5 min readDec 13, 2025 01:42 PM IST
First published on: Dec 13, 2025 at 01:42 PM IST
I shifted to a new apartment recently — a larger, quieter space. But here, I often wake up without reason, sitting upright in the dark as if memory itself has tugged at my sleeve. Through the uncurtained windows in the stillness of winter, I hear the stray dogs outside cry against the cold. Their wails move through these unfamiliar rooms, brushing past unopened cartons and half-set shelves, settling into the silence like reminders of what has been left behind. And in those hours when the night feels longest, I realised something: Uprooting is not always about changing houses. Sometimes it is about losing the continuity and certainty that once made a place feel like home.
As I flip through the newspapers and speak to my mother, who still lives in our village, that feeling appears less personal and more collective. Across the country, belonging has begun to shift in quieter, more disquieting ways. In an India increasingly defined by documentation, verification and eligibility, home in the deeper sense — as recognition, safety and memory — is becoming fragile. Everything now demands proof. Everything must be justified. And in this process, the idea of home begins to blur, replaced by a sense that belonging is something one must continually perform.
The Supreme Court’s recent orders on stray dogs brought this into sharper focus. Community animals — sterilised, vaccinated, familiar to the lanes they inhabit — are being relocated to shelters already overburdened. “Aggression,” once a behavioural descriptor, is now an administrative term. Their displacement reveals an institutional impatience with vulnerability and shows how effortlessly the voiceless can be moved away from the spaces they have grown up in.
This mirrored a geography I knew as a child. In my ancestral village, caste was mapped onto land: Certain families placed at the outskirts, their distance from the centre both physical and symbolic. Geography was power; belonging was spatially assigned. Our cities look different today, but exclusion follows a similar logic — only now it is bureaucratic, not geographic. We rename institutions, laws, even cities in the name of “cultural grounding”, as though altering nomenclature can alter realities. Yet one cannot help wondering: What culture demands that some lives be rendered so precarious?
A new marginality
The tightening of digital processes in institutions like the UPSC reflects this tension. After a high-profile case exposed misuse of disability and caste certificates, reforms were introduced to increase transparency. But what began as accountability has hardened into rigidity. Formats change, compliance grows heavier, and accessibility remains an afterthought. Many candidates struggled with the revamped portal; helplines rang endlessly; deadlines passed before help arrived. For those negotiating disabilities or limited digital access, the process felt less like an invitation to public service and more like a reminder of whom the system is designed for — and who must struggle simply to enter it.
The frenzy around the SIR echoes these anxieties. Across states, families scramble to assemble long-forgotten records — land deeds, birth papers, ancestral documents — fearful that a missing file might erase their names from electoral rolls. Migrant workers postpone returning to work; elderly parents remain in villages longer than planned; domestic workers hurry back on crowded trains, believing their physical presence necessary to prove belonging. Fear travels faster than fact, and the burden of verification falls hardest on those whose lives were never neatly documented.
These developments do not exist in isolation. Taken together, they reveal a shift in the architecture of governance: In the name of transparency, efficiency and safety, the state is producing new forms of marginality. These are the new subalterns — people who live in the heart of cities yet remain structurally invisible to the systems that decide recognition. Their displacement is bureaucratic, not spatial; symbolic, not always visible; Quiet, yet deeply consequential. Home, in this context, is not a structure but continuity — the assurance of one’s place in the social world.
Sitting in an unfamiliar apartment larger than the one I left, I am reminded that size or novelty does not create belonging. A home is not a shiny upgrade; it is the certainty that one’s presence is accepted without constant performance of eligibility. When policies — administrative, judicial or digital — fracture that certainty, they do not merely inconvenience people. They unsettle the ground on which ordinary lives stand.
Which is why the question before us is no longer only about stray dogs, portals or paperwork. It is about the kind of country we are becoming — one where belonging is earned through compliance, or one where it is safeguarded as a human right. A nation is more than its databases. A citizen is more than a document. And perhaps the real work of governance lies not in renaming institutions or refining portals, but in ensuring that the warmth of belonging does not slip away unnoticed — from our streets, our systems, or from one another.
Mohanta is a Delhi-based writer and researcher
The question before us is no longer only about stray dogs, portals or paperwork. It is about the kind of country we are becoming — one where belonging is earned through compliance, or one where it is safeguarded as a human right (PTI/File) 
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