Denationalisation and discrimination in postcolonial India
| Author | Sumedha Choudhury |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13582291221113517 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International Journal of
Discrimination and the Law
2022, Vol. 22(3) 326–342
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13582291221113517
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Denationalisation and
discrimination in postcolonial
India
Sumedha Choudhury
Abstract
With the recent National Register of Citizens updating process in Assam (a northeastern
state in India) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019), there have been sig-
nificant changes to India’s citizenship laws and policies. This may create one of the world’s
largest stateless populations in modern times. These changes manifest the government’s
othering process of creating binaries of belonging and non-belongingness between the
majority Hindus and minorities (especially followers of the Islamic faith).
In this article, taking these recent changes to citizenship as a case study, I discuss how
India’s colonial past, the experience of partition, and the henceforth nation-building
contributed to perceiving the ‘citizen’primarily along Hindu majoritarian lines. I argue
that the nation-building process in India was based on retaining and simultaneously re-
establishing the ‘others’, thereby reinforcing colonial legacies in the structure and
functioning of the postcolonial state. Consequently, this article deals with two questions,
first, how the adoption of discriminatory citizenship laws and the risk of statelessness in
India is rooted in its complex history, the impact of British colonial expansion and the
postcolonial realities and second, what role ‘law’has played in the process.
Keywords
Citizenship, colonialism, denationalisation, discrimination, India, statelessness
Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, Melbourne Law School, Carlton, VIC, Australia
Corresponding author:
Sumedha Choudhury, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, University of Melbourne, 185 Pelham St,
Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia.
Email: sumedha@unimelb.edu.au
Introduction
There has been a revival of denationalisation by liberal democratic states over the last
decade (Gibney 2020).
1
Discrimination is a prominent feature of such denationalisation
processes. In a number of Western states, denationalisation is only lawfully permitted for
specific categories of citizens like the naturalised and dual nationals, overwhelmingly
with backgrounds from Muslim-majority countries (Doherty, 2019;Gibney, 2020).
Likewise, in the Global South, denationalisation processes are wrapped in discriminatory
practices based on ethnic-religious identities (Arraiza et al., 2020). Such identities that
define denationalisation processes are not devoid of the colonial past. Rather the nature of
denationalisation is significantly shaped by the experience of colonialism. Colonialism
prepared the grounds for discriminatory practices to be invoked and flourish in the
postcolonial states. The recently conducted process to update the National Register of
Citizens (NRC) in Assam (a state in northeastern India) is an example of this context.
In this article, I discuss how India’s colonial past, the experience of partition, and
nation-building contributed to the territorialisation of society, politics, and policies on a
cultural and religious basis. I argue that the nation-building process in India was based on
retaining and re-establishing the ‘others’, thereby reinforcing colonial legacies in the
structure and functioning of the postcolonial state. Ruling elites in contemporary India
continue to follow the colonial practice of ‘divide and rule’, of establishing similar
colonial dyads of self/others, civilised/barbaric, educated/uneducated, etc. (Jamil, 2020).
The ‘logics of coloniality, exceptionalism and racism to maintain systemic inequities and
embed oppressions’continue to prevail (Ahmad and Venkatesh, 2020).
The NRC updating process is open to a similar form of analysis reflecting colonial
lineages. I argue that the recent law and policy changes to citizenship manifest the
government’sothering process of creating binaries of belongingness and non-
belongingness between the majority Hindus and minorities (especially followers of
the Islamic faith, Muslims). I try to understand how law and legal institutions have
remained a fundamental tool in this othering process by introducing unlawfully dis-
criminatory citizenship controls. I show how the Muslims in India are othered by the state
through its apparent discriminatory laws and policies.
The NRC was created in 1951 to determine who was born in Assam and is, therefore,
an Indian citizen, based on the first census data conducted in Independent India in the
same year. In December 2015, the Supreme Court of India mandated updating the NRC in
Assam based on two writ petitions filed by Assam Public Works and Assam Sanmilita
Mahasangha & Ors. To be included in the NRC, residents were required to produce
official documents demonstrating their ‘Indian roots’on or before 24 March 1971.
2
As
many people belonging to the marginalised community failed to produce these docu-
ments, the final list published in August 2019 revealed that 1.9 million people had been
excluded from the NRC (Amnesty International, 2019). Thus, about 6% of the total 31
million population of Assam (as per the 2011 census) was excluded. These recent legal
and policy changes may create one of the world’s largest stateless populations in modern
times (Ratcliffe, 2019).
Choudhury 327
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