Mapping Citizenship in India

Abstract

This study contributes to the ongoing debate on the theory of citizenship. It traces the Citizenship Act of India, 1955 — from its inception, through various amendments (1986, 2003, and 2005), its connection with other significant laws such as the Abducted Persons Recovery and Rehabilitation Act (1949) and the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals Act (1983), and relevant judgments — to see how citizenship unfolded among differentially located individuals, communities, and groups. The book identifies the amendments in the Citizenship Act as transitions which are, however, not the manifestations of an irreversible, continuous historical process of progression, but moments which are framed by major historical choices and decisions. The liminal categories of citizenship, which emerged at the commencement of the Indian Republic in the context of the Partition, show that the question of legal membership remained a vexed one. Both the contest over citizenship and its resolution were embedded in processes of state-formation and institutional ordering, as seen in the ways in which institutions perceived, interpreted, and eventually resolved their respective powers of decision-making over citizenship matters. The amendments in 1986 and 2003 continued to embed citizenship in the politics of place-making and of neo-liberalism, marking out ethno-spaces and setting in motion processes by which the association of citizenship with descent is affirmed.

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