The Contentious History of Citizenship in India
Hindutva aside, CAA needs to be situated in the troubled legacy of the partition
An unprecedented popular resistance is unfolding across India against the current political dispensation headed by Modi’s BJP since it returned to power at the center in 2019. The resistance — which includes people from all walks of life — University students, civilians, civil society activists, artists, and intellectuals — is challenging the BJP’s latest legislation known as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019. The Act provides an eased pathway of citizenship for members of six faiths from three neighbouring Muslim-majority nations but conspicuously leaves Muslims from these countries out of its pail. The central government claims that it is aimed at enabling those facing religious persecution in these nations to return to their ‘natural’ homeland. Critics argue that this law links Indian citizenship with particular faiths thereby violating the secular principle of the Indian constitution and the polity. When viewed in the context of the NRC, the law seems even more sinister: it could potentially become an ideological tool in the hands of the majoritarian Hindutva government to harass and disenfranchise Indian Muslims. This fear is further compounded by the fact that almost 20 lakh people have been virtually rendered stateless by the NRC exercise in the borderland state of Assam in India’s northeast.
Citizenship in modern nation-states not only defines relations between individuals and states but also ways in which individuals experience the state. Thus, while it underscores the legal status of a person within a state, citizenship is also iterated through a framework of individual rights vis-à-vis a state. In this light, the right to protest against the CAA across India may indeed be seen as an enactment of citizenship by laying claims over the state. By claiming the secular in the current citizenship discourse, opponents argue that they are safeguarding the founding principles of the Indian republic. However, in the emerging polarized views on this issue [secular vs. non-secular forms of citizenship], it is pertinent to remember the complex political history in which ideas of citizenship took shape in independent India, a history that remains deeply imbricated in the legacy of the Partition and resulted in religious identities becoming political currency.
Under the violent aftermath of the partition of the Indian subcontinent and movement of large masses of people across the newly drawn borders, Indian leaders nonetheless chose the secular and inclusive jus soli [by birth] principle of citizenship rather than jus sanguinis [blood-based descent]. Given India’s multi-ethnic polity, citizenship came to be delinked from a single cultural marker such as language and religion. By rejecting dual citizenship to overseas Indian and pressing for the latter’s rights in their host countries, we also decoupled citizenship from nationality at the time. Among the multiplicity of contending claims to Indian citizenship, the major challenge came from those coming from the newly carved Pakistan. The constituent assembly euphemistically referred to two categories of people coming into India in the aftermath of the partition: refugees and migrants. ‘Refugees’ were those seen as fleeing communal violence from the newly created state of Pakistan. By contrast, those ‘returning’ to India after they had ‘decided’ to move to the neighbouring country at the time of the partition were seen as ‘migrants’. As political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal argues, the terms refugees and migrants “served to conceal the religious identities they encoded.” Refugees were primarily assumed to be Hindus and Sikhs, while migrants were seen to be Muslims.
The rationale for this differentiation was that migrants left India on their own ‘volition’ and had transferred their loyalty to the state of Pakistan. Unlike Hindu refugees, their return was to be viewed with suspicion. This religious cleavage was further institutionalized in the constitution through Article 6 and 7 that spelt out different pathways of citizenship for refugees and migrants. Thus, even as the vocabulary in constituent assembly debates remained secular, a religious fault line continued to inflect the political discourse in post-partition India. Successive amendments to the idea of citizenship in India only confirm that its career has steadily moved towards the more exclusive racial principle of jus sanguinis. Notably, the 1986 amendment inserted that citizenship eligibility required that at least one parent had to be an Indian citizen; another amendment in 2003 added that those individuals born with one parent being ‘illegal migrant’ at the time of birth would not be eligible either, thereby further narrowing the possibilities who could be an Indian citizen [interestingly, this amendment also sought a nation-wide NRC].
While the CAA stems from the BJP’s ideological belief that India is the ‘natural’ of Hindus, its more insidious aim is to question the same claim made by the Indian Muslim. The exclusion of Muslims by the current legislation appears to be a direct challenge to the secular tradition of the Indian polity. However, it is also true that these tensions had been latently built into the constitutional design of a nation that was grappling with the enormous cost and absurd logic of partitioning the sub-continent and forging of the new post-colonial nation-states of India and Pakistan. As proponents of secularism and constitutionalism challenge the putative Hindutva agenda of the BJP, it is imperative that we fully understand the checkered nature of citizenship in India and situate it in the historical and bloody shadow of the partition.
Further readings:
Jayal, Niraja Gopal, 2013, “Citizenship and its discontents: An Indian History”, Harvard University Press, p. 58.
Written by Smitana Saikia.
