It took India as many as eight years to formulate and enact its first Citizenship Act, 1955. Section 3 of the Citizenship Act deemed every person born in India on or after January 26, 1950, to be “a citizen of India by birth.” Nestled under Article 11 of the Constitution, the Act specified five conditions of citizenship: birth, descent, registration, naturalisation and incorporation of territory. An “illegal immigrant,” then was a foreigner who entered India without valid travel documents, or one who remained beyond the permissible time.
The constitutional promise of ‘secular citizenship’ was short-lived. Over the next three decades, migration from the Eastern Frontier would go on to become a question of national security rather than a provincial concern confined within the borders of Assam.
The root of the citizens versus outsiders’ movement can be traced to this one neglected remark by Rohini Kumar Chaudhuri in the Constituent Assembly debates in 1949: “Already I have been to Cachar and I have seen in that district, from which crossing the Barak river you come into India, there is trouble...[if the Amendment is enacted], this district of Cachar will be entirely one of district of Pakistan, and who will be responsible for giving one district which should have been kept in our province and which was retained after a good deal of fight but which will be sent to Pakistan?”
The Eastern Frontier question
Along its northern border, India negotiated a free movement agreement with Nepal in 1950, allowing all Indian and Nepalese citizens to freely live and work in either country.
The permit system of 1948 was not implemented for the then-East Pakistan border; “it would have prevented the easy movement of the millions of Hindus still in East Pakistan,” Mr. Kapur wrote. In the eastern frontier, the migration was seen as temporary, but by 1950, riots in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) sparked calls for an exchange of populations, war, and subsequently the “largest migration to date.”
These waves were several and successive: almost three lakh people moved to India and about 500,000 people crossed over to East Bengal. The movement sparked a wave of Muslims migrating into Assam. A letter from the Premier of Assam to Home Minister Sardar Patel betrayed this bias: Hindus migrated out of fear of “discriminatory treatment,” while Muslim migrants were considered to have more sinister intentions. The government in 1950 passed the Undesirable Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Bill, giving it power to expel any person or class of persons who entered Assam and whose stay was “detrimental to the interests of the general public.” Muslims were not mentioned specifically, but the law noted that the Act would not apply to any person migrating due to disturbances or fear of disturbances — thus, the East Bengali Hindus. The citizenship laws were “unable to reflect the situation” on the eastern frontier, wrote Mr. Kapur. Here, the logic of Partition involved a balancing act: to protect large minority populations from physical, economic and bureaucratic violence (as in Bengal), while simultaneously responding to local nationalisms such as the one in Assam.
The fate of the minorities — and the charged situation in East Bengal, West Bengal, Assam and Tripura — worried both governments. Though citizens of Pakistan, “[minorities in East Pakistan] were certainly [India’s] concern to the extent they had security; if not, measures have to be devised to give them security,” Mr. Nehru said in the Parliament on March 17, 1950.
“The case of Assam seemed to be special in terms of the migration of both the Hindus and Muslims, which at that time was understood as temporary without being challenging. ”Paramjit S. Judge, in “Citizenship and Minorities in the Constituent Assembly Debates: Making Sense of the Present”
India and Pakistan engaged in negotiations, to ensure the governments gave “complete equality of citizenship” and an assurance of all “democratic rights … without distinction” to the populations of both dominions. It culminated in the famous Nehru-Liaquat pact signed on April 18, 1950. There, the government relied on inter-war minority rights precedents set by European countries, and through negotiations, established categories of “minorities” and “citizens,” an ambiguous distinction. The Nehru-Liaquat pact, also known as the Delhi Agreement on the Rights of Minorities, was signed on April 18, 1950. Mr. Kapur noted that for “right-wing members, both within and outside Nehru’s cabinet, the pact amounted to a betrayal.”
The Liaquat–Nehru Pact signed on April 18. 1950. The bilateral treaty between India and Pakistan allowed refugees to return to dispose of their property, unrecognised forced conversions and confirmed minority rights. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
The government on December 15, 1949, also passed the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, to deal with the gendered toll of the Partition. Different statistics show at least 75,000 women were abducted from both sides (the real numbers may be much more grim) . Anupama Roy, in her book Mapping Citizenship in India, pointed out the Hindu and Sikh women recovered from Pakistan “were differently positioned from Muslim women: the latter were “taken into custody” and placed in detention camps in India, whereas the former were restored to their “homes.” “Muslim women who had been ‘recovered’ and sent to camps were constituted as impure body populations who had no claims to Indian citizenship,” she wrote.
The impact of the Bangladeshi Liberation movement and Assam Accord
The pace of migration only sped up with the Bangladeshi Liberation movement, leading up to a point “where their presence became ‘illegal,’” observed Ms. Roy. Conflict and caution gripped the newly-carved nations. Riots in East Bengal in January 1964 triggered clashes in parts of West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa; India eventually restricted migration, months before India and Pakistan would go to war. Matters became complicated because of both geography and socio-cultural identity; that unauthorised Bangladeshis could become Indian voters aggressively kindled the Assam agitation.
An article in The Hindu published on May 22, 1957, commenting on Indian citizenship rights to other nationalities on a reciprocal basis. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
The Citizenship Act of 1955 would soon see its first amendment — a legal intervention engineered by communal tension, massacre and a war.
Bangladesh gained freedom on the early hours of March 26, 1971— and this marked the beginning of immigration of several Bangladeshi individuals into India— specifically into Assam. Locals were concerned about the dilution of Bengali culture and identity by the largely Muslim immigrants, and protests ensued, often violent and with communal undertones, from 1979 to 1985.
The communal tone of the protests was highlighted by Partha S. Ghodh in a paper: “The massacre of about 4,000 Muslims at Nellie, the assembly elections that brought the Hiteshwar Saikia-led Congress Party to power, and the passage of the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act (IMDT) by Parliament when all the members of Parliament from Assam were on a boycott — all in 1983, clearly indicated that the matter of Bangladeshi migration was much beyond the simple logic of Indians versus foreign.”
The current that culminated in the signing of the Assam Accords originated in 1980. On February 2, after a year of violent agitation, the AASU sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi expressing apprehension about the continuing influx of foreign nationals from Bangladesh into Assam. A dialogue began, resulting eventually in what was the Assam Accord.
The six-year-long Assam agitation that saw some of the worst carnage in free India ended with the signing of a “Memorandum of Settlement” in New Delhi. At the signing of the accord were (left to right): Mrs. P. P. Trivedi, Chief Secretary of Assam, and Messrs. R. D. Pradhan, Union Home Secretary, P. K. Kaul, Cabinet Secretary, Rajiv Gandhi, Prime Minister, S. B. Chavan, Union Home Minister, P. K. Mahanta, AASU President, B. K. Phukan, AASU General Secretary and Biraj Sharma, AAGSP Convener. on August 16, 1985. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
The Assam Accord was a memorandum of settlement (MoS) signed on August 15, 1985 between the government of India, government of Assam, All Assam Students Union (AASU), and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad. This Accord was finally signed when Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, marking an end to the six year agitation to detect and deport illegal residents from the State.
The Prime Minister, Shrimati Indira Gandhi listening to one of the inmates of Chawlkhowa relief and rehabilitation camp in Darrang District of Assam on March 31, 1983. | Photo Credit: PIB
The Foreigners Issue in Clause 5 of the MoS stated that all persons who came to Assam before January 1, 1966 would be regularised. Those arriving between January 1, 1966 and March 24, 1971 would be detected in accordance with relevant laws and removed from the electoral rolls from 10 years. After 10 years, their names would be reinstated in the electoral rolls.
Those who come after 1971 were simply deemed illegal immigrants. Subsection 8 of Clause 5 stated that foreigners who came to Assam on or after March 25, 1971, would continue to be detected, deleted and expelled in accordance with law.. Meanwhile, clause 6 assured constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to “protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social, linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people.”
Also read: 1985: Assam Accord signed
Another amendment was later made in the citizenship law, inserting a new requirement into the provisions relating to citizenship by birth, such that only individuals born before July 1, 1987, were citizens regardless of their parentage. To be a citizen by birth, a person born in India between 1987 and 2003 would need to have one parent who is an Indian citizen. Further, persons were deemed ineligible for citizenship by birth if one of their parents was an illegal immigrant at the time of the person’s birth.
Although the discord in Assam over the migrant inflow was largely due to concerns over dilution of Bengali identity, ethnicity and language, the term “illegal immigrant,” as its definition stood, broadly referred to Muslim-majority Bangladeshi immigrants. Thus, the move covertly carved out a religion-based exception to a law of citizenship which, till then, was religion-neutral.
Further amendments were in the wings. The Citizenship Rules were amended to exclude ‘minority Hindus with Pakistani citizenship’ from the definition of ‘illegal migrants’— thus excluding Hindu migrants from Pakistan who had entered Pakistan-bordering Indian States like Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab from the operation of any of the consequences that were to befall illegal immigrants.
Niraja Gopal Jayal in her 2022 paper notes that, “The amendment to the law smuggled in a religious category covertly; the amendment to the Rules did so explicitly.”
Citizenship and the passport question
An intriguing sidebar: while questions of citizenship were being deliberated and dealt with in different fora, there was also the question of who had the right to possess an Indian passport. The answer to this, too, proved to not be straightforward. Post independence till 1967, the Indian government engaged in a discretionary process of granting of passports. This was prompted, among other things, by the fact that Indians were granted British subject or Commonwealth citizen status prior to 1955, and restriction was thought to be beneficial from the British side, argues Kalathmika Natarajan in a paper authored in 2022.
India, too, was concerned about who would represent the nation on the global stage, particularly after several years of colonialism and servitude by Indians in other British territories. This discretionary granting of passports, however, was found to exclude the lower class and the lower castes.
It was not till 1967 that the Supreme Court held that the right to hold a passport and travel abroad was a fundamental right for every Indian.
Into the 21st century and a shift from soil to descent
The Assam Accord had already set in motion a current of change; it had altered the law of citizenship in Assam, seeding in currents of jus sanguinis into what had earlier largely tilted towards jussolis. It also confirmed that a law of uniform citizenship across the country could be challenged, and pieced apart.
The coming decades continued along this path. If an amendment in 2003 brought in a concrete definition of an illegal migrant, the 2019 amendment further entrenched “definitively the move from soil to blood as the basis of citizenship and openly introduces a religious category into a religion-neutral law”, as Ms. Jayal notes in her 2022 paper. She further argues that the roots of this “were already prefigured in earlier amendments to the law on citizenship.”
The Citizenship law, “initially a product of political compacts with the then ruling Congress party on the vexed question of immigration in Assam, came to be more aggressively politicized by the BJP,” she adds.
References:
- Visaria, P.M. (1969) ‘Migration between India and Pakistan, 1951–61’, Demography, 6(3), pp. 323–334. doi:10.2307/2060400.
- A. N. Sinha, 1958. “Law of Citizenship and Aliens in India,” India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, , vol. 14(3), pages 253-269, July.
- Kapur, M. (2021). India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The Statelessness & Citizenship Review, 3(1), 208–35. Retrieved from https://statelessnessandcitizenshipreview.com/index.php/journal/article/view/265
- Jayal, N.G. (2022) ‘Reinventing the republic: Faith and citizenship in India’, Studies in Indian Politics, 10(1) pp. 14-30, doi: 10.1177/23210230221082799.
- Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol 11 (May–June 1949) (‘Nehru Selected Works’);
- The Hindu Archives
