Uneven Land: Territorial Differentiation in Citizenship Law in India

Citizenship as a legal status grants you membership and therefore access to the territory of the modern nation-state. It therefore follows that within the nation-state, laws granting citizenship should flow uniformly––flooding every square inch of the territory. In India, the Citizenship Act, 1955, governs the acquisition, termination, deprivation, and revocation of citizenship in India, and it applies to the entirety of India’s territory. Unitary citizenship in principle means that at any given point of time, the laws governing the gain and loss of Indian citizenship should apply uniformly across the nation-state’s territory. However, the Citizenship Act does not flow through India’s territory uniformly. On the one hand, the incorporation of territories such as Goa, Sikkim, and Daman and Diu years after India’s independence resulted in not only a delayed application of citizenship rules to these territories but also the creation of state-specific citizenship orders that allowed for the granting of citizenship to persons domiciled in these territories. For these territories, the Citizenship Act floods in at the moment of incorporation. On the other hand, in the state of Assam, the creation of Assam-specific citizenship provisions has created a distinctive (and exclusionary) citizenship regime, where the provisions of the Citizenship Act are refracted at the state boundary, with some rules (such as birthright citizenship) reflected away. This has interesting consequences for a country which has many internal migrants, a quasi-federal form of governance, and which is carved out of a subcontinent where racial, religious, and ethnic identities do not neatly map onto national borders. In this article, I will explore the impact of territorialisation on the experience of Indian citizenship, and how this has created a varied topography of inclusion and exclusion across this nation-state.