Commentary | Luna Sabastian, India’s Citizenship Amendment Act: Partition’s Fulfilment or Its Undoing?
On 11 March 2024, India’s Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah took to X (formerly Twitter) to notify the rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which was passed already in 2019. “With this notification,” Shah wrote, “PM Shri @narendramodi Ji has delivered on another commitment and realised the promise of the makers of our constitution to the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians living in those countries.” By “those countries” he meant Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, migrants from whose territories receive a path to Indian citizenship under the new CAA, provided they be from religions other than Islam. For the first time, as pointed out by Indian critics, the international press, Amnesty International, and petitions pending against its constitutionality in the Indian Supreme Court alike, the CAA introduced a religious stipulation into Indian citizenship law. Shah’s linking of the CAA to the secular constitution that B. R. Ambedkar drafted and India adopted in 1950 is therefore remarkable, to say the least.
The Constitution of India grants citizenship to those domiciled in India at its passage, provided they or their parents were born in India or permanent residents for at least five years. Coming out of the fray of Partition violence, or civil war, the Constitution also catered to the needs of the millions of migrants who had come to India from what, at the stroke of midnight on 14 to 15 August 1947, became Pakistan, by granting them Indian citizenship. Reversely, migrants from India to Pakistan forfeited their Indian citizenship, unless they returned. The Constitution names migrants from and to India. What it does not do is name Hindus and Muslims.
The CAA, for the first time, does. The act needs to be understood in relation to the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was implemented for Assam in 2013-19. The state situated in India’s extreme Northeastern tip, almost sequestered from mainland India by the interrupting bulk of Bangladesh, has long stood at the centre of concerns over immigration. Bengali labourers recruited by the British to work in tea estates streamed into Assam in the nineteenth century, after Indian independence followed by migrants and refugees from East Pakistan (Bangladesh since 1971). Responding to fears of population exchange, the loss of Assamese culture, and migrant influence on elections, the Immigration (Expulsion from Assam) Act of 1950, the Foreigners (Tribunal) Order of 1964, and the 1985 Assam Accord all provide for the expulsion of undocumented foreigners from Assam.
The National Register of Citizens for Assam that was conducted from 2013 onwards asked all residents to prove that they or their parents were in India before 25 March 1971, when the Bangladesh War of Independence against Pakistan began and millions of refugees came to India. “Illegal immigrants” are to be detained, deported, and their names struck off the electoral register. But for the poor and illiterate, producing the requisite documents to prove their legal status is notoriously difficult. As a result, the final NRC list returned two million “illegal” aliens for Assam, the majority of whom, to the apparent surprise of the ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP, are Bengali Hindus. To safeguard them, the Citizenship Amendment Act provides the exemption of anyone from the “Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014” from the status of illegal migrant, thus putting the citizenship of Indian Muslims alone on the line.
The population transfer between India and West and East Pakistan that occurred in and around 1947 and 1971 occurred on religious lines, with Sikhs and Hindus fleeing Pakistan’s two wings and Muslims fleeing India. And yet previous Indian citizenship laws never acknowledged the specificity of religion while making allowances for this migration. For instance, the 1950 Nehru-Liaquat Pact, while providing for the free movement of “migrants from East Bengal, West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, where communal disturbances have recently occurred,” insists that “the loyalty of the minorities is to the state of which they are citizens, and that it is to the Government of their own State that they should look for the redress of their grievances.” Similarly, the 1950 Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act exempts “any person who on the account of civil disturbances or the fear of such disturbances in any area now forming part of Pakistan has been displaced” and moved to Assam and India, from removal as an illegal migrant. It may be assumed that non-Muslims would have reason to fear civil disturbance in Pakistan, but the refusal to name religion persists.
“The elision of the difference between the Hindu religion and Indian citizenship, as a proxy for the Indian state, today is ominous.”
This refusal matters. It is the refusal to define India as the land of the Hindus. The elision of the difference between the Hindu religion and Indian citizenship, as a proxy for the Indian state, today is ominous. Is the CAA the fulfilment of Partition, the perfection of the population transfer that neither Jinnah nor Nehru wanted, and that remained incomplete in 1947? The notification of the rules that operationalised the act after four years of controversy was dubiously timed, at just a month away from the 2024 Indian general elections. The election year has also witnessed the consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, which solemnised the erection of a Hindu temple at the site of a sixteenth-century mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. Citing the temple or the CAA as its hallmark, commentators have begun to speak of the arrival of Hindu rashtra, or the Hindu state, that has been the dream of Hindu nationalism (or Hindutva) for a hundred years.
The Indian Constitution, when referring to India before independence and Partition, speaks of “India as defined in the Government of India Act, 1935.” It does not use the term that has since crept into citizenship parlance: “undivided India.” “Akhand Bharat,” in the Hindi rendering, was the major fighting term against Partition and Pakistan, wielded by the likes of Hindutva’s arch-architect V. D. Savarkar and officially adopted by his party, the Hindu Mahasabha. The dream of Undivided India has never left Hindu nationalism. Indeed, the BJP’s predecessor party, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or BJS, which was founded in 1951 by the ex-Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee, cited Akhand Bharat as its foundational first principle. The BJS openly called for the undoing of Partition in its election manifestoes of the 1950s and 1960s, and in its 1965 constitution. Recently, Mohan Bhagwat, chief of the RSS that is the major ideological force behind the BJP, reiterated the aim of Akhand Bharat. High-ranking BJP politicians have done the same.
The question is how Hindu nationalism can want to incorporate or annex that which it hates: clearly, not through compromise and mutual understanding. Rather, the erasure of Pakistan that is Hindu nationalism’s firm yet underarticulated dream seems to come about through an excess of the Hinduising of India itself. Buoyed by its success over the past ten years in making India Hindu, Hindu nationalism now feels confident to redraw the political map.
So, depending on how one looks at it, the CAA is a decisive step towards the fulfilment of Partition, by completing the population transfer of Muslims and non-Muslims between India and the two Pakistans. Or it is a step towards the undoing of Partition, by undoing the territorial settlement between India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Assam was a case study. The real test will come if and when the National Register of Citizens is applied to all of India. Then, as one commentator put it, we will have an “Indian Inquisition designed to tell true citizens from false ones.” For Muslims alone, this is a high-stakes game. Only they risk losing their Indian citizenship, since for most others there exists a Get Out of Jail Free Card in the shape of the CAA.
The online portal to apply for Indian citizenship under the CAA is now open. Detention centres are already built.
Luna Sabastian is Assistant Professor in History at Northeastern University London. She is a historian of modern Indian political thought, best known for her work on Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and Indian fascism. She is writing a book with the provisional title Indian Fascism: Race, Caste, and Hindutva.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Luna Sabastian, “India’s Citizenship Amendment Act: Partition’s Fulfilment or Its Undoing?,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, June 3, 2024. https://doi.org/10.52698/PRUV6217.