Compassion, Classification, Closure: Media Discourse and the Regime of Truth of India’s Citizenship Amendment Act

India’s 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) made religion a criterion for expedited naturalization, granting a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants from three Muslim-majority countries while excluding Muslims. This article examines how such a law came to be normalized in public discourse. Analyzing 60 articles published between December 2019 and December 2024 in three influential English-language media outlets—The Times of India, The Wire, and Organiser—the article examines how the CAA was made to appear legitimate, even as its religious logic remained contested. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “regime of truth,” it identifies three interrelated mechanisms through which this normalization occurred. First, humanitarian appeals and civilizational narratives created a hierarchy of suffering that made some lives more visible and grievable than others. Second, this hierarchy was recast in administrative terms, presenting religious exclusion as a matter of procedure rather than politics. Third, dissent was narrowed through prohibition, epistemic disqualification, and the privileging of authorized knowledge. Religion, in this process, was discursively reconfigured as a humanitarian criterion, civilizational claim, administrative category, and security marker. The article finally reveals that the CAA’s religious logic was normalized through the seemingly secular languages of law, governance, and compassion.