Belonging has become a deeply contested concept

Belonging has different defacers, and displacement, different agents

Forget Sonia Gandhi’s upcoming memoir. Belonging is loaded with more baggage than the train taking you home, or where you think home is. Few other words carry such a load: physical, political, social, emotional, and economic. Even grammatical. Adding an “s” at the end turns it into an object. A noun that’s also an apt verb. In myriad places, some person/group is objecting to another’s claim of belonging there. It ranges from road rage to Gaza — and that’s been going on since the Old Testament.

In Trumpland, ICE is aggressively sending immigrants into the cold (Reuters)

As for the book allegedly nixed by Penguin in India and saved by Harper Collins, raucous objections to its author have been relentless. How dare she claim any ownership rights to Indian polity? So what if her in-laws are an Indian version of political royalty? So what if she’d been the perfect traditional Indian daughter-in-law to the first Mrs G, quite unlike the homegrown younger one? But then, in the wider context too, the paraya dhan daughter could become a pariah even in her marital home (read land in Sonia Gandhi’s case).

Belonging is a shape-shifter. Every club is an exclusion zone — the posher, the greater push-outer. In housing societies, belonging is a durwan allowing/barring X community or caste. Beyond those gates, it’s upgraded to border security guard. Bal Thackeray’s "sons of the soil" finds brothers-in-arms across the global immigration battle-zone.

In Shanta Gokhale’s translation of LS Rokde’s Poisoned Bread (1992), the Dalit poet laments, “Is this land yours, mother/ Because you were born here?/ Is it mine/ Because I was born to you?/ Must I call this great land mine/ Love it/ Sing its glory?/ Sorry mother, but truth to tell/ I must confess I wondered/ Should I be born/ Should I be born into this land?”

Our initialised army of SIR and CAA is hell bent on confirming these fears. In Phase 1 of the 2026 assembly elections, SIR made 4.7 million people persona non-voter, with all its implications on the claim to belong. In Phase 2, 6.5 million. Here, Uttar Pradesh was Abou Ben Adhem, “leading all the rest”; it lost 18.7% of the pre-SIR number. In Phase 3 draft lists, 15.9 million got un-belonged; Delhi was Brutus-ised with the unkindest cut of all, 32.8%. Its Lal Quila Yamuna Bridge polling booth was left with only one valid elector out of the original 729. Including the entire family of Gayatri Devi who, as a booth level agent for the BJP, helped corral voters for the party for 30-plus years. Last week, even external affairs minister S Jaishankar, LK Advani, and top Election Commission officials were served notices under different categories of discrepancies under SIR. At least, this has nixed the suspicion that it’s just the politically inconvenient who stand electorally cancelled.

CAA is not just deletion, it’s deportation.

Would the hapless folks thus made unbelonged find their home only in an airport, like Tom Hanks’s character in Terminal? Or in a no-man’s land? In the film, a coup breaks out in Viktor Navorski’s (fictional) home country, Krakozhia, while he’s in mid-flight. So, when he lands at New York’s JFK airport, he’s suddenly a nowhere man. Since Krakozhia no longer exists in any form recognised by the US, he can neither be deported nor admitted. Thus suspended in bureaucratic formaldehyde, he remains in the transit lounge for nine months, with all the spoors of settled life: job, romance, and even community. He can leave this proxy home only when the coup ends. In India, however, belonging is being taken away from people who never thought they were in transit.

The Western world is moving at expulsion speed. In Trumpland, ICE is aggressively sending immigrants into the cold; to that, add the recent “Mr Singh” shocker. Across the pond, it’s Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. In Europe, it’s a clutch of Rightist parties: Trump’s EU ally Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, France’s Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and Éric Zemmour, Germany’s Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla.

Want more arbiters of belonging? A British politician devised his eponymous Tebitt test; the loyalty of South Asian and Caribbean immigrants was gauged by which cricket team they cheered for when England was playing against theirs. Hailing a Pakistan player’s masterly stroke during our mahayudhs (epic battles) is high treason. The latest transgressor was last year’s Malvan teen overheard doing so in his own house. Forget the so-called enemy-nation, even four unsung stanzas of Vande Mataram can render you non-national.

Yes, belonging has different defacers, and displacement, different agents. In 1947, Radcliffe rewrote the idea of home with a blue pencil. More recently, Nepal did so with a collapsed glacier.

Bachi Karkaria is a senior journalist. The views expressed are personal