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In 2024 alone, more than 2,06,000 Indians walked into a consulate somewhere in the world, surrendered their Indian passport, signed a form and ceased to be Indian under the law. The previous year, the figure was over 2,16,000. In 2022, it was just over 2,25,000. The Ministry of External Affairs informed Parliament during the winter session of 2024 that over 20 lakh Indians voluntarily renounced their citizenship between 2011 and 2024 — roughly half of them after 2020.

The Minister of State for External Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, was asked in Rajya Sabha for the income or occupation profile of the renunciants. He said the ministry did not maintain that data. The reasons, he added, were “personal and known only to the individual”.

The reasons are not, in fact, mysterious. India does not allow dual citizenship. When an Indian citizen voluntarily becomes the citizen of another country, Section 9 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, terminates her Indian citizenship automatically, without ceremony, without notice. To return to India, she will need a visa, like any foreigner, or she will need the consolation prize the state has, since 2005, offered in lieu of full citizenship: the Overseas Citizen of India card.

In August 1949, the Constituent Assembly debated draft Article 5, which carried a proviso that one who voluntarily acquired the citizenship of a foreign state could not be a citizen of India. The Drafting Committee elevated the proviso to a general principle, and so it became Article 9 of the Constitution: a flat, prohibitive sentence that closed the door behind anyone who chose to leave. A single member rose to suggest that dual citizenship might be permitted on the basis of reciprocity. The proposal was rejected swiftly and without much debate. Partition was two years old.

That this load-bearing wall has remained almost entirely undisturbed for seventy-six years is the puzzle. The Indian-origin population abroad is now 3.54 crore – the largest national diaspora in the world. In 2000, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government appointed a high-level committee under jurist L.M. Singhvi to study it. The Singhvi report, submitted in January 2002, was unequivocal: dual citizenship deserved consideration “in a positive and forward-looking spirit and without the........

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