Sitting at the edge of the Arabian Sea, I, like many others who were gathered on the warm afternoon at the Kozhikode Literature Festival on January 24, 2026, had the good fortune of listening to the novelist Abdulrazak Gunrah answer questions ranging from his childhood to his recent novel Theft. Among the many thoughtful things Abdulrazak shared, with wit and sharpness, his insistence on the fact that, at all but 18 years, “he left” his beloved Zanzibar, and not “fled”, stood out as an important reminder of how even in the worst of times, human agency remains central to migrants, among others.“I did not flee. I left,” he pushed back against historian Dilip Menon, who was perhaps naive to ask what it was like to have fled Zanzibar. It left more than a smile on many of us in the audience when he added that he flew out of Zanzibar instead of taking a boat! Abdulrazak went on to insist that he left/departed a Zanzibar that was witnessing random acts of violence, terror and also where schools were being shut down. He left, the Nobel laureate added, because, among other things, he wanted to study. Rest is history.This response from Abdulrazak reminded me of the condition of migrants in India, particularly of Bengali workers who have been facing frequent discrimination and violence in various parts of India. Like any migrant, they too migrate, leave their homes for work, but are rendered homeless and strangers in their own country.Some of them face acute hostility at home, and with it, profound everyday unfreedoms – both social and economic as Amartya Sen would have it. Reports of them facing attacks in various places in India were reported last year. Some of them were also packed in buses and pushed across the border to Bangladesh. These harrowing experiences are compounded by other random acts of physical and symbolic violence. Periods of panic now have an eerie presence in the social life of such victim communities in Assam, with and without National Register of Citizens (NRC). For instance, elections have become another movement and theatre to stage such violence. Most recently, the genocidal intent displayed in a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ad stood witness to how far we have fallen. Listening to Abdulrazak, I could realise the many uncanny parallels in the history (coloniality, particularly of labour) and contestations (including counting) of citizenship in Zanzibar and Assam. In the Northeastern state of Assam, the historic anti-Bengali hatred has witnessed sustained and intensified attacks against the community since 1950, and with an ever-widening social base of this hate since the 1960s Language Movement which forced so many to “leave”.Such hatred has taken new forms, with evictions becoming a regular affair in the state to dispossess suspect families – not only in the name of being a “foreigner”, but also as “encroachers.” Thousands of homes have been bulldozed with disturbing regularity and impunity, and many others wait, with fear and anxiety, for their home to be turned to rubble, or worse, detained or pushed across the border.The state government maintains that this has been done to clear people who are deemed “encroachers” and “outsiders”. Imagined fears of nationalists now find public action and legitimacy. Additionally, not just hate speech but dangerous speech has become the norm. Assam’s chief minister’s insistence that pay rupees four, if you are supposed to pay rupees five to a “Miya” is an example of the current social health of our country. We did not arrive at this place this year or in the last decade alone. In 2018-19, the NRC update was published in Assam, leaving out over 1.9 million people from the citizenship register. The decision on citizens, who belong and don’t, was directed primarily at the Bengali community, a desire harvested by its regional nationalism and placed during the Assam Movement. This exercise, in many ways, opened the door for questioning the citizenship of Bengalis and Muslims in India.The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that has already been implemented or ongoing in many states in India has taken on a much more intensive form in West Bengal. This has witnessed so many deaths, suicides, road accidents and panic, similar to what we saw with the NRC in Assam. But in the instance of the NRC, the enumerators were on one side and those being enumerated were on the other. There was a clear divide.But in West Bengal, it has been reported that, faced with enormous pressure, enumerators/ booth-level officers (BLOs) have also taken their lives – died by suicide. Similar stories have emerged from other states too. This is no small thing. While this is going on, the West Bengal government has approached the Supreme Court in a unique political move.The appearance of the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, in the Supreme Court is a testimony to the tragic state of affairs in which she accused SIR of being used to “bulldoze” citizens. What is happening in West Bengal, has already happened in other states where SIR was implemented, and it is bound to create more pain and misery.What lakhs of citizens of India are undergoing with SIR is, to borrow from the political theorist Hannah Arendt, “fearsome, word-and-thought-defying”. And a particular type of people are to blame for the current state of affairs, robbing citizens of their dignity as Indians. Arendt called them “desk killers or desktop killers“. Those responsible must be identified, and those assuming such roles must be named and questioned.The bureaucratic maze of the citizenship determination process of the NRC provides a haunting resemblance to the SIR process. Documents, or their lack thereof, are tearing apart lives, dignity and respect. Destitutes, women, children and trans people are the most disadvantaged when it comes to producing documents. We see that in the NRC process. This is and will be no different in the SIR process.People in the bureaucracy are extremely crucial in processing such documents with life altering consequences for people. It is in the process of verifying, identifying and considering documents as asli and farzi, admissible and inadmissible, that the murder of citizens and voters takes place. As a war on citizens unfolds, such executioners of documents play a larger than life role. It is such forces in the bureaucracy who ‘kill’ and ‘delete’ from behind the window and at their desks. Today, they wield desktop computers, phones and laptops to accompany their talent, skill and expertise.Adolf Eichmann, a major organiser of the Holocaust and member of the Nazi Party were such figures for Arendt. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno also echoed similar sentiments about them. Such a type of human embodies the banality of evil, which Arendt described after observing the trial of Eichmann. Such banality is a place of thoughtlessness, but not of stupidity, yet, as Eichmann has shown, it is also marked by “extraordinary diligence” and being on the lookout for “personal advancement”.Unlike Arendt’s “killers” who acted during the Holocaust, this bureaucracy can’t be held to the same standard, but many of their actions rob people of peace, citizenship and their right to a livelihood – which is tantamount to a killing in many ways.Obedient, such evil does as it is told of them, without thinking about what the doing entails or the consequences that will follow. In SIR or NRC, it is the mass exclusion, detection and deportation that drives them. Their motto is exclusion and not inclusion. These days, such a type of human also appears to be ideologically motivated and aware. They are more pervasive than ever, not only in Western modernity but in the post-colonial modernities (not without its nation-states and nationalisms) of the Global South as well. The relationship between evil and thoughtlessness is perhaps more viable these days.These developments also show how violence is endemic to nationalism, which is said to be a superstition proper to the nation. And as national ideas narrow, there will be no dearth of both demand for and supply of bureaucrats willing to be evilly banal. The worrying thing is that such people remain – still are – like their older type, “terribly and terrifyingly normal”. We are amidst a forest of paradoxes – nation and its people; people and the nation. The unmapped in the SIR. The D-voter of the NRC. Where will this assault end? Or, is it just how administrative massacres begin?Suraj Gogoi teaches at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode.