Citizenship imbroglio

Citizenship regimes, law & belonging: the CAA & the NRC Anupama Roy Oxford university press Rs.1,495 Pages 270 The power of the State to determine membership of political communities and people’s power to challenge the State are discussed In Citizenship Regimes, Law, and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC, Anupama Roy examines the form and content of recent changes to citizenship laws in India by placing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA, 2019), the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and the Land Border Agreement (LBA, 2015) in their historical, ideological, and political contexts. The power of the State to determine one’s membership of a political community and the people’s power to challenge state power are the two types of powers that Roy alludes to at the beginning of the book. These allusions are elaborated with reference to two historical moments. The first moment was the people’s non-violent resistance in the South African province of Transvaal led by Mahatma Gandhi against state power. The people, largely Indians, were protesting against the imposition of the Transvaal Registration Act (1906) because it created an identity card for non-whites, who wanted to reside in Transvaal. But the identity card involved profiling Indians with photo mugshots and fingerprints, which the protesters believed was an affront to their dignity as they were being treated like criminals. The second moment is borrowed from Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story, Toba Tek Singh. In the midst of the violence wrought by the Partition of India in 1947 and discord between the newly-formed nations of India and Pakistan on most matters, the two governments concurred on the exchange of ‘lunatics’. The inmates of the lunatic asylum however resisted the madness outside. They refused to be boxed into either India or Pakistan. If Partition created new boundaries for India and Pakistan, the madness of Partition violence smudged the boundaries between lunacy and rationality. The two moments from the early and mid-20th century display the expansive power of the State to impact affective ties. At the same time, they reflect the power of the people to resist the State, and raise questions about the relationship between legal rationality and the power of the law. Those moments have found a new iteration in the 21st century. In chapter one titled Hyphenated Citizenship: The National Register of Citizens, Roy contends that NRC through the judicial route and the CAA through the legislative route introduced two distinct ways of determining Indian citizenship. The NRC in Assam became a citizenship register for people of Assamese origin as well as for identifying ‘illegal migrants’, who were incarcerated in detention centres. CAA made religion a criterion for determining those amongst illegal migrants who were eligible for Indian citizenship by naturalisation. Chapter two is titled Bounded Citizenship: The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, where Roy examines the discourses surrounding the CAA and notes that the category of ‘illegal migrant’ had acquired a connotation that differs from the NRC. While the CAA sought to stretch citizenship safeguards to people facing religious persecution,…