Ideas of Indian citizenship

Citizenship Regimes, Law and Belonging: The CAA and NRC

Author: Anupama Roy

Publisher: OUP

Pages: 270

Price: Rs 1,495

In recent years the government’s steps to redefine citizenship has generated extensive debate and heightened divergences in the socio-political discourse. Opposition to this legislative manoeuvre stepped outside seminar halls and campuses of educational institutions and made common cause with ordinary people who poured out on the streets after assessing, on their own, that the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, (CAA) 2019 was discriminatory and against the tenets of India’s Constitution.

Faced with opposition that gained a life of its own, the government responded by launching unbridled persecution of both groups, jailing several till date. Those placed under detention were to act as “deterrents” for others opposed to the law. In a country where mass movements appeared to have faded since 2014, these new sites of democratic protestations — the Shaheenbaghs —became testimony to citizenship being a subject of huge contestation. The fact that we grapple with this reality on the eve of the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence, underscores that not just citizenship, but the idea of our nation and nationhood remains fiercely contested for well over a century.

During the national movement there were two divergent views of the nation and the basis of nationalism. Although the more inclusive view of the nation secured majority support at independence, the alternate and myopic view that viewed the nation and nationalism on cultural terms, lurked in the background in almost every party.

The book under review acts dually. First, it is a comprehensive treatise on the CAA and the inter-related National Registry of Citizens (NRC), whose precise status at this juncture remains unclear for political reasons. Secondly, the book also provides a comprehensive recapitulation of the changes in India’s citizenship laws. This second feature serves an important purpose. A narrative has emerged since 2014 wherein it is contended that “nothing” positive happened in the country prior to that fateful transition. There is a counter narrative, too, that argues that all that is against democratic principles, and violative of the basic character of the constitution, started only after May 2014. For instance, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act  to contain dissidence against the CAA was first enacted in the late 1960s and has been used persistently by almost every government thereafter besides being amended several times to give it more teeth.

The author has literally mapped the narrative of citizenship in the country which has evolved through several amendments in the Citizenship Act of 1955. Given that the book’s necessity arose after the 2019 amendment, it focuses at length on the legal dimensions of the CAA and the NRC. The book provides a detailed account of parliamentary debates on the citizenship issue besides succinct recaps of important judicial verdicts and alongside examines the legal framework on citizenship.

The author establishes that it is not just the Act or the rules that are framed under it that constructs the citizenship regime. Instead, it is the way the “law is structured to produce specific power effects.” The book traces that after having started from defining Indian citizenship on the principle of jus soli, citizenship on the basis of birth, India “gravitated towards the principle of jus sanguinis, which is founded in an ideology of majoritarian communitarianism.” She argues that both the CAA of 2019 and the principle behind the NRC exist as evidence of this ideology shaping the official “line” on citizenship. The book argues that the gradual movement towards jus sanguinis was a complicated and even convoluted process and eventually the exclusionary form of nationhood became unshakeable. Ironically, this shift happened under the pretence of being firmly on the path of liberal citizenship. As of now the discourse and regulatory framework of citizenship is bound by the CAA and NRC.

The primary emphasis in the first chapter is on NRC, how the “documentary regime” that it established has resulted in the necessity for people to establish a “clear link” to the Assamese legacy. This, the author argues, has resulted in a “form of ‘hyphenated citizenship’ with the Indian citizenship.” Chapter two focuses on the legal regime set in place by the CAA of 2019.  This chapter examines the basis of justifying the CAA. It explains how this was done by invoking the Indian Constitution, Article 11 to be precise, as well as Constituent Assembly debates. Chapter three in the book focuses on the peculiarities of the situation between India and Bangladesh on the inter-connected issues of land, state and citizenship. The chapter examines the Land Border Agreement Treaty between the two nations in June 2015 to settle the peculiar situation of both states “having” enclaves within the territory of the other, creating an almost insurmountable situation for both the state and people. The last chapter examines the divergent narratives that emerged in the wake of CAA. The new nature of constitutional citizenship that was articulated at protest sites are examined in this section. The author has engaged with the issue of citizenship for a long time and has come out with a timely intervention because despite this regime’s political victories in 2019 and 2020 on the issues of CAA, suppressing the agitation against it and the repression it unleashed, the government is yet to roll out the new citizenship regime it initially intended to.

The reviewer is an NCR-based writer. His latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India. His other books include The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.  @NilanjanUdwin