECT OF THE SIR PROCESS

3. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, while presented as an administrative update, effectively reproduces the exclusionary and discriminatory logic of earlier documentary regimes such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and the National Population Register (NPR).
4. The SIR process demands that citizens prove their existence and legitimacy through documentary or biometric means, thereby violating the presumption of citizenship and equality guaranteed by the Constitution of India.
5. Such procedures weaponize bureaucratic discretion to exclude, interrogate, and harass ordinary citizens, particularly religious minorities, marginalized communities, and dissenters—echoing the colonial “passbook (dompas)” system of apartheid South Africa, where Black citizens were required to carry documents to justify their presence in “white” zones.
6. The SIR perpetuates what may be called the Doctrine of Paper and Power, wherein bureaucratic documents become instruments of control rather than means of justice. Each historical epoch has reinvented this doctrine—from the colonial census and apartheid passbooks to the postcolonial NRC and now the digital SIR—thus demonstrating how the State’s paper becomes the citizen’s prison.

III. CONNECTION WITH DIGITAL PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION ACT (DPDPA), 2023

7. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), 2023, when read with the SIR process, reveals a dangerous architecture of state-corporate surveillance and data extraction.
8. Sections 17 and 18 of the DPDPA grant sweeping exemptions to the “State,” thereby legalizing the non-consensual processing of personal and demographic data.
9. This enables:
   • Centralization of voter and demographic data across government databases;
   • Linkage of Aadhaar, electoral, and welfare databases in violation of informational self-determination;
   • Corporate access to demographic data under “public–private partnership” governance models.
10. The combined effect is the establishment of a bio-digital panopticon, wherein the citizen’s identity, movement, and political participation are tracked, predicted, and controlled by algorithmic governance systems under the guise of legality.
11. The SIR also institutionalizes a form of surveillance federalism, wherein Booth Level Officers, local police, and outsourced agents collectively enact scrutiny under the guise of administrative regularity. This transforms everyday citizenship into an ongoing performance of proof, perpetuating anxiety and internalized obedience.

IV. CONSTITUTIONAL VIOLATIONS

12. The SIR and related documentation exercises violate the following constitutional guarantees:

a. Article 14 — Equality Before the Law: Arbitrary and selective targeting of communities for re-verification constitutes discrimination and violates the equal protection of laws.

b. Article 15 — Prohibition of Discrimination on Grounds of Religion, Race, Caste, Sex, or Place of Birth: The SIR process, by disproportionately scrutinizing Muslim citizens and marginalized minorities, effectively institutionalizes religious discrimination and reproduces patterns of structural exclusion.

c. Article 19(1)(a) & 19(1)(c) — Freedom of Expression and Association: Surveillance and verification mechanisms create a chilling effect on dissent, association, and political participation, undermining the democratic ethos of free engagement.

d. Article 21 — Right to Life and Personal Liberty: As interpreted in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017), this right includes privacy, autonomy, and informational self-determination. Coercive data collection and scrutiny under SIR constitute a violation of personal liberty and human dignity.

e. Article 25 — Freedom of Religion: The implicit communalization of the SIR process—by aligning documentation scrutiny with the ideological imperatives of Hindutva—undermines religious freedom, secular citizenship, and the pluralistic fabric of the Republic.

f. Article 326 — Universal Adult Suffrage: Coercive verification mechanisms and arbitrary exclusions threaten to disenfranchise legitimate voters, transforming the right to vote from a constitutional guarantee into a conditional privilege.

13. The SIR thus amounts to an administrative subversion of the democratic right to vote and live free from arbitrary state scrutiny.

IV-A. CORPORATIZATION OF ELECTORAL SOVEREIGNTY

14. The outsourcing of electoral verification processes, data management, and digital record-keeping to private entities, including data analytics firms, fintech platforms, and surveillance technology providers, constitutes the corporatization of electoral sovereignty.
15. This violates the democratic doctrine that sovereignty resides in the people, not in algorithmic or corporate intermediaries.
16. By permitting non-state actors to handle voter data and conduct verification under opaque contractual arrangements, the State abdicates its constitutional duty of neutrality and exposes citizens to commercial and political exploitation.
17. This reflects the emergence of the Innovation–Military–State Complex—a nexus where technology, governance, and capital merge to produce control rather than representation.

V. INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

18. The ongoing practices are inconsistent with India’s obligations under:

• Article 15, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948): “Everyone has the right to a nationality.”
• Article 25, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR): “Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity to vote and be elected.”
• UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011): States must protect citizens from corporate misuse of personal data.

19. The SIR, when combined with digital profiling and private technological partnerships, constitutes a form of data colonialism, undermining democratic sovereignty and human rights.

VI. POSTCOLONIAL AND ANARCHIST CRITIQUE

20. The SIR exemplifies the “will to archive”—a biopolitical urge of the modern State to document, categorize, and control human life.
21. Through this archival compulsion, the State and its corporate allies transform living persons into data subjects, reducing political belonging to bureaucratic recordkeeping.
22. As Michel Foucault observed, power’s deepest form is not repression but documentation: the creation of subjects through records and classifications.
23. From an anarchist and postcolonial standpoint, such a bureaucratic fetish of proof is illegitimate, for it treats citizenship as a privilege bestowed by authority, rather than as a natural condition of human existence.
24. Citizenship thereby becomes a weapon of exclusion rather than inclusion—a paper regime that colonizes the right to belong.

VI-A. THE LEGAL FOUNDATIONS OF BELONGING: JUS SOLI, JUS SANGUINIS, AND THE SHIFT TOWARD ETHNOCENTRIC CITIZENSHIP

22. Modern citizenship is historically anchored in two juridical principles:
    (a) Jus soli — the right of the soil, or citizenship by birth within a territory; and
    (b) Jus sanguinis — the right of blood, or citizenship by descent through ancestry.
23. The Constitution of India, through Articles 5–11, originally adopted a predominantly jus soli framework — affirming that citizenship is derived from presence, birth, and belonging to the land of India, rather than from racial, religious, or ethnic lineage.
24. However, with the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, and subsequently the CAA 2019, the State began to retreat from jus soli and reconfigure citizenship through jus sanguinis, privileging ancestry and religious affiliation.
25. The ongoing SIR process must be viewed as the bureaucratic enforcement mechanism of this ideological shift. By forcing citizens to document their ancestry, the SIR reanimates colonial and fascist genealogical obsessions—where legitimacy flows not from coexistence but from lineage.
26. Such reconfiguration violates the secular and egalitarian intent of the Constitution’s framers, particularly the Constituent Assembly’s rejection of ethnic citizenship models that had torn apart Europe and pre-Partition South Asia.
27. It also contradicts Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees that “everyone has the right to a nationality” and “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of nationality.”
28. The SIR, when read alongside the CAA and NRC, thus represents the ethnicization of legality, converting a republic of citizens into a registry of bloodlines.
29. This shift is not only unconstitutional but ontologically regressive, substituting the civic imagination of India with an ethno-genealogical vision of belonging—where the soil remembers ancestry, but forgets humanity.

VI-B. CLIMATE CRISIS, BORDERLESS BELONGING, AND THE POLITICS OF MIGRATION

The climate crisis has already dissolved the illusion of stable political boundaries. Rising seas, desertification, cyclones, and ecological collapse are redrawing the human map far more radically than any government’s cartography. This new planetary condition demands an ethos of being borderless — a recognition that migration is not an aberration but an ecological necessity. Climate migration is not infiltration; it is survival. The people displaced by floods in Assam or the Sundarbans share a destiny with those uprooted by droughts in Africa or hurricanes in the Caribbean. They are the first citizens of a planetary future, not subjects of suspicion.

In this context, the language of “illegal migration” weaponized by state institutions must be critically examined. The Border Security Force (BSF), entrusted with national protection, must itself be held accountable for who and what crosses borders. If porous borders exist, the responsibility lies as much with institutional mechanisms of regulation as with those seeking refuge. What are called “infiltrations” are, in truth, movements compelled by economic deprivation, agrarian collapse, and the absence of dignified livelihood — the very structural inequities that development policies have deepened over decades. To criminalize those who cross borders for survival is to punish the symptom while protecting the cause. Refuge, in this sense, is both a moral and ecological right — not a crime. The act of seeking safety or subsistence across a line on a map cannot be criminalized without betraying both constitutional morality and planetary ethics.

The logic of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls operates in an atmosphere thick with suspicion. Field data from Bihar show that districts with higher proportions of Muslim populations—such as Kishanganj (68% Muslim) and Purnia (~38% Muslim)—recorded deletion rates of 11.8% and 12.08% respectively, higher than the state average of around 8.3% (Hindutva Watch; The Indian Express; ThePrint). At the same time, other districts with lower Muslim shares also witnessed high deletion rates (for instance, Gopalganj: 15.1% despite only ~17% Muslim population) (ThePrint).

These patterns indicate a discernible correlation between high deletion rates and Muslim-majority districts, though a formally proven causal targeting of Muslims has not been established—perhaps deliberately obscured under the veneer of administrative neutrality to evade constitutional scrutiny.

Thus, the promise of “accuracy” conceals a deeper intent: to reshape citizenship through a regime of doubt and demographic anxiety. In its current form, SIR appears not only as revision, but as revision with selective deletion, heightened scrutiny and contested legitimacy.

Yet a deeper question arises: who decides who is an “infiltrator”? When the State itself is governed by a majoritarian Hindutva ideology, its gaze cannot be presumed neutral. The designation of illegality becomes a political act, not an evidentiary one. In this climate, bureaucratic categories such as “illegal voter,” “doubtful citizen,” or “ghost entry” acquire communal overtones. The infiltration discourse, revived through SIR, reproduces the NRC–CAA logic in a subtler but equally corrosive form—where the very notion of belonging is filtered through religious identity. Public perception, shaped by ministerial rhetoric and partisan Godi media, increasingly conflates the ‘infiltrator’ with the ‘Muslim,’ normalizing suspicion as civic reason. The SIR thus operates not merely as a technical audit but as an ideological project that reconfigures citizenship itself around the grammar of fear and exclusion.

In an India where hundreds of thousands still sleep without a reliable roof, struggle to put food on the table, and are locked into precarious income cycles, the demand that citizens produce documents to validate their identity before they can vote or exist as legitimate individuals is not merely impractical—it is deeply unjust. According to recent data, approximately 938,000 urban dwellers are recorded homeless in India, lacking permanent shelter. en.themooknayak.com Meanwhile, literacy in states such as Bihar barely hovers over 74%, leaving millions without the basic capacity to navigate complex administrative forms. Wikipedia With one hand the state asks the economically vulnerable to produce layered documentation, and with the other it withholds the structural support—income, housing, stable employment—that would allow them to do so. This mismatch reveals the coercive nature of the exercise: it isn’t an optional “verification” but a conditioned test of belonging, in which the poorest and most vulnerable are structurally disadvantaged. To require identity papers from those who lack income security, housing stability, and literacy is to demand the impossible—and in doing so, the state places itself not as neutral arbiter of rights but as gatekeeper of existence. These injustices are further compounded by the anthropogenic climate crisis, which is already displacing millions through floods, droughts, and cyclones—erasing not only homes but also the very documents demanded for proof. In an era of climate migration, where survival itself is precarious, the insistence on paperwork as a precondition for belonging transforms ecological vulnerability into bureaucratic exile.

This conflation of the refugee and the infiltrator, the migrant and the criminal, reproduces the colonial and fascist myth that belonging must be proven by paper, not by presence. It is the same myth that fuels border violence, digital exclusion, and communal polarization. The affidavit therefore asserts that ecological displacement must be recognized as part of the new constitutional reality: to deny climate refugees the right to refuge is to deny the planetary truth of interdependence itself.

VII. PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP AND EARTHIAN IDENTITY

25. Against such statist encroachments, I invoke the doctrine of Planetary Citizenship—an ethical, ecological, and juridical principle asserting that every being’s legitimacy derives not from paper, but from participation in the planetary commons.

26. It is not the cosmopolitanism of elites, but an ecological egalitarianism: all beings share a biospheric membership that precedes and exceeds any passport, register, or electoral roll. This principle resists the territorial narcissism of nationalism, affirming that belonging is not conferred by borders but by coexistence.

27. As Rabindranath Tagore envisioned through visva-maitri (world fraternity), nationalism is “a great menace” to humanity, for it converts moral imagination into parochial power. Mahatma Gandhi’s antyodaya placed the last and most vulnerable—the voiceless, not the voter—as the true measure of humanity. Hannah Arendt’s “right to have rights” and Félix Guattari’s “three ecologies” together insist that the political cannot be severed from the planetary: one cannot sustain justice for humans while destroying the Earth that sustains life.

28. Planetary citizenship therefore deterritorializes political belonging—your right to live, breathe, and express cannot depend on documentary proof issued by a state that itself erodes the ecological conditions for existence.

29. It rests upon three foundational principles:
a. Ontological Equality: All beings possess an equal right to exist and to flourish, independent of documentation or nationality.
b. Ecological Belonging: Citizenship is Earthian, not national—rooted in coexistence rather than control.
c. Ethical Responsibility: Legitimacy arises from sustaining the planet and one another, not from bureaucratic recognition.

30. This doctrine finds resonance in:

• The Earth Charter (2000): Calls for “respect and care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.”
• UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007): Affirms the right of peoples to self-determination and harmony with their lands and traditions.
• Global Compact for Migration (2018): Recognizes migration as a human condition, calling for dignity, safety, and rights for all regardless of legal status.

31. Planetary citizenship thus signifies not rejection but evolution of constitutionalism—from territorial rights to trans-territorial responsibilities. It aligns with the emergent global jurisprudence of planetary rights, as reflected in UNGA Resolution 76/300 (2022) recognizing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

32. To belong to Earth is to be already legitimate. The State may record existence, but it cannot authorize it.

33. In this sense, Planetary Citizenship forms the legal-ethical counter-narrative to the SIR’s logic of exclusion and surveillance.
Where the SIR reduces persons to verifiable data, Planetary Citizenship restores them as ecological beings. Where the SIR constructs walls of proof, Planetary Citizenship opens fields of belonging. It transforms the question from “Who has the paper?” to “Who shares the planet?”—redirecting democracy from documentation to care, and from domination to coexistence.

VIII. PRAYER FOR RELIEF AND DECLARATION OF RESISTANCE

Accordingly, I hereby respectfully submit and declare the following:

a. That I object to and refuse any coercive interrogation or identity verification under the SIR process;
b. That I assert my constitutional right to privacy, freedom of religion, dignity, and informational self-determination under Article 21;
c. That I assert my inalienable right to vote under Article 326, free from discriminatory verification;
d. That I affirm my status as a planetary citizen, whose belonging is inherent, not conditional;
e. That any attempt by the State or corporate actor to impose documentation as a condition of existence or participation is illegitimate, unconstitutional, and morally void;
f. That I affirm the right to civil disobedience and conscientious refusal, as a legitimate democratic act recognized under Article 1 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders (1998) and under the Gandhian doctrine of Satyagraha, when State action violates constitutional morality and human dignity.

IX. VERIFICATION

I, ____________________________, do hereby verify that the statements made above are true and correct to the best of my knowledge, belief, and conscience. Nothing material has been concealed therefrom.

Place: ____________________
Date: _____________________

Deponent: __________________________
(Signature & Name)

Before Me:
(Authorized Notary / Oath Commissioner)

Closing Note:
This affidavit affirms that citizenship cannot be reduced to statist documentation. It is a moral relationship among beings who share the planet’s air, water, soil and memory. Against bureaucratic violence and algorithmic exclusion, it asserts a planetary belonging grounded in empathy, justice, and ecological interdependence — a refusal to let paper override personhood.

Download the Customizable and Printable Word Document for India’s Politically Conscious Citizens:

SIR Affidavit And Public Legal RepresentationDownload

REFERENCES

A. Constitutional and Legal Instruments

1. Constitution of India — Articles 5–11 (Citizenship), 14 (Equality before Law), 15 (Non-Discrimination), 19 (Freedom of Expression and Association), 21 (Right to Life and Privacy), 25 (Freedom of Religion), and 326 (Universal Adult Suffrage).
2. Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1 — Recognition of the Right to Privacy and informational self-determination.
3. Citizenship Amendment Act, 2003 and Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 — Alterations from jus soli to jus sanguinis framework.
4. Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), 2023 — Sections 17 and 18 (Exemptions for State data processing).
5. The Representation of the People Act, 1950 and 1951 — Provisions relating to electoral rolls and voter registration.
6. United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, 1998 — Article 1: Legitimacy of peaceful resistance and conscience-based refusal.

B. International Human Rights and Environmental Frameworks

7. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) — Article 15: Right to nationality.
8. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) — Article 25: Right to vote and be elected.
9. UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (2011) — State duty to prevent corporate misuse of personal data.
10. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) — Articles 3–5: Self-determination and cultural integrity.
11. The Earth Charter (2000) — Principle 1: Respect and care for the community of life.
12. Global Compact for Migration (2018) — Objective 1–2: Recognition of migration as a natural human condition.
13. UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 (2022) — Recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

C. Academic and Theoretical Works

14. Foucault, Michel — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975); The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969).
15. Arendt, Hannah — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); The Human Condition (1958).
16. Tagore, Rabindranath — Nationalism (1917); The Religion of Man (1931).
17. Gandhi, M.K. — Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (1909); Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
18. Guattari, Félix — The Three Ecologies (1989).
19. Posel, Deborah — “The Meaning of Apartheid: State and Citizenship in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies (1991).
20. Mbembe, Achille — Necropolitics (2019); On the Postcolony (2001).
21. Chatterjee, Partha — The Politics of the Governed (2004); Lineages of Political Society (2011).
22. Derrida, Jacques — Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995).
23. Bandyopadhyay, Debaprasad — Mystique Pad: Archive Fever in the Age of Lies (2025, forthcoming).

D. News and Documented Reports (Human Impact of SIR/NRC/CAA)

24. The New Indian Express, “Man Dies by Suicide Over Fear of NRC, SIR Verification,” 30 October 2025.
25. The Tribune India, “Elderly Man’s Suicide Linked to Voter Roll Anxiety,” 30 October 2025.
26. NDTV, “Farmer Attempts Suicide Fearing Name Deletion from Voter List,” 30 October 2025.
27. India News Stream, “Another Suicide in Bengal Linked to SIR Process,” 30 October 2025.
28. The Wire and The Telegraph India, corroborative reports on SIR-related fear and exclusion.
29. Scroll.in and BBC Hindi, “Ground Reports on Citizenship Anxiety and Bureaucratic Exclusion” (2020–2025).

E. Civil Society, Legal, and Policy Analyses

30. People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Report on NRC and Citizenship Discrimination in Assam (2020).
31. Amnesty International India, Designed to Exclude: How India’s Citizenship Amendments Endanger Human Rights (2021).
32. Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), DPDPA 2023 and the Threat to Privacy and Democracy (2023).
33. National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM), Statement on NRC–CAA–NPR and Constitutional Morality (2020).