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Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging

Law must be seen not simply as bare provisions but examined for the ideological practices that validate it and lay claims to its enforceability. Successive amendments in the citizenship law in India have spawned distinct regimes of citizenship. These regimes manifest a movement from jus soli to jus sanguinis through a complex process of entrenchment of exclusionary nationhood under the veneer of liberal citizenship. This work argues that the contemporary landscape of citizenship in India is dominated by the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The CAA 2019 and the NRC emerged as distinct tendencies from the amendment in the Citizenship Act in 2003. These tendencies subsequently become conjoined in an ideological alignment to make citizenship and belonging dependent on lineage and blood ties. The extraordinary legal regime of citizenship spawned by the NRC was justified by invoking the spectre of ‘crisis’ in citizenship precipitated by indiscriminate immigration, and the risks presented by ‘illegal migrants’. The CAA provides for exceptions in this regime by making religion the criterion of distinguishability. The CAA and NRC together constitute a regime of ‘bounded citizenship’ which assumes that citizenship is a natural and constitutive identity. The ideological apparatus of Hindutva has buttressed this regime, eroding the foundational principles of secular-constitutionalism that characterized Indian citizenship in 1949.