‘Those who before the partition of Pakistan and India were citizens of this country’: Negotiating citizenship to inform nation-states

In much of social psychology, citizenship has been examined and understood in terms of how it proceeds from nationhood and how various versions of nationhood can be mobilised to exclude others. In this paper, we deviate from this line of scholarship to identify and examine practices by which constructions of citizenship are developed to inform nation-formation. We examine how versions of territory, national belonging, and history are intertwined in the construction of citizenship through a discursive and rhetorical examination of debates on Indian citizenship at two momentous occasions for India: the drafting of India’s constitution (1946-50) and the Citizen Amendment Act 2019. Analysis shows that citizenship policies were evaluated in terms of whether they realised the rights and entitlements of Hindus to the territory of India outside of the Indian nation-state. The findings then show that belonging to a territory is a salient resource in negotiating citizenship, and this can in turn work to support or undermine the idea of a nation-state.