Reconfiguring Citizenship in Contemporary India

Jayal, Niraja Gopal

doi:10.1080/00856401.2019.1555874

Cited by 45 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Scholars and commentators have pointed out that these absences are akin to a "second partition," marking Muslims off from other religious groups in the subcontinent and affording them an inferior citizenship. 47 The protests also question proposals to introduce an India-wide National Register of Citizens, a National Population Register that asks for the date and place of one's parents birth, and a National Social Register, like the controversy-ridden biometric identification scheme, Aadhaar designed to streamline access to the Indian government's welfare schemes. Taken together, these legislative and administrative exercises significantly alter the scaffolding of Indian citizenship, where one's ancestry and origin story might always be questioned by the state, one's patterns of mobility and migration is rendered suspect, and where one's social, political and legal identity is always inadequately documented.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

Ramnath¹

2021

Itinerario

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This essay discusses the important contributions of three new works on Indian citizenship by Ornit Shani, Uditi Sen, and Oliver Godsmark. Their books discuss the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the framing and inauguration of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the preparation of voter rolls and the first democratic elections, and linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, alongside questions of refugee rehabilitation, counterinsurgency measures and rising ethnonationalisms. The emphasis is not only on the legal regimes of national citizenship, but also how it is unevenly mapped and experienced. This emphasis on territoriality is an invitation to ask questions about continuity and change in the transition from empires to nation-states, as well as invented pasts and imagined futures that transcend national borders set up after the end of colonial rule.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

Ramnath¹

2021

Itinerario

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“…In 2004, the BJP‐led NDA coalition amended the Act so that people with ‘one parent who was an illegal migrant at the time of their birth would not be eligible for citizenship by birth’. As Jayal explains ‘[s]ince most of the migrants from Bangladesh were Muslims, this covertly introduced a religion‐based exception to the principle of citizenship by birth, undermining the principle of jus soli’ (2019, p. 35). This requires us to score India as medium before the election of the single party BJP government.…”

Section: Formal Measure 2 Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

How can we model ethnic democracy? An application to contemporary India

Adeney

2020

Nations and Nationalism

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The status of India as the world's largest democracy is often lauded, but the re‐election of the overtly Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2019 has increased concerns about the threat to India's multinational democracy and the rule of law. India is not the only democracy facing challenges related to majoritarian nationalism; there has been a worldwide rise in the language of majority ‘rights’ in democratic systems. The importance of analysing the extent to which the rights of majorities are being increasingly institutionalized within democratic systems has therefore increased. It is vitally important to identify whether tendencies toward ethnic democracy are increasing (and the conditions under which they do so). There may well be red flags that emerge in democratic systems, heralding the potential direction of travel. This article proposes a methodology to identify degrees of ethnic democracy using a combination of formal and informal measures and illustrates it by assessing India through an examination of anti‐Muslim policies and rhetoric.

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“…Several scholars and anti‐CAA protestors have called the CAA (Ministry of Law and Justice, 2019) a constitutional crisis (Faisal, 2020; Kaur, 2020; Nizaruddin, 2020; Roy, 2020; Sundaram, 2020). In the beginning, the Citizenship Act of 1955 possessed a progressive, inclusive, and pluralist character, but amendments made between 1986 and 2013 made citizenship more exclusionary and conditional (Jayal, 2019; Roy, 2010). Until 1987, citizenship was granted based on birth and required at least one parent to be Indian (Jayal, 2019; Mander, 2020; Roy, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism from the margins: How women are contesting the “othering” of Muslims through arts‐based resistance?

Kumar¹,

Kamble

2021

Gender Work & Organization

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This paper captures how a women's protest offered resistance to the ethnonationalist state's exclusionary citizenship policy that seeks to disqualify Muslims from citizenship rights and entitlements in postcolonial India. Since the pre‐pandemic period, Muslim women have been contesting this ideological play of the sovereign state power through various cultural and political framing of counter‐narratives through various art forms, including poetry, poetic practices, and graffiti. We argue that this arts‐based resistance has significant implication for how grassroots feminist movements discursively mobilizes theory and practice to build feminist consciousness and solidarity among this minority community as well as create coalitions and networks with broader communities of different faiths. Poetry, poetic practice, and graffiti provide the communicative platform to voice against injustice and violence by those in power. We contribute to the debates on writing differently by integrating the poems and graffiti as an empirical source that brings forth collective experiences to engender empathy and the hope to resist structures of hegemony.

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Reconfiguring Citizenship in Contemporary India

Cited by 45 publications

References 0 publications

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

How can we model ethnic democracy? An application to contemporary India

Feminism from the margins: How women are contesting the “othering” of Muslims through arts‐based resistance?

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