‘Paused citizens’: waiting and negotiating liminality in Assam, India

In Assam, India, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) population enumeration process excluded about two million people from the final list. The NRC dropouts referred to in this study as 'paused citizens' are locked in a condition that is legally and socially ambiguous, hovering between citizens and stateless. This essay seeks to highlight the experiences of 'paused citizens' who have been thrown into this opaque and paralysing situation as they attempt to manage their precarious status, illustrate the tangled web of citizenship regimes, and the binary distinctions between inclusion and exclusion that are mediated by documents. A closer examination also reveals how the systems of power and control operate and how people trapped in time alternate between feelings of purposeful waiting and senseless stasis.