A History of Citizenship and Its Discontents 

 Sailen Routray

The ideas surrounding citizenship are as contested and debated in India now, as they were during the time the country's constitution was framed. In this context, the book 'Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History' promises to become essential reading. 

The book under review tries to make sense of the puzzle that is citizenship in India by discussing three aspects of the idea of citizenship that are answers to three questions: who is a citizenship (citizenship as legal status); what does a citizen have (citizenship as rights); and who/what does the citizen belong to (citizenship as identity). 

Traditionally, the book argues, jurisprudence has been the site of battles surrounding legal status of citizenship; civil society has been the locale of struggles surrounding citizenship rights; and, the rough and tumble of politics have been the stage of negotiations surrounding citizenship as identity. These three aspects are framed around three key debates.

The first set of debates surrounding citizenship in India revolve around a debate between two conflicting principles of citizenship: birth (jus soli) and blood-based descent (jus sanguinis). Citizenship in British India was inflected with the markers of race and class, and carried a moral and pedagogic purpose. The nationalist challenge to the colonial imperatives of citizenship (almost fictional in a classical sense), was not so much political as an effort to change the nature of the moral charge of citizenship. 

From obedience to the colonial state, for the nationalist elite, citizenship came to stand in for resistance to a state that did not respect the rights of the individual. This in turn stemmed from for an internalization of the liberal universalism that was the ethical justification of the Indian Empire. 

This universalist logic girded the ideas of the constitution that came into being in 1950. But the formal granting of a remarkable set of civil and political rights (including universal adult suffrage) was marred by the shadow of partition. Through legislative measures such as the Abducted Persons Act that tried to ‘recover’ Hindu women abducted by Muslims in Pakistan, the state subverted the constitution by providing a biological marker of citizenship for such women. 

Such an initial bias has become increasingly more pronounced. An egregious example of this is the stripping up of rights of long standing residents in Assam (with all the documentary evidence of citizenship) merely because they happen to be children of Muslim migrants from Bangladesh.

The vision of the constitution promulgated in 1950 was more secular and universalistic. The debates and politics that produced this document produced voluminous arguments about whether the mere granting of formal civic and political rights in a deeply stratified and iniquitous society like India was enough, or should the constitution grant a set of justiciable socio-economic rights such as the right to work as well. 

The principal objections to including socio-economic rights as justiciable fundamental rights in the constitution were framed around practicality and constitutional legality. As a final compromise, the constitution included substantive socio-economic rights in a separate section of the constitution called, ‘Directives Principles of State Policy’. 

These, although non-justiciable, expressed the fond desire by the makers of the constitution that the political would act as a transformative engine that would carry ‘the social’ marked by tradition and inequities into socio-political modernity. This transformation was never achieved.

But this debate still provides the infra-structure within which contemporary debates are carried out. For example, one of the key tropes through which the MNREGA (the law that guarantees right to work in India) has been critiqued is its ‘affordability’. A remarkable aspect of social citizenship in contemporary India is the fact that precisely when a certain movement of capital is poised to become hegemonic, a set of important socio-economic rights have been granted. These include the right to work, the right to food, and the right to education. The book frames this fact and discusses it in some detail, but fails to provide any substantive explanations of the phenomenon.

The third aspect of citizenship, that of identity, is discussed in the book through the concept of Group Differentiated Citizenship (GDC) as it maps out across the watershed of decolonization.  Some aspects of GDC related to identity such that the privileges granted to the ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (STs) were initially provided as benedictions of colonial rule, whereas others like the demand for separate electorates for Muslims stemmed from fears of the minority community regarding majoritarian rule. 

Although the formation of Pakistan made a section of the nationalist elite skeptical of GDC, the constitution provided full civic and political rights to Muslims and provided reservations and other protections to SCs and STs. Their overall effect has been to provide socio-political mobility to relatively small sections of the scheduled communities, without producing any significant and substantive improvements in the economic condition of these social groups.

In dealing with these three aspects of citizenship in India, the book takes a historical approach that maps the continuities and ruptures across the colonial divide. This magisterial history of citizenship in India suffers from two inadequacies though. 

First, it provides a history of citizenship without providing a history of the formal transformations of the state in India. Secondly, as an exercise of normative theory of politics, it hints at, but does not grapple with, a very important question: does the practice of politics exhaust ‘the ethical’ in a postcolony like India? The answers to this question have significant implications for the practice of citizenship in India. 

Despite these two reservations, it must be mentioned that the book braids together a diverse set of materials ranging from mid-colonial textbooks in civics, debates of the Constituent Assembly, judgements by various courts, reports by governmental agencies, and other diverse sources to provide a comprehensive and theoretically informed genealogy of the ideas and practices of citizenship in India. ‘Citizenship and its discontents’ promises to become mandatory reference material and a classic in the study of politics in the country.

Details About the Book: Niraja Gopal Jayal. 2013. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History.  Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, , 366+viii pp., Unpriced (hardback), ISBN 9780674066847

Note About the Review: A slightly different version of this review was first published in the journal Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 54(4) in the year 2016.