The abiding mystery of Indian citizenship — is it another legal fiction?

So you think that the issues uppermost in the minds of those who rule us — or those who tell us what the rules are — would be the landslides in the Himalayas or Trump's tariffs or our global isolation? Well, you would be wrong, but you can be forgiven for thinking so, for that is how a rational, logic-driven nation should think. But we have lost that status for a decade now and have become a Blunderland of nonsense.

We are now firmly in the position of Lewis Carroll's Alice: 'If I had a world of my own everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it is. You see?'

You probably don't, so let me explain. The flavour of the season is none of the issues mentioned above: it is citizenship, something we thought had been decided 75 years ago by a liberal Constitution which allowed citizenship on grounds of Birth (jus soli), descent (jus sanguinis), naturalisation and registration. But, as Ambedkar said, any Constitution is only as good as those who are charged with implementing it — and that is why we are a Blunderland.

For the Constitution, though unamended in this respect, is being spray-painted in many parts of the country to ensure that certain sections of our vast population are denied citizenship. An attempt to do so through legislation some years back (the Citizenship Amendment Act) hangs in limbo, or the deep freeze which is the Registry of the Supreme Court, where inconvenient carcasses are kept for revival at a more appropriate time.

So now it is being done through a game of smoke and mirrors — a Bangladeshi here, a Rohingya there, an encroacher here, a Bengali-speaking person there. But the message is loud and clear — we are the new India, we no longer brush a problem under a carpet (which sometimes is the more prudent course), we now push it into Bangladesh in the dead of night, or into a detention centre under the gavel of a foreigner's tribunal.

But there's a problem: the Constitution has been shoved into the background, and a new set of (con)founding fathers have replaced it with their version of what constitutes citizenship.

The ball was set rolling in 2019 by the home minister himself who, through the CAA, implicitly propounded the theory that only a Hindu was entitled to citizenship of India. This doctrine has come in handy in Assam to include the few lakh Hindus excluded from the NRC there.

The RSS, not one to be left behind in the Hindutva sweepstakes, proclaimed that Hindustan was for Hindus alone, that an Indian citizen should possess both 'Bharatiyata' and 'Bharati swabhav (no prizes for guessing who would define these terms!).

The BJP's eminence grise, Ram Madhav, went a step further and demanded that India should have, not a democracy, but a 'dharma-cracy'. That would in effect transform us to a twin of a country like Iran, presumably with a different religion at the helm, of course. Believers of other religions could lump it, as second class citizens.

In short, as Seema Chisti opines in an article in The Wire (30 July), Indianness would be defined by faith and belief, notwithstanding the Constitution.

Enter the Deletion Commission of India (formerly the Election Commission of India), which finds conducting elections a boring job and so has now decided to identify citizens instead, something it is neither qualified nor mandated to do.

Not knowing which document to rely on for proving citizenship, it has prescribed an à la carte menu of 11 documents to choose from. It is another matter that 90 per cent of Indians do not possess these certificates, including (by his own admission in open court) a sitting Supreme Court judge!

Many experts estimate that this could result in the disenfranchisement of as many 20 per cent of voters in Bihar. This shortfall will, presumably, be made up by importing voters from UP and Madhya Pradesh, as a recent report by the Reporters' Collective seems to indicate. 

As if these versions of citizenship were not enough, the Supreme Court too has entered the fray by prescribing the test for a "true citizen" or "Indian" — not questioning the government on any matter relating to defence. This novel definition has been provided in a defamation case against Rahul Gandhi.

The Mumbai High Court has also pitched in by declaring that Aadhaar and EPIC do not confirm citizenship, adding for good measure that any protest relating to matters of any other country — such as the genocide in Gaza by Israel — does not behove any patriotic Indian citizen, who should be protesting on domestic shortcomings such as potholes and piling up of garbage etc. In other words, any protest which does not toe the official line is not the hallmark of citizen. 

So here's what all this pontificating boils down to: though there appears to be no dearth of definitions as to what constitutes citizenship, there is no official single document which can prove one's citizenship! (The government conceded as much last week in Parliament when, in response to a question as to which document establishes citizenship the MoS (home) evaded any answer on this specific point). We now need a bouquet of documents, with the lotus being the centrepiece.

And so, while you and I shuttle between the RSS, judiciary, Election Commission and Ram Madhav, it is no wonder that, in the last 13 years, more than 18 lakh Indians have decided that they have had enough and have surrendered their notional citizenship and migrated to other countries, more than 2 lakh in just 2024.

They have obviously decided that a PIO card in the hand is worth two citizenships in the bush. And more will continue to depart our eroding shores, unless the PM's new 'Demography Mission' isolates that particular Indian gene which defines 'Bhartiyata' once and for all. Meanwhile, don't give up on your dreams: keep sleeping, for did the Bard not insist that 'sleep knits up the rav'lled sleeve of care'?

Avay Shukla is a retired IAS officer and author of Holy Cows and Loose Cannons — the Duffer Zone Chronicles and other works. He blogs at avayshukla.blogspot.com

More of his writing can be read here