Citizenship is a test One may never Pass

Samar Halarnkar

From Maharashtra to Assam, India’s offensive against “infiltrators” has begun, unannounced and arbitrary.

Many abandon fragile livelihoods to flee homewards to avoid detention and deportation. Some can do little as loved ones disappear or are carted off to detention. Others forsake daily wages for days or weeks to look for documents that might protect their vote and existence as Indians. Lives are upended, trauma is inflicted and families are torn apart.

In this quest for identity, millions face the prospect of being reduced to second-class citizens–or stripped of citizenship altogether.

Why the government is subjecting some of its most vulnerable citizens to fear and displacement became clear on Independence Day, when the prime minister–without uttering the “M” word–announced the launch of a “high-power demography mission,” making what was unofficial, official.

“Today, I wish to warn the nation of a grave concern and challenge,” said NarendraModi. “As part of a deliberate conspiracy, the demography of the country is being altered. Seeds of a new crisis are being sown. These infiltrators are snatching away the livelihoods of our youth. These infiltrators are targeting our sisters and daughters. This will not be tolerated.” And so on.

Modi offered no details on how the mission would work. But trace the arc from past events to unfolding developments, add in the disparate actions already underway against suspected “infiltrators” and a clearer, if unsettling, picture emerges.

Some of the current battles over citizenship have reached the courts, but what people hear is not encouraging because the very documents that people are frantically trying to collect may be of limited or no use, if recent court observations are anything to go by.

The Supreme Court said last week that voter IDs, Aadhar and PAN cards are not proof of citizenship but proof of identity to access services. Fair enough, but the Election Commission has now made clear its intention to reject these documents because it treats the verification of voter rolls as a test of citizenship.

The Bombay High Court said the same thing, although here the judges explained what might help prove that you are a citizen–“verification of the process through which these were obtained”.

 This means one must produce the documents that she/he got the documents in question–a circular nightmare. To update or reconfirm them, one may have to provide proofs that they depend on those very documents: a chicken-and-egg trap, a classic bureaucratic paradox. This is the burden now placed on millions of Indians from Muslim and other disadvantaged communities, desperate to prove they are Indian.

On August 5, a Lok Sabha MP asked the government what identity cards were “admissible proof” of citizenship. This was the government’s reply: “The Citizenship Act, 1955, as amended in 2004, provides that the Central Government may compulsorily register every citizen of India and issue a National Identity Card to him. The procedure for the same has been laid down in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Card) Rules, 2003.”

On August 12, for the second time in a week, another Lok Sabha MP asked the government to specify the documents required to prove Indian citizenship. Again, the government wouldn’t list these documents, only saying, “The citizenship of India is governed under the provisions of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and rules made thereunder.”

In other words, the government wants its most vulnerable citizens to produce documents that prove citizenship but won’t accept its own identity documents and won’t say what specifically proof of citizenship is.

The national identity card that the government spoke about in the Lok Sabha does not exist. At this time, only a passport appears to be definitive proof of citizenship–although even a passport does not prove citizenship by birth–and getting one involves the same bureaucratic paradox that will collapse under the heightened scrutiny that Modi now promises.

If Modi’s “high power demography mission” gets going, expect everyone to scramble for documents and line up to bear the mass disruption that his government loves. Remember the queues of demonetisation and the long journeys of Covid. For those already running the formidable gamut of proving citizenship, the legal justification is rooted in the days of Empire: if the state suspects you are not a citizen, the law places the burden on you to prove otherwise.

Around 6.5 million in Bihar were struck off the voter list revision, the exercise mutating into a covert citizenship test. In Assam, citizenship trials have pushed thousands into manufactured statelessness. Those excluded from the National Register of Citizenship in Assam are often undocumented Indian residents rather than being traditionally stateless, with citizenship of no country.

Assam, as the home minister made clear in 2019, was never the endgame–it was a rehearsal. “NRC aanewalahai [The NRC will come],” Amit Shah warned, referring to a national deployment.

The Supreme Court agrees with the Election Commission that it must only enroll citizens in its hasty review of voter rolls in Bihar–except it is unclear when the commission became an arbiter of citizenship.

There was some relief to the harried people of Bihar when the court on August 14 ordered the commission to publish the names of all 6.5 million excluded Biharis and explain why they were removed. But that order must be applied to every upcoming voter verification that the Election Commission has planned in the coming months in West Bengal, Assam and elsewhere. Otherwise, arbitrary citizenship tests and mass disenfranchisement by electoral subterfuge will continue.

In any case, here is the Election Commission’s list of 11 approved documents for any new voter to be registered (and by default prove citizenship) in Bihar: domicile certificate, passport, birth certificate, caste certificate, Class 10 marksheet, forest right certificate, land/house allotment certificate, family register, national register of citizens (wherever it exists), identity card or pension payment order issued to regular employee or pensioner, and identity card or certificate or document issued by government, local authorities, bank, post office, public-sector companies or the Life Insurance Corporation before July 1, 1987.

Forget, for a moment, the hardship and agony this exercise caused.

If–or when–the government decides to start afresh on citizenship questions, rolls out the national identity cards it mentioned last week in the Lok Sabha, and launches a nationwide National Register of Citizens, hundreds of millions will be forced to unearth birth certificates and who knows what other papers reaching back how many generations to prove they belong to their own country.

[This an abridged version of an article first published in Article 14, of which Samar Halarnkar is the founding editor.]

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 12, Sep 14 - 20, 2025