Political scientist Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal addressed the evolution of citizenship law within India’s Constitutional scheme. She said that the Constitution and the Citizenship Act had originally proceeded on the basis of a broad jus soli conception of citizenship, but that India had gradually moved away from that foundation. In her account, “universal citizenship” was increasingly being replaced by a framework of “alienage” that is determined by identity-based factors such as caste, class and religion. She said that this development could not be understood apart from an ideological project that treated some communities, particularly Muslims, as belonging outside the political community.
She referred to amendments to citizenship law and related legal developments, including changes made in 2003, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process and the later Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). amendments. In her view, these measures had produced a hierarchy-based model of citizenship. She said that the legal and political framework now distinguished between those presumed to belong and those required repeatedly to prove their status. She further argued that a reconstruction of citizenship in India would require a return to unconditional jus soli, the scrapping of the NRC, National Peoples Register (NPR) and the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, the repeal of the CAA, and the removal of the category of “illegal migrant” from the Citizenship Act and associated rules under which citizenship is presently administered.
She also emphasised the relationship between citizenship and rights. In her view, there had been a shift from a rights-based constitutional understanding of citizenship to one framed increasingly in terms of duties. She observed that access to welfare was in some contexts becoming linked to inclusion on electoral rolls, and said that this connection required urgent dismantling. She concluded by suggesting that civil society had to focus not only on resisting exclusion but also on reconstructing the civic, political and economic content of Indian citizenship.
