For months now, the Election Commission of India has been saying that only those who can prove their citizenship will be allowed to vote. This idea, already implemented in its broad essentials in Bihar and West Bengal, will now cover the whole nation. The government also recently claimed that the passport is simply a travel document; it does not establish citizenship. If so, which document should be viewed as a definitive certificate of Indian citizenship?
Given the vast literature on citizenship, four critical issues are at stake. What does the concept of citizenship signify? Are there multiple ways of defining citizenship and where does the Indian definition fit in? What kinds of documents establish citizenship? And is the idea of a documentary proof of citizenship exclusive, inclusive or simply neutral?
In citizenship literature, one of the most famous lines was penned by Hannah Arendt, an influential political philosopher of the 20th century. She called it “the right to have rights”. Citizenship is a legally enshrined foundational right. A citizen is a juridically recognised member of the political community. This juridical person, by virtue of citizenship, also receives some other rights, especially in a democratic polity, such as the right to liberty, vote, move, practise religion, form organisations and receive welfare benefits.
This concept was not available in pre-modern times. Human beings were subjects, not citizens. Their “rights” were drawn from the ruler’s wishes, and such rights could be distributed differently to different groups. Premodern rights, thus, were based on royal wishes, not on citizenship.
After their revolutions overthrew monarchies in the late 18th century, the first citizenship-based polities emerged in the US and France. Elsewhere in the West, citizenship evolved gradually. For India, especially significant was the colonial period, when Indians were subjects, not citizens. In the 600-odd princely states, too, this was true. The idea of citizenship became a reality only after Independence.
The literature also makes it clear that there are two standard ways to define citizens—jus solis (by birth in a territory regardless of race, religion, gender and ethnicity) and jus sanguinis (by blood lineage – racial, ethnic or religious). Citizenship by the territory of birth came to be called “birthright citizenship” in the US after the 14th Constitutional Amendment (1867) when the formerly enslaved became citizens.
The scholarly literature views the US and France as the purer, if not perfect, examples of territory-based citizenship, and Germany and Japan of blood-based citizenship. When the Soviet Union broke up, over 1 million ethnic Germans who were Soviet citizens migrated to Germany and became German citizens. And to avoid criminal prosecution, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori simply went to Japan when his scandal-ridden government collapsed in 2000. He had Japanese ancestry, which allowed him to become a Japanese citizen.
Where does Indian citizenship fit in? A landmark work by Niraja Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Harvard University Press, 2003), demonstrates that India’s Constituent Assembly unequivocally went for jus solis (territory), not jus sanguinis (blood). The Assembly had left it for Parliament to construct laws under this principle. The original citizenship law (1955) treated as Indian citizens all those who were born in India unless they chose to be citizens of Pakistan (or any other country). The many Indians born and living abroad—in the Caribbean, Malaya, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, etc.—were not given Indian citizenship, and were instead instructed to become citizens in their countries of emigration.
Starting in the 1980s, especially after the Assam agitation, Indian citizenship started acquiring a hybrid character. Birth in the country was no longer a sole criterion. In Jayal’s precise words, “today, anyone born in India before 1987 is legally an Indian citizen. However, persons born in India between 1987 and 2003 are not entitled to citizenship by birth, unless they have one parent who is an Indian citizen. Since 2004, persons born in India, who at the time of their birth have one parent who is an ‘illegal migrant’, are ineligible for citizenship by birth. Because many of the migrants into Assam from Bangladesh were Muslims, the category of ‘illegal migrant’ was a way of covertly introducing a religion-based exception to the principle of citizenship by birth”. This process was taken to its logical conclusion when the CAA, passed in December 2019, explicitly excluded Muslim immigrants from neighboring Muslim-majority countries from naturalisation as citizens, reserving it instead for non-Muslim immigrants.
It is against this background that we should examine the current debate about citizenship and voting. That only citizens should have the right to vote is not the point of dispute. The contentious matters are: What documents are needed to establish citizenship; and if one loses voting rights, would one also lose welfare and other benefits?
Also read: Who is an Indian citizen? The onus is on govt to deliver a reliable, transparent NRC
The right document
India has no universal citizenship documents. In the US, three documents affirm citizenship: Birth certificates, passports and naturalisation certificates (for immigrants who wish to be citizens).
In India, only around 8 per cent of the population is estimated to have passports (as opposed to roughly 50 per cent in the US). So it cannot be the basis of citizenship affirmation for the masses. The government has in any case said so.
On birth certificates, the story is more complicated. The older the citizens, the greater the likelihood that they were born at home and do not carry a birth certificate. Birth registrations and certificates have gone up in recent years, but rich-poor gaps are worth noting. Take the example of the 2015-16 National Family Health Survey. Of the 62.3 per cent of children under the age of five who had birth registrations and certificates, the proportion was 82.3 per cent in the richest wealth group and 40.7 per cent in the poorest wealth group.
Which communities constitute the bulk of the poor in India? As is well-known, it is Dalits, lower OBCs and Muslims. If birth certificates are made the touchstone for voting, the proportion of these groups in the voter list would go down. Those without documents from the upper classes will also be excluded, but in lesser magnitudes.
Who do these groups vote for? If we look at the elections of 2019 and 2024, the Lokniti data gives us the following profile of BJP voters: Upper Castes 52-53 per cent, OBCs 42-43 per cent, Dalits 31-33 per cent, and Muslims 8 per cent. A restructuring of electoral rolls, undertaken on the basis of citizenship documents, thus would tilt the electoral field in favour of the BJP. It will be more exclusionary with respect to those who normally vote less for the BJP.
The issue of naturalisation—meaning the passage from immigration to citizenship—would not impact all of these communities, but it would basically exclude Muslim immigrants. Hindu immigrants would be allowed citizenship via the CAA.
Let us also consider how this idea of citizenship would affect the provision of other rights. Take the example of the new West Bengal government, which declared that if your name is not on the voting list, your ration access will be withdrawn. This is an illustration of what Arendt meant by citizenship being the right to have other rights.
To conclude, the idea of documentary adequacy promotes exclusionary citizenship and enforces contraction of rights. It is also aimed at tilting electoral scales in favour of the party ruling in Delhi and in 21 states of India.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)