INTRODUCTION
In modern times, Sovereignty has been conceptualised in different ways. Two prominent thinkers, Foucault and Agamben, view the concept of sovereignty in different ways, which are depicted as contrasting with each other. Foucault sees sovereignty as managing populations through biopolitics, which are techniques that control life, health and body, while Agamben conceptualises sovereignty as the power to create a state of exception in which legal norms are suspended and individuals are reduced to “bare lives” or “zoe.” A superficial reading of the two might suggest that both these conceptions are opposite to each other, but there are instances where these conceptions run parallel.
One such instance is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). The CAA–NRC regime in Assam demonstrates how biopolitical techniques of classification, documentation, and population management operate alongside a suspension of legal protections that produces rightless detainees. In this sense, Foucault’s biopolitics and Agamben’s state of exception do not diverge but converge. They function simultaneously to shape citizenship and exclusion. The CAA was aimed at protecting religious minorities, specifically Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian populations who were compelled to seek shelter in India due to their persecution in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. The Act was framed by the government as a humanitarian measure to fast-track citizenship for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. Several scholars and rights bodies argue that, when seen alongside the NRC process, it effectively introduces a religious criterion into citizenship and risks rendering Muslim populations vulnerable to exclusion and statelessness. This paper analyses the situation of camps, particularly in Assam, to examine how Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories can be brought into dialogue to illuminate the interplay of the creation of a state of exception and managing population. Here, ‘camps’ refers to detention centres in Assam where individuals declared or suspected to be ‘illegal foreigners’, particularly after the NRC exercise, are confined while their citizenship status is determined or pending deportation. This analysis is situated within the wider context of the CAA, which alters the criteria of citizenship and thereby shapes who becomes vulnerable to detention. In linking the camps to the CAA–NRC framework, the paper traces how legal reclassification and physical confinement intersect to produce exclusion.
CAA, CAMPS AND AGAMBEN’S THEORY IN PRACTICE
Giorgio Agamben posits that the sovereign is the one who creates the state of exception, which is the zone of indifference where law and violence, state and enemy, order and chaos are no longer clearly separable. He claims that this zone of indifference has been normalised in modern times. Further, he argues that by creating a state of exception, individuals are reduced to “bare lives” where they have no legal rights and are prone to any kind of violence. Though his theory is influenced by Foucauldian biopolitics, he develops a more critical theory which emphasises how the sovereign decides who may be killed or excluded.
The enactment of the CAA contributed to the creation of a state of exception. By extending citizenship benefits selectively and excluding Muslims from its ambit, the law reconfigured the legal field in which citizenship is determined. On 31 August 2019, 1.9 million people in Assam were identified as “illegal migrants,” a significant proportion of whom were Bengali-speaking Muslims. The “exception” in Agamben’s formulation does not merely refer to the act of excluding a group; rather, it denotes a suspension or reconfiguration of the normal legal order, a state of emergency, through which such exclusion becomes possible and legitimate. The Muslim migrants who were from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh are reduced to mere “bare lives” without any identity or rights. This renders them prone to various kinds of violence, like detention, threat of deportation and other human rights violations. Relief camps were set up by the state, but the state no longer protects these illegal immigrants from violence, and they have been left unprotected by legal safeguards. Agamben locates the sovereign power in these camps where the sovereign inflicts violence on these individuals who are without any rights. Agamben locates sovereign power in camps not because the state necessarily inflicts direct violence there, but because the camp represents a space where legal protections are suspended and individuals are reduced to “bare life”. While appearing to offer care, the sovereign ultimately decides who should be excluded from the law and made prone to violence. Hence, for Agamben, the sovereign has the capacity to dictate death. This capacity to exclude human subjects from the domain of rights, which develops within the discourse of citizenship, is a sovereign mechanism. The CAA blurs the boundaries between law and exception, turning exclusion into a normalised and systemic feature of governance.
RETHINKING THE PERMANENCE OF EXCEPTION
However, there are certain limits to Agamben’s point of view. Even within discriminatory legislation like CAA, not all migrants are reduced to zoe for an indefinite period of time. The Citizenship can be granted to Muslim migrants based on the process of naturalisation. This dynamic nature of the precarious situation of the migrants, shows that for these migrants the state of exception does not last forever. It highlights the limitation of Agamben’s argument that in modern times, the state of exception has been normalised and lasts perpetually. The CAA–NRC framework produces shifting degrees of legal precarity, where exclusion is neither uniform nor irreversible, and where some individuals retain a pathway, however limited, to regularisation. This dynamic and conditional vulnerability complicates Agamben’s claim of a perpetual and totalised state of exception, suggesting instead a fluctuating regime of exception rather than an absolute one.
While Agamben conceptualises the state of exception as a generalised suspension of law, the operation of the CAA-NRC framework shows a more differentiated form of suspension. This framework does not render all migrants rightless, rather it produces a graded form of legal precarity. Although limited pathways like naturalisation remain available, they operate within a structure where legal status is contingent and selectively accessible. This suggest that the contemporary state of exception operates in a differential regime, and not in a uniform suspension of law.
The notion of sovereignty and camp as a state of exception can be extended when we look at the complex ways in which these conceptions play out. Hence, recognising this limitation pushes us to look beyond a purely Agambenian lens. While the state of exception helps illuminate how legal vulnerability is produced, it does not fully capture the fluid, managed, and conditional nature of citizenship under the CAA–NRC regime. By this, I mean that citizenship under the CAA–NRC framework is not determined through a single moment of exclusion, but through ongoing administrative processes such as documentation, verification, and categorisation, which continuously shape an individual’s legal status. To fully understand the interplay of camps and sovereignty, it is therefore essential to also engage Foucault’s account of power that operates not only through exclusion and abandonment, but through the continuous regulation, categorisation, and management of life itself.
FOUCAULT AND BIOPOLITICAL MANAGEMENT IN CAMPS
Michel Foucault is interested in biopolitics rather than the question of exercising sovereignty to control a particular territory. Biopolitics is about how the state manages and controls life. To govern a state means to govern the inhabitants of the state, their wealth, and their behaviour. It is a form of surveillance and control over the population. For Foucault, power is productive in the sense that it builds lives in a certain way. Government arranges and guides things, i.e. disposition of things using laws as tools and not as ends in themselves. This shows that the government’s primary role is not just to enforce laws for their own sake, but to guide the behaviour of the people towards certain outcomes. Foucault coined the term “Governmentality,” by which he means a form of power that focuses on the management of population using political economy as its main knowledge and security apparatus as its tool. For Foucault, there is no unified idea of the state. His emphasis is on the effects of power rather than on locating the source of power.
CAA emerges as a product of governmentality. It is shaped by the state’s continuous use of population surveillance, resource management, data collection, and historical narrative to regulate specific communities. The CAA was passed on 11 December 2019 after the data of “illegal migrants” was gathered through the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Migration in Assam dates back to the colonial period, and has led to intense conflicts, the most heinous of these being the Nellie Massacre of 1983. More than 2000 Muslims died, and an uncounted number moved to various parts of the state to find shelter. This crisis has been intensified by the Bodo tribe’s movement of the 1990s, through which the Bodos demanded a separate state for themselves. As a reaction to violence, the government set up camps to provide accommodation. This reinforces the idea of biopolitics, wherein the state’s objective is not the decimation of life, but the regulation, management, and control of life.
Biopolitics has led to an increase in detention camps and citizenship tribunals. By creating camps, the state effectively controls the lives of migrants. It controls the movement of people. The inhabitants of refugee camps in Assam are deprived of their livelihood and home due to flooding, and many have lost their land documents. Camps become emotional spaces for people as over a long period, as people build relations with each other. Hence, camps are highly governed spaces that reflect the tactics of government like security, identity and verification.
Further, the conflict over language in Assam demonstrates that sovereign power operates not only through formal legal instruments like the CAA and NRC but also through socio-cultural mechanisms that regulate belonging. The longstanding Assamese–Bengali tensions are instructive here: the Assamese middle class historically mobilised linguistic identity to assert political dominance against Bengali-speaking populations, including both Hindus and Muslims, who were perceived as controlling economic and cultural spaces. In this context, the State’s citizenship-verification measures intersect with pre-existing anxieties about language, migration, and cultural preservation. The Assamese case therefore, reveals that sovereignty in contemporary India is exercised through a convergence of legal exclusion and biopolitical management, where citizenship laws, demographic regulation, and identity politics together shape who is recognised as part of the political community.
Additionally, the case of the CAA illustrates how Muslim citizenship in India can be shaped through biopolitical governance. The State justifies the exclusion of Muslims on the ground that they are not religious minorities in the three neighbouring countries identified under the Act, and thus cannot, in its view, be presumed to face religious persecution. However, when situated within the broader NRC and Foreigners’ Tribunal processes in Assam, the effect of this exclusion becomes sharper: Muslims are required to prove citizenship through documentary regimes that disproportionately expose them to scrutiny, uncertainty, and potential statelessness, while similarly-situated non-Muslim migrants are offered a statutory pathway to regularisation.
In this way, legal differentiation interacts with long-standing social and political anxieties about Muslim belonging. Scholars argue that this framework constitutes a contemporary form of biopower in which the State selectively secures the welfare and legal protection of one group while placing another in a prolonged condition of vulnerability. The differential access to citizenship not only shapes who is protected and recognised by the State, but also constrains the political agency of those rendered precarious. Thus, rather than an abstract theoretical effect, the CAA produces a concrete “biopolitical fracture” through which populations are governed unequally, with implications for access to security, mobility, and the basic guarantees that accompany legal membership.
This biopolitical differentiation is produced through the legal design of the CAA–NRC framework. The CAA introduces religion as a criterion for fast-tracked naturalisation and creates a distinction between similarly situated migrants on basis of religious identity. When read alongside the NRC process, which places the burden of documentary proof on individuals, this distinction acquires material consequences. The people excluded from the CAA’s protective ambit remain vulnerable to being classified as illegal migrants, with attendant risks such as detention, loss of legal status, and barriers to accessing state services. In this sense, the framework operationalises unequal protection through legal procedures that directly affect the conditions of life and citizenship.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the case of CAA highlights the dual operation of sovereignty, i.e. through both Agamben’s state of exception and Foucault’s biopolitics. The push-back operations of Bengali-speaking Muslims, which human rights organisations have documented as issuing from irregular expulsions across the India-Bangladesh border, illustrate how the modern sovereign state no longer relies solely on territorial exclusion but instead employs data-driven verification regimes and administrative categorisation to render certain populations vulnerable.
My analysis shows that sovereignty here is exercised not only at borders but through documentation, data and verification systems that determine who belongs. While statelessness has always had transboundary dimensions, the CAA–NRC framework demonstrates how citizenship can now be denied from within through bureaucratic and data-driven mechanisms.
