Citizenship is a vertical relationship between the individual and the state. Originally, citizenship used to signify a belief in certain liberal and republican ideas and did not have much to do with territory and status. Today, it is all about territory, status, and exclusion rather than inclusion. The Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam reportedly denied citizenship to people despite some possessing as many as 15 documents. The judiciary, too, has become quite restrictive in this regard.

In Shabbir Hussain’s (1951) case — a trader who got stuck in Lahore during Partition and returned to India only on a temporary permit but was subsequently arrested for overstaying in India — the apex court refused to treat him as a Pakistani national. Similarly, in Abdul Khader (1960), the Supreme (SC) Court refused to treat Khader as a foreigner despite his having a Pakistani passport. But in Izhar Ahmad Khan (1962), the court treated possession of a Pakistani passport as conclusive proof of Pakistani citizenship. By 2008, the Court had become even more restrictive when, in Razia Bergum, it held that even possession of an Indian passport was not sufficient proof of citizenship.

B R Ambedkar said that the citizenship provisions of the Constitution had given the Constitution’s Drafting Committee “a headache” and he did not “know how many drafts were prepared and how many were destroyed”. Yet, the citizenship topic was considered so settled that no constitutional law syllabus included it with prominence. After the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA), citizenship became the most important subject not only for law students but for the masses. Though the government enacted the CAA with great alacrity, it took five years to notify its rules, just prior to the 2024 general elections.........

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