The Overseas Citizens of India: Law, Lives, and Institutional Practices

The Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) is a legal category introduced by an amendment in the Citizenship Act (1955) in 2003. This article locates the category of OCI in the contemporary landscape of citizenship in India by tracing the ideological framing of citizenship in 2003 when the OCI was given legal recognition as a status with ‘differentiated rights’, and then again in 2019–2021 following the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, when the status was hedged in with reasons of state. Migration is often seen as precipitating a ‘crisis’ in citizenship and most countries evolve different modalities for addressing it. These modalities make themselves manifest as distinct tendencies in citizenship laws, generating citizenship regimes embedded in specific ideological formations. The High-Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, which proposed the OCI, presented it as ‘dual citizenship’. Yet, the OCI fell short of being ‘dual’ citizenship. It merely allowed Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) who were citizens of other countries to obtain an Overseas Citizen of India Card (OCIC), which brought them specific entitlements including a life-long visa to travel to India. Dual citizenship is often seen as a reflection of ‘flexibility’ and the ‘choice’ that a mobile population has in negotiating its terms of ‘affective’ and ‘effective’ belonging. It also, however, reflects graded and uneven distribution of mobility and its recognition in citizenship laws. This article traces the uneven trajectory of the OCI in India through an examination of the debate over its legal contours, the political contexts in which the OCI took form, its elaboration through the intervention of courts and evisceration through amendments in law, alongside a mapping of how questions of ‘dissent’ and ‘loss’ of OCI status as well as ‘dual belonging’ figure in these debates.