Constitutional parasitism, camouflage, and pretense: Shaping citizenship through subterfuge

Constitutional rights or values are sometimes used by governments to disguise, mask, or misdirect attention from the true nature of their actions. Such strategies of subterfuge are, by their nature, difficult to identify and prove. This article responds to the challenge of identifying and proving subterfuge by demonstrating three types of strategies of subterfuge governments may deploy. To that end it uses a close study of three strategies deployed in the Indian government’s defense of a controversial citizenship law. The first strategy is the introduction and incubation of nationalist versions of constitutional values, exemplified by the Indian government as it planted an alternative nationalist vision of secularism in legal and public discourse about citizenship. The second strategy is the appropriation of constitutional rights to serve as camouflage to deflect criticism of the government’s true aims; the Indian government illustrated this strategy as it used religious freedom to camouflage its goal of removing “infiltrators.” The third strategy is the appropriation of human rights precedents for state action which in fact breaches human rights. The article demonstrates how we might prove, identify, and establish each of these strategies, when they are at work.