Book review: Anupama Roy,Citizenship Regimes,Law,and Belonging: The CAA and the NRC

This book forms a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship on India’s transitioning citizenship framework in the last five years. The amendment of India’s Citizenship Act (CAA) in 2019, to provide opportunities to Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis to seek Indian citizenship after facing religious persecution in neighbouring states, has attracted criticism, specifically for the deliberate exclusion of Muslims, and has engendered widespread public protests. Simultaneously, legal and political efforts to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) currently implemented in the north-eastern state of Assam, have purportedly targeted migrants but were conducted as an exercise that resulted, in 2019, in disenfranchising almost two million people and rendering them stateless. Roy’s book begins with the identification of this transformation of the Indian citizenship regime as ‘…inconsistent with the constitutional imaginary’, producing ‘unprecedented opposition’ (pp. 3–4) across the state, in protests that were framed by affirmations of constitutional ideals and principles.

Roy’s book is a legal-anthropological account of these transformations, established through interviews with affected persons and public officials, as well as documentary sources including government reports, parliamentary debates, case law and archival material. She establishes the current NRC and CAA as one of several successive ‘regimes’ of citizenship, encompassing not only legal frameworks but also the political and ideological contexts of these transformations, and the way that laws are enforced within the state. In Roy’s analysis, there have been three such regimes: a legal affirmation of citizenship that occurred when the Constitution was enacted in 1949, amidst Partition, which she calls transformative citizenship; the introduction of ‘deferred’ and ‘residual’ categories of citizenship in the context of Assam, manifested by the enactment of the Illegal Migrants (Determination) by Tribunals Act (IMDT Act) in 1983; and the amendment of the Citizenship Act in 2003. Roy argues that instead of seeing these three legal changes as a linear evolution from the law of citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis) to citizenship by birthright (jus soli), we should see them as ‘representing constitutive sites for citizenship practices’, each of which produces specific practices by the state in effect (p. 5).

Roy’s book accordingly frames the NRC and CAA in historical context, both legal and political. Identifying the present regime of citizenship as being characterized by three aspects, Chapters 3, 4 and 5 analyse each in the context of these previous regimes. Chapter 3 is devoted to what Roy calls ‘hyphenated’ citizenship, specifically aimed at capturing the exceptional circumstances of citizenship in the state of Assam, and the implementation of the NRC. Roy argues that the requirement to produce documentary links to establish Assamese legacies and claim citizenship for the NRC, allows the state to accommodate Assamese identity within the general category of citizenship, creating space to allow conflicting claims to coexist, with the active involvement and support of courts. In Chapter 4, she examines the NRC, drawing from Walzer and Sadiq to define this regime as one defined by walls that separate communities on religious grounds, creating ‘bounded citizenship’. The NRC is consequently contextualized within its larger ideological framework, including the redefinition of Indian territory as a religious homeland, coupled with attempts at political and legal justification of exclusionary, religious-based identity framing, through Parliamentary debates. Chapter 5 is devoted to ‘liminal citizenship’ under the Land Border Agreement Treaty, emphasizing particularly the uncertainty that characterized citizenship for residents of enclaves located in India and Bangladesh, and the treaty in 2015 that sought to conclude this question between the two states. In a final chapter, Roy focuses on public contestation around these changes, characterized, in her account, by a deep engagement with constitutional ideas and principles. In Roy’s account, the constitution occupies public imagination not only as a legal charter, but also a ‘…historical legacy of ideas and icons integral to the national imagination, and as a source of consciousness of democratic citizenship…’ (p. 203). Through these four accounts, Roy establishes the history of current citizenship regimes as the product of successive ‘hinge points’ that establish bloodlines as the foundation for citizenship, and consequently the exercise of franchise and rights (p. 244).

Roy’s book joins a number of recent volumes by Niraja Jayal (2013), Shani (2018) and Ansari and Gould (2019), that re-examine citizenship in historical context, legal and political context, amidst the current legal changes, political debates and ideological conflicts in India, as well as work that particularly focuses on the NRC and CAA. It is, however, one of the first to provide a comprehensive, and scholarly account of contemporary conflict, protest and resistance against changes to Indian citizenship, and in doing so, provides a valuable resource for scholars. Roy’s chief contribution, however, is her intellectual framing of citizenship, historicizing present conflicts without defaulting to linear accounts that disguise the tremendous ideological and political transformations that accompanied legal amendments.

She begins her account with a reference to the story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’ by Sadat Hasan Manto, which tells of a man placed in an asylum, resisting relocation amidst the partition of India and Pakistan. Roy frames this story as a point between the following three poles: legal rationality, the state-drive force of law and the creative resistance to narrowing citizenship. In Manto’s story, the protagonist ends up in no-man’s-land, stateless, refusing to submit to legal processes that he sees as arbitrary, and absurd. In Roy’s scholarly account, the point between these three poles represents not only the reality of majoritarian politics enacted by state power and legal authority but also includes room for democratic dissidence, and what she calls a ‘zone of sustained inhabitation to guard against the breach of democracy’ (p. 250). It is, accordingly, a rigorous scholarly project on citizenship, as well as a hopeful account of democracy.