Excerpted from the introduction of Anupama Roy’s Citizenship Regimes, Law and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC, Oxford University Press, 2022.
Seventy years after the installation of republican citizenship through the termination of ties with the colonial regime and the inscription of ‘We the People’ as the ‘source’ of authority of the Constitution, citizenship in India has become deeply contested. While there were contests over citizenship in the past, the contemporary period is distinctive for the unprecedented display of a ‘heightened consciousness’ (Heater 1999, Faulks 2000) about citizenship, which spans the breadth of the country. This ‘citizenship consciousness’ has become manifest in the deep fault-lines caused by changes in the citizenship law, which has produced a citizenship regime inconsistent with the constitutional imaginary. In the summer of 2016, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in the Parliament which was entrusted to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for scrutiny. The CAB was eventually passed in December 2019 when the NDA returned to power in May 2019 with an overwhelming majority in the Lok Sabha. In enacting the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, the ruling NDA invoked the constitutionally mandated power of the Parliament to legislate on all matters pertaining to citizenship. The CAA 2019 was brought with the objective of offering citizenship to those Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis who had fled Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to escape religious persecution and had sought refuge in India before 31 December 2014. BJP leaders asserted that the amendment was essential to correct historical injustices caused by the partition of the country on the basis of religion and the failure of Pakistan to protect its minorities, to which both India and Pakistan had committed themselves in 1950. Through this articulation, the CAA 2019 recognised the right of specified religious communities to return ‘home’, in the fulfilment of a moral claim to obtain the legal protection of citizenship, whose denial would perpetuate a historical wrong.
Anupama Roy
Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging
Oxford University Press, 2022
In this work I would attempt to bring the CAA to an anthropological scrutiny, locating the contemporary form and content of the citizenship law in a ‘matrix… of historical experience’ (Guha 1982, 140-141). The law of citizenship in India may be seen as located within a realm of contestation over ideas of who belongs and how. The history of this contest and its resolution show distinct logics through which membership and terms of belonging were laid down in law, entrenching successive citizenship regimes. The association of the term ‘regime’ with citizenship is crucial for making the argument that law must be seen not only in terms of its bare provisions, but also examined for its political and ideological embeddedness. The ‘bare act’ of citizenship which comes to us as an accumulation of successive amendments represents the law’s coalescent present. The different temporalities of law are compressed in the bare act, occluding the historical layers and flows that have marked the changes that occurred through successive amendments.
Citizenship in contemporary India represents a coalescence of tendencies which have emanated from successive citizenship regimes spawned by the earlier periods of change in the citizenship law. The amendment in 2003 may be considered a hinge point from which the NRC and the CAA emerged and have become an integral part of the ideological landscape of citizenship in contemporary India. Having emerged as discrete tendencies out of the 2003 amendment in the Citizenship Act, the NRC and CAA have become conjoined to produce a spectre of national citizenship based on the logic of descent as the organising principle. While the NRC, as the experience in Assam has shown us, is a legal regime of enumeration of Indian citizens based on evidence that establishes a legacy of inherited belonging, it is simultaneously, and often primarily, presented as a modality of identifying illegal migrants. The CAA is embedded in the idea of national-majoritarian citizenship with religion as its distinguishing principle. The CAA makes a distinction among illegal migrants to identify those among them who would be considered eligible for Indian citizenship through naturalisation. These two principles – of descent as the organising principle of citizenship and religion-based citizenship – have coalesced in the ruling practices of the current political regime to become decisive in determining who belongs to the political community.
The inscription of the ‘Assam exception’ in the Citizenship Act, the IMDT Act 1983 and its repeal in 2005, and the Assam Accord have reverberated in the contemporary landscape of citizenship. Indeed, the framing of illegality within which immigration from Bangladesh came to be seen in a national security framework, was reiterated in the Supreme Court judgement in the Assam Samhilita Mahasangh case in December 2014, in which the court laid down the framework for updating the NRC in Assam. Indeed, in an extension of the court’s position in the Sarbanand Sonowal Case (2005), it made the fortification of territorial boundaries as well as the protection of population a function of state sovereignty. The persistence of the Sarbanand Sonowal judgement in contemporary debates on citizenship is seen in the manner in which the JPC in recommending the CAB 2016 for the consideration of the Parliament, quoted the judgement to assert that ‘misconceived’ ideas of secularism must not come in the way of extending the protection of citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities who faced persecution in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
…The CAA represents a tendency in the ideological formulation of citizenship that redefines the idea of the political community. If the NRC as it has unfolded in Assam congealed the relationship between legal status and blood ties, the CAA has installed an exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship. The CAA 2019 purports to extend the protection of citizenship to those facing religious persecution and simultaneously puts in place a regime which discriminates on the ground of religion. Amidst the possibility of a nation-wide NRC, the CAA made the question of ‘documentary citizenship’ (Sadiq 2009) more perplexing.
Anupama Roy is also the author of Citizenship in India and Mapping Citizenship in India.