Student Work
Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India. Book Cover. Graphic Design by Kaming Lee (Yale MFA).
MED Thesis Book Spreads.
MED Thesis Book Spreads.
The Goalpara Detention Center, Assam, India. Image by Prashanth Vishvanathan. Bloomberg.
The India-Bangladesh Border Fence. Image by the Author.
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Title
Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India
Project Description
Authorizing Violence: Spatial Techniques of Citizenship Politics in Northeast India studies the spatial and legal instruments through which Hindu Nationalism and its political front, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), operates in Northeast India. It documents the means through which authoritarian power is introduced into a democratic structure of governance. Emphasizing the role of architecture and spatial knowledge, this thesis attends to how the violence of disenfranchisement and dispossession is legitimized under the force of law.
Chapter 1, entitled ‘Legislating Containment,’ turns to how the legal instrument of citizenship and the conception of Indian nationhood was fundamentally reformed by introducing a legislative loophole. It studies the mechanism of manufacturing illegal citizens and incarcerating them at the Goalpara detention center and multi-purpose criminal jails in the northeastern state of Assam. This chapter attends to how, instead of an exception, clearly defined laws have authorized the violence of indefinite detention for Bengali Muslims. Chapter 2, ‘Discontinuous Border,’ traces the intermittent fences along the India-Bangladesh border. It explains how a discontinuous border fence allows the positioning of the military with shoot-at-sight orders and proliferates the infrastructures for the limestone extraction and cement manufacturing industry. It emphasizes how the logic of infrastructural development is co-opted to make borders inseparable from circulations of global economic power and capital and finance ethnonationalist motives. Chapter 3, entitled ‘Conservation Nationalism’ looks at the Kaziranga National Park, where the global efforts of conserving the One-horned Rhinoceros and emergent environmentalism are repackaged with ideas of national heritage and religious patriotism to evict Bengali Muslim migrants that dwell in the forest margins. This chapter examines how forest land rights are predicated on spatial knowledge of satellite image resolutions to expand national park boundaries and carry out eviction drives.
In all three cases, this thesis unfolds how spatial and legal instruments introduce an illiberal form of rule within the existing liberal democratic structure of governance. It documents how violence is legally authorized and spatially delivered in Northeast India.
