With the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Bill becoming subjects of household conversations and dubious WhatsApp forwards, it extremely important to understand the intricate relationship binding the concepts of citizenship, nationality, and identity. While most people believe the terms citizenship and nationality are synonymous with one another, this is not the case in India, where these concepts are complicated by arbitrarily-drawn borders, religious divisions, and territorial struggles. In this article, which is the first of a two-part series, I follow the trajectory of Indian citizenship since Independence and look at the theoretical bases that it derives itself from and attempt to answer the questions - whose country is India, and what does it mean to be an Indian citizen?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes citizenship as one of the most basic and essential links between the individual and the international system. While it is difficult to arrive at a universally accepted definition of citizenship without imposing one's own moral code, the concept is more or less constant among countries worldwide. This includes three main notions that govern citizenship: rights, duties, and authority. These are generally granted to a state’s citizens in its most basic legislation; in India, citizens’ rights and duties are outlined in the Constitution. Even the third and most central pillar of citizenship – authority– is implicitly given to Indian citizens by way of the parliamentary democracy that holds the state accountable to its citizens.
Citizenship forms a part of an individual's identity. Our relationship with our environment is a large defining point of who we are, and our association with the state polity, or citizenship, tells us who we are in the political realm. There is a widespread presumption that citizenship and democracy go hand in hand and are naturally complementary and compatible, but this may not be true, especially in certain West Asian Arab regimes where even though democracy does not exist, citizenship is enjoyed and granted to its fullest.
The story of India’s citizenship is a complicated one. After Partition, the subcontinent saw major migration in and out of the newly-formed borders in Bengal and Punjab. At this time, the erstwhile princely states were also being gradually assimilated into the Union of India, and their subjects, as well as those belonging to the small French and Portuguese colonies, also became claimants to Indian citizenship. Furthermore, colonial practices of indentured labour led to a significant Indian diaspora in East and South Africa as well as in (erstwhile) Malaya, Ceylon, Burma, and other countries. From the early 1900s, Indian nationalist leaders were active supporters of overseas Indians who were claiming recognition in the British Commonwealth as “citizens of the Empire”. MK Gandhi campaigned for the rights of Indians in South Africa while others rallied against discriminatory policies against Indian indentured labour in Fiji, Burma, and Zanzibar, among others. In 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru drafted the first foreign policy document for the Congress party, which encouraged these overseas Indians to identify their citizenship with the country they have adopted.
Indian indentured labourers. Source: Zululand Observer
By 1947, there were an estimated four million recognized Indians in the British Commonwealth, with around half living in Malaya, Ceylon, and Burma. Most of these were descendants of 19th century indentured labourers. Would these people now be Indian or British, or Burmese or Malaysian?
Traditionally, citizenship is determined based on two principles: jus soli (right of the soil) and jus sanguinis (right of the blood). Essentially, jus soli citizenship is considered to be a right for those who have been born on the soil of a given nation, while jus sanguinis citizenship is given based on the citizenship of one or both parents.
In a visit to Singapore, Nehru assured the diasporic community that India would be able to protect its overseas children soon, and this rhetoric of a jus sanguinis citizenship was rather odd, given that British law followed an unambiguous jus soli based law of nationality. Furthermore, Nehru contradicted his own efforts of the past where, along with Gandhi and other nationalists, he had consistently maintained that Indians living abroad should be loyal to the country of their adoption rather than being divided in their loyalties. However, this managed to stir nationalist support for equal citizenship for the Indian diaspora in their host countries.
However, after the Partition, the importance of territory and borders became so important that Indian leadership rejected overseas Indians’ claims to citizenship on the basis that they were not domiciled in the Indian state. After complaints of Indians abroad on grounds of being offered half-citizenship or being treated unfairly by their host countries, the Indian government argued that by taking up citizenship of the foreign state, these Indians had given up their Indian nationality. The idea of an Indian nationality and nationhood itself is contentious due to the absence of a singular and unified ethnocultural identity. Rather, India derives its ideas of nationhood from its territorially-defined polity.
Put simply, citizenship implies an established relationship between the individual and the state while nationality evokes notions of identity, belonging, blood, and often ethnicity and culture. The connection between citizenship, nationality, and migration has been explained wonderfully by Nando Sigona in the video below:
As Sigona mentions, the “definition of who belongs to the nation implicitly and sometimes explicitly is also defining who doesn’t belong”. This is especially true in India, whose nationhood itself is challenged due to the absence of a singular and unified ethnocultural identity. In the late colonial period, Niraja Gopal Jayal notes, Indians were reminded repeatedly that their demands for citizenship were unconvincing since the country did not fulfil the primary requisite of nationhood, which is that of a shared common heritage, language, and culture. Therefore, one may argue that India is not a nation of states, but rather a state or a union of nations that derive a sense of nationhood from territorialism.
Due to this lack of cohesive nationhood, Indian definitions of who constitutes the ‘other’, the ‘non-Indian’, or the ‘illegal migrant’ has been largely dependent on the which party is in power and the religious identity of the individual in question. Post-Partition, the Constitutional definition of citizenship included both Hindu refugees from Pakistan (East and West) and the large number of Muslims who returned from Pakistan. The jus soli concept was adopted in the Constitution under Article 5, but the idea of who is a ‘natural’ citizen became a matter of debate in civil society as it usually began with the jus sanguinis assumption that the Hindu male was the epitome of a domiciled citizen. Despite reminders that the jus sanguinis concept is redundant in India, support for it is extremely strong, especially among right-wing Hindu groups who believe that Muslims, especially those who returned to the country, do not hold legitimate claims to citizenship.
Constitutionally, however, the jus soli doctrine continues to define Indian citizenship. The justification of this doctrine lies in its “presumed enlightened modern civilized character”, in contrast to jus sanguinis which is more racial in nature. Jayal mentions that despite hostility towards citizenship claims of Muslims who returned from both sides of the border, our citizenship laws extended to them. Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution were introduced as provisions to manage the massive migration that accompanied the Partition. Article 6 deals with citizenship for those who migrated from Pakistan to India before July 1948, and outlining the need for registration for those who migrated after that date. The Constituent Assembly at the time used the term ‘refugees’ to refer to such migrants, hence the clause did not see much controversy. On the other hand, Article 7 outlines the conditions of citizenship for those who migrated in the opposite direction to Pakistan but later returned to India with a resettlement permit or permanent return issued by the Indian government. These people were described as ‘migrants’.
While this nomenclature of ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ is not officially used in the Constitution, it was a part of the vocabulary surrounding official and unofficial discussions in and outside the Constituent Assembly. In the post-Partition context, the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ were used as euphemisms for the various religious identities that they referred to. In Assam, the terms ‘refugee’, ‘migrant’ and ‘immigrant’ are used almost interchangeably depending on the Indian state’s changing official status that is granted to this section of the population. Locally, such persons are referred to as bideshi (foreigners), bohiragoto (outsiders), ghuspetiye (invaders), land grabbers, Bengali peasants, among others.
Those who were in favour of the more inclusive citizenship provisions maintained that the ‘migrants’ were returning due to disturbances and riots and should be welcomed back warmly with their properties returned. More conservative minds believed that Indian citizenship was “being sold too cheaply”, and that the people who migrated initially chose to do so intentionally, hence their wish to return was suspicious. Jaspat Roy Kapoor, who coined the term ‘obnoxious clause’ to describe Article 7, was one of the few vocal Indians in this debate who suggested that Indian Hindus and Sikhs are entitled to Indian citizenship. Kapoor said,
“It is a serious matter of principle. Once a person has migrated to Pakistan and transferred his loyalty from India to Pakistan, his migration is complete. He has definitely made up his mind at that time to kick this country and let it go to its own fate, and he went away to the newly created Pakistan, where he would put in his best efforts to make it a free progressive and prosperous state.”
Such rhetoric still holds relevance, where the otherization of Pakistanis has been rampant since Independence and today the celebration of so-called surgical strikes are synonymous with the mainstream nationalist identity. At the same time, there are calls for the revival of an Akhand Bharat (undivided India), but groups demanding this are still unwilling to extend offers of citizenship to those currently inhabiting Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thus, the question of who is Indian and who is not remains unresolved in civil society as notions of nationalism and citizenship, have changed through the years. This form of nationalism which defines the outsider as the enemy of the state is used to target Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. While Pakistani Muslims are labelled ‘terrorists’, Bangladeshi Muslims are considered ‘infiltrators’ who are draining India of its resources and stealing jobs from Indians. In many radical groups, this even extends to a burning hatred for fellow Indian citizens belonging to different religious or ethnic identities.
This has been extremely evident in the case of Kashmir, which was stripped of its statehood following the abrogation of Article 370 earlier this year. The gross violations of human rights that are occurring even today are being justified under the garb of national security, and mainstream media outlets seem to be lauding the government for their move and reporting false stories of normalcy in the area. Arguments in favour of scrapping Article 370 mainly include tired terms like development, access to property, and a prosperous future, and are heavily underpinned with territorialism and hypernationalism. Yet, there seems to be little to no consideration by the ruling government or the general Indian public for the present lives of the Kashmiri populace in terms of citizenship, which was earlier safeguarded by Article 370. The overnight removal of the Article and the imposition of the most militarized lockdown in Indian history are proof that the current administration is fearful of a loss of citizenry and views the desire for freedom as a threat to its own national identity.
If Kashmir really “belongs” to India and is a part of the sovereign state, why are Kashmiris being systemically disallowed from realizing their citizenship? If Kashmiris are to consider themselves as Indian first, why are their democratically elected leaders being gagged and excluded from conversations regarding their own future as a Union Territory? In this case, it is evident that not even one of the notions of citizenship is being followed: neither are Kashmiris being awarded their rights, nor are they being allowed to exercise their duties, and authority to question and participate in the political process has become somewhat of a distant dream.
It can, therefore, be said that citizenship plays two roles that fundamentally oppose one another. The first is facilitating equality, and promising a common set of rights and duties, regardless of identity. On the other hand, like in the case of Kashmir, it presents a legitimizing force for inequality itself. The full political, social, cultural, economic, and civic inclusion of individuals is what constitutes the heart of citizenship theory, and anything else diminishes its value. When tribal communities and caste minorities have been forcefully displaced from their ancestral homes by state actors to make way for roadways and bullet trains, can we really claim that Indian citizenship is a fair concept?
For example, a woman who is born in a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe is automatically assumed to have weaker citizenship than an upper-caste North Indian Hindu male, due to a lack of access to the basic rights that are promised to her by the Constitution. No one government is to blame for this since this disparity has widened due to the unequal implementation of policies and a lack of better policymaking for decades. Therefore, before deeming Kashmiri separatists as “anti-national” and Bangladeshi migrant workers as “foreigners”, we must question the value of our own citizenship in the Indian state. There has always been a defined set of thought and action that is acceptable in the formation of one’s Indian nationality, and in the past few years, this has evolved to eliminate certain notions of responsible and inclusive citizenship.
The growing importance of lineage and citizenship based on jus sanguinis principles, especially among radical Hindu groups like the RSS, threatens the very fabric of Indian citizenship as it excludes various intersections of identity from its ideal narrative. The Modi regime’s proposed Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 (discussed in detail in the second part of this article series) illustrates the government’s attitude towards what communal identity constitutes the larger Indian identity.
Therefore, notwithstanding migrants from outside modern Indian territory, it is still difficult to define an Indian citizenship that is firstly delineated from nationality and secondly equally provided and actualized by all those who have it. It is imperative that the Indian state works more towards strengthening accessibility to rights and dignity to its citizens before jumping the bandwagon and ridding the country of its supposedly illegal immigrant population. Furthermore, if citizens’ rights in Kashmir can be lifted at any time due to national security concerns (even without the formal declaration of an Emergency), it should be a matter of grave distress to Indians in other parts of the country, as their citizenship has the potential to be threatened at any point without following due processes. At any given point, human security must not be lost in efforts to maintain national security, and citizenship, being the guarantor of human security, must be upheld at all times.
References
Bhattacharjee, J. (2019). Impact of NRC Assam amongst people observation from the ground | ORF. Retrieved 23 October 2019, from https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/impact-nrc-assam-amongst-people-observation-ground-55910/
Deka, K. (2019). Why Amit Shah cannot throw out all illegal immigrants by 2024. Retrieved 23 October 2019, from https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/why-amit-shah-cannot-throw-out-all-illegal-immigrants-by-2024-1610617-2019-10-18
Jayal, N. (2013). Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Masood, H. Illegal Bangladeshi Immigration to India: Causes, Consequences, and Future (Undergraduate). Symbiosis International (Deemed) University.
Ranjan, A. (2019). National register of citizen update: history and its impact. Asian Ethnicity, 1-17. doi: 10.1080/14631369.2019.1629274
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