Borders are a defining element of the modern state. As markers of territorial sovereignty, they have foregrounded the idea of a natural alignment between people and their ‘proper place’ in the world (Zehfuss & Vaughan-Williams, 2024). Recent literature in critical border studies has taken a turn towards ‘bordering practices,’ where borders are situated and analysed as verbs rather than fixed nouns.This has rendered visible techniques of governance that make, remake, and transform borders in everyday life. Analysing ‘borders as method’ (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019) has revealed the underlying power and socio-political processes that go into the enactment of borders. It has also shifted the concentrated gaze from the geographical borders towards internal bordering practices to uncover the dynamics of determining insider/outsider bodies. 

Such a study unfolds the historical making of borders and their contingencies. However, it also opens up a site to understand how borders are fundamentally entangled with other forms of inequalities. This article examines the intersection of bordering practices with contemporary religious-nationalist ideologies in India to demonstrate the production of precarity for marginalised groups under current migration governance.

Two Sides of a Coin: Paper Reality and Doubting Documents

The discourse around ghuspaithiya or ‘infiltrators’ has gained renewed political currency, particularly in election campaigns. Immigrants from Bangladesh, especially Muslims, have been repeatedly invoked in the political arena to claim that the opposition parties engage in ‘vote bank politics’ by sheltering illegal immigrants (Mukul, 2025). In 2018, a year before the announcement of the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), the issue of ghuspaithiyas was given prominence in political discourse. It was stated that every “infiltrator” would be identified and removed from voter lists (Dhingra, 2025). The ghuspaithiya discourse also surfaced during the 2025 Bihar elections (Noor, 2025) and recently in the nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Proving citizenship in India is not an easy task, as there is no universally applicable, official citizenship document provided to all citizens. A host of papers are required, and based on a person’s year of birth, it can even include proving that one was born in India, along with proof of birth for one/both parents. Due to a substantial number of home births, many do not have birth certificates, particularly in rural and remote areas. Moreover, uneducated migrant labour in the unorganised sector is left out of two layers of commonly accepted documents: matriculation and employment certification. The recent exercise of SIR in Bihar had clearly shown that providing documentary proof had become a challenge for many people (Bhalla, 2025).

Furthermore, the question of farzi or forged documents has been central in bureaucratic exercises (Mathur, 2020). This focus operates alongside inconsistencies, errors, and incomplete documentation, being a routine occurrence in India. For instance, translation of names from local languages into English lacks a standardised format, resulting in common discrepancies across different government IDs. When read together, these conditions create an unstable documentary terrain where forged and simply inaccurate documents can easily overlap.

Bordering Practices

The concerns regarding migration from Bangladesh date back to the 1970s. However, the recent political discourse has marked a significant shift, where Muslim migrants from West Bengal are often conflated with Bangladeshi immigrants. A telling example is an animated image, shared by the ruling party’s official handle on X, illustrating a Congress-RJD van carrying Muslims labelled as ‘ghuspaithiyas,’ (Noor, 2025) their faces portrayed through devilish features as they are shown to ‘enter’ India.

In May 2025, the district administration of Delhi and Gurugram carried out a “Special Talaashi Abhiyaan”- Special Investigative Campaign, a citizenship verification drive to detect ‘illegal immigrants’ (Express News Service, 2025). A report by HRW showed that hundreds of Muslim migrants were expelled to the border without due process (Human Rights Watch, 2025). Such screenings have also involved checking the documentation of the detained people. In Maharashtra, 7 Muslims migrants were identified as ‘Bangladeshi’ and handed to the Border Security Forces to be expelled to Bangladesh. Some even had documents sent by Bengal authorities to verify their citizenship during their detention (Ahmed & Hoque, 2025). However, papers, it appeared, were not sufficient to prove one’s nationality. As another migrant from Delhi told the BBC, “I had my voter and national ID cards, but they told me they were fake. I spent six days not knowing my fate before I was finally released,” (Mateen, 2025). As illegal immigrants are seen through a suspicious eye, verification processes for those who might potentially be Indian citizens also get laced with doubt and mistrust.

Between this ground of asli (real) and farzi (forged) documents, a no-man’s land is left behind, where those who are made to prove their citizenship can always be questioned, creating a category of ‘doubtful citizens’ (Mathur, 2016). As it was claimed, TMC, the ruling party of West Bengal, was alleged to have developed an ‘entire ecosystem’ to help undocumented migrants get forged identity documents (Bhattacharya, 2025). This suggests that documentary proof, the primary mode of verification, is often already taken with the possibility of forgery. It reveals a core logic of everyday bordering practices: that the demand for documentary evidence of citizenship coexists paradoxically with the perpetual suspicion of those very documents.

Under such governance, uncertainty is unequally distributed, as groups are rendered differentially vulnerable. Since Bangladeshi immigrants are suspected of carrying forged documents, screening processes are imbued with a presumption of doubt that extends even to Bengali-speaking migrants who may be citizens. Recently, the poor, predominantly Muslim migrants working in the informal and care economy have been the primary target of citizenship screening. In these encounters, the presence and support from urban residents had worked as informal protection. Shabnam, a domestic worker in Gurugram, was stopped by the police to show her documents. The police had let her go only when her employer intervened, confirming that Shabnam had been working for years. As another woman observed, “Even our presence—simply standing beside them in the company of the police—improves how they are treated” (Behal, 2025). Such informal protection reveals the differential logic of trust and certainty that underlies everyday governance of verification. Those perceived as potential “illegal immigrants” might face heightened scrutiny and suspicion regarding the authenticity of their documents during verification processes. Since the public imagination is repeatedly pushed towards the ghuspaithiya discourse, the danger of prejudice against Bengali-speaking Muslims increasingly grows. 

The recent statements that the demographic change in India’s Muslim population was not because of their fertility rate, a rhetoric that had been invoked till now, but due large-scale infiltration of illegal immigrants (Express News Service, 2025b) and an announcement of a mission to check the ‘well-planned conspiracy’ to alter India’s demography (Dhingra, 2025) All indicate the growing importance of the ghuspaithiya discourse in bordering practices. With illegal immigration being repeatedly highlighted as a central ‘problem to be solved’, these practices are becoming an important site to understand how borders are entangled with the broader marginalisation of Muslims, making certain bodies systematically more precarious than others.

References:

Ahmed, A., & Hoque, M. (2025, June 24). “Foreigners for both nations”: India pushing Muslims “back” to Bangladesh. Al Jazeera.

Behal, A. (2025, August 22). When Employer Solidarity Failed Gurugram’s Domestic Workers – BehanBox. BehanBox.

Bhalla, V. (2025, July 3). Bihar voter roll revision: Why having to prove you are an Indian citizen is a nightmare. Scroll.in.

Bhattacharya, S. (2025, July 23). Indian Citizens, Mostly Muslims, Are Bearing Brunt of Its Citizenship Screening Drive. Thediplomat.com; The Diplomat.

Dhingra, S. (2025, August 15). Modi announces demography mission to weed out “infiltrators”. BJP’s “ghuspaithiya” politics over the yrs. ThePrint; theprint.

Express News Service. (2025a, August). Illegal migrant verification drive: Civil society group writes to Gurgaon DC, police, NHRC, Haryana chief secretary. The Indian Express.

Express News Service. (2025b, October 10). Muslim population up because of large-scale infiltration, says Amit Shah. The Indian Express.

Human Rights Watch. (2025, July 24). India: Hundreds of Muslims Unlawfully Expelled to Bangladesh. Human Rights Watch.

Mateen, Z. (2025, August 7). India police raid on Delhi migrants shows stark inequalities. BBC .

Mathur, N. (2020). “NRC se Azadi”: Process, Chronology, and a Paper Monster. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 24/25.

Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2019). Duke University Press – Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Dukeupress.edu.

Mukul, S. (2025, November 10). Has BJP turned infiltration into just an election-season issue? India Today.

Noor, A. (2025, October 24). “Namak Haram”, “Burqa” & “Ghuspaithiya”: The Hate Factor in Bihar Elections. TheQuint; The Quint.

Zehfuss, M., & Vaughan-Williams, N. (2024). From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics. International Political Sociology, 18(3).

***

Anamta Husain is in the Department of Political Science at Ashoka University. Her interests are in migration studies, political violence, and gender studies.