Book review: Niraja Gopal Jayal,Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy

With the backdrop of majoritarian nationalism threatening the founding pillars of democracy, Niraja Gopal Jayal, through the lens of ‘citizenship’, makes a convincing argument about the impending effects of the slow erosion of equality, liberty and fraternity in India. According to her, the repeated assaults on the minorities—who are either subjected to state violence against them or social, economic and political discrimination—have culminated in the understanding of what it is to be an Indian citizen. When the idea of Indian citizenship is conflated with the idea of a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (State) where only the majority Hindus are capable of being citizens, the promise of equal citizenship granted to all in the pages of the Constitution has weakened. Through the lens of citizenship, Jayal has argued that democratic citizen- ship based on principles of equality and universality is the only avenue out of this constitutional imperilment.

Jayal has previously written extensively on the journey citizenship has undertaken from ‘by [place of] birth’ (jus soli) to ‘by descent’ (jus sanguinis). The debates on this transformation are rooted in the religious divisions that even after partition cast a shadow. More recently, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) of 2019 grants fast-track citizenship only to a few selected groups of pre-1947 India (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians) from three Muslim majority countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh) and that reconfirms citizenship’s journey towards a faith-based conception. Besides the conflicts over the formal legal status (who can or cannot be citizens), Jayal makes an important contribution by analysing other forms of contestations, over rights and identities. She argues that even though welfare claims have led to the expansion of social citizenship rights, the role of the State in conferring rights is replaced by non-State agencies (international organizations, NGOs, etc.) that turn rights-bearing citizens into consumers or clients. As a result, universal equal citizenship is increasingly replaced by group-differentiated citizenship as a dominant mode of citizenship. In the name of ‘marking’ citizens into groups as ‘beneficiaries’ for welfare provisions, those disadvantaged—the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), Muslims and women—are continually reminded of their ‘backward status’. Even though these graded categories of people have access to special provisions, they end up living their lives in the ‘margins’, always with an inferior position to the real citizenship of the unmarked citizen. Therefore, Jayal recommends ‘democratic citizenship’ (p. 155) rather than inclusion as a way out of this hierarchy.

Citizenship Imperilled is mainly a collection of Jayal’s public lectures and individual essays published between 2012 and 2019, with the exception of the introduction and first chapter, which focuses on the CAA. Building her analysis on robust archival and ethnographic resources, her cry for recuperating democratic citizenship as an equal and universal mode of determining citizen identities reverberates throughout the book. While she strongly criticizes group-differentiated citizenship, as acquiring a deterministic identarian approach, she appeals for universal citizenship that creates a singular civic-national identity while simultaneously accommodating the claims of disadvantaged groups for protection and compensation for past marginalization. According to her, the criteria should be ‘by which different types of claims to differentiated citizenship can be arbitrated in a manner that is normatively just and satisfactory, and still leaves room for the practice of a universal conception of citizenship’ (p. 154). Jayal regards the debates on the CAA as an avenue for bringing back discussions around the lost idea of democratic republican citizenship. She notes that even though the CAA marks the moment when the ‘original idea of citizenship was legally extinguished’ (p. 2), it is also the moment ‘in which it appeared to have been recovered rather than irretrievably lost’ (p. 2).

Although Jayal makes strong arguments, providing concise explanations to bolster them, there are some weaknesses in her discussion. Her explication of citizenship being contested is repetitive (as she warns us: ‘in the detailing of the trajectory of legal citizenship … there are some unavoidable overlaps across first four chapters’) (p. 9). Second, she does not situate ‘citizenship’ within the context of neoliberal political economic reforms when the attitude towards citizens also got redefined. The ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’ who the citizenship laws declare to be ‘illegal’ (or ‘enemies’) are increasingly recruited as disposable labourers in the economy. They are denied the status of citizen, but this non-recognition did not prevent their utilization as cheap labour as and when deemed necessary.

That said, Jayal’s analysis adds significantly to the contemporary discourse on citizenship in India. Her robust analysis on the CAA, which led to the ultimate diminution of Constitutional law and principles, is worthy of note. The book also provides an overview of the state of majoritarian politics in India and the vilification faced by the minorities, especially Muslims.