ABSTRACT

Seyla Benhabib in “The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt” re-examines the writings of one the most important political thinkers of late modernity to assert that what enabled Arendt to transform Heidegger’s teachings into an original political philosophy were her own experiences as a German Jewish woman in the “age of totalitarianism.” According to Benhabib, Arendt is neither the standard political philosopher of nostalgia nor the anti-modernist for whom the Greek “polis” is the quintessential political experience, nor the elite reactionary assessing the prospects of liberal democracies. Instead, she says that one has to think of human history as sediments in layers of language and of concepts. Particularly, during moments of rupture, displacement and dislocation, the history of concepts themselves bore witness to the more profound tectonic shifts occurring beneath the visible course of events. This chapter shall attempt to juxtapose the current political reality of statelessness and displacement emerging out of the imposition of the National Register for Citizens (NRC) in India by its ruling government on Arendt’s argument of the “right for rights.” Why is it that a nation-state like India continues to practice a policy like the NRC which displaces its own hitherto citizens from their idea of themselves? What is the philosophy behind a nation-state disenfranchising millions of its own citizens in its quest to reinvent its own identity? What perhaps is the original meaning behind this horrific moment in India’s history that we are witnessing wherein citizens get displaced from their own homelands by their own government? The criminalization of the migrant and the conversion of its own citizens into non-citizens is thus a reality in India’s present state of political totalitarianism. As Arendt had foretold years ago:

“The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal.”