Who is an Alien?: Reading Gandhi

Gandhi remains controversial yet still demands reconsideration because he stands at the beginning of the long twentieth century and we stand at the other, implosive, end. The questions he asks about how imperial nations were being made and how free nations should be made remain unfinished – they are at the core of casteism, communalism and racism as a majori- tarian state defines, deports, sequesters and ghettoises underclasses, or eliminates so-called aliens. The techniques that were put in place at the turn of the twentieth century have intensified in the early twenty-first: state surveillance (now fusing with corporate digitalisation); selectively restricted mobility inside and into the country; the cordoning of land and resources for the few (now under the aegis of state-supported neoliberal capitalism).