# Muslims As India’s Second Class Citizens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODDfS3TZeI8

[00:00] Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual's citizenship status and in determining their access to welfare provisioning.
[00:09] The RSS ideal of a hierarchy of citizenship in the Hindu Rashtra.
[00:17] 2019.
[00:18] [music]
[00:18] And that amendment is very well known to all of us, including to the youngest members of the audience here, offered fast-track citizenship [music] to migrants other than Muslims and introduced a formal religion-based differentiation into secular law.
[00:40] I wish I could say I was happy to be here and speaking on this subject.
[00:44] It's an unfortunate time that we're living in.
[00:47] The one thing that I am very happy about is that we have a large number of young people in the audience because all of these ideas that we're discussing today are going to be more important for your.
[01:00] Generation.
[01:09] As we all know, citizenship is a hot button topic across the world today.
[01:15] President Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship has just been struck down a few days ago by the US Supreme Court.
[01:25] Here in India, both the Constitution and the Citizenship Act 1955 enshrined the principle of unconditional jus soli citizenship, that is citizenship based on birth on the soil of the country.
[01:45] However, slowly and incrementally, we've been moving away from the principle of unconditional jus soli for some decades now.
[01:55] The foundational conception of universal equal citizenship in our constitution.
[02:00] And in the law on citizenship was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship.
[02:09] That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced as we speak by a presumption of universal alienage.
[02:22] The presumption of alienage is the principle underlying the NRC.
[02:27] It is the principle underlying the SIR.
[02:31] It is also the principle underlying the latest salvo against passport holders who can be excused for wondering if they might have been considered citizens if they didn't have passports that don't certify their citizenship.
[02:45] The presumption of alienage is finding expression in different aspects of governance and with alarming regularity.
[02:53] One day, it is an amendment to the law on citizenship.
[02:55] Another day, it is a new method for the routine task of revising.
[03:01] Electoral rolls.
[03:03] Yet another day, it is a throwaway comment about whether passports constitute proof of citizenship or not.
[03:10] But all of these are tending to the same purpose, the same objective, the presumption of alienage.
[03:19] But who gets the memo and who doesn't is for the most part a function of one's identity, religion, caste, class, gender, tribe, and so on.
[03:30] Occasionally, there is a black swan event such as the story of the journalist R. Jagannathan, but for the most part, this is precision targeting.
[03:40] So, how did we get here?
[03:42] This is one of the two critical aspects of the citizenship question that I will be speaking on this morning.
[03:49] Question of who is or can be or to be, an Indian citizen.
[03:55] I will also reflect secondly, and a little more briefly, on how equally or not the rights of citizenship are.
[04:02] Distributed across the citizenry.
[04:05] The influence of both RSS ideology and BJP policies and practices on the first aspect, the first question, that is who is or can be a citizen, is more significant, but in the present time, this also has consequences for the second.
[04:23] And in both aspects, the RSS vision fundamentally contradicts the constitutional vision.
[04:31] So, who is, can be, or to be, an Indian citizen?
[04:34] The RSS vision of this question is fundamentally anchored, as all of us know, in Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva, 1923, especially the distinction he makes between Punyabhumi and Pitribhumi.
[04:48] The RSS, as we also know, sees the work of the partition as incomplete, Indian Muslims as a blot on the body politic, who can at best be treated on sufferance as second-class citizens.
[05:02] It construes citizenship as faith-based.
[05:06] In consonance with its idea of India as a Hindu majoritarian nation, a Hindu Rashtra, of which Hindus are natural citizens, while Muslims belong to Pakistan or Bangladesh or anywhere else.
[05:19] And perfecting this congruence between religion and territory is the object of their project of reinventing citizenship, which is obviously received a fillip with the coming to power of the BJP.
[05:35] This ideology has been the inspiration for the two most important amendments to the Citizenship Act 1955, amendments that were passed in 2003 and 2019.
[05:48] The first enacted by the Vajpayee government and the second by the Modi government.
[05:53] There was one amendment to the Citizenship Act before these.
[05:58] That was in 1985.
[05:59] And it was an amendment that gave effect to the Assam Accord.
[06:04] And this amendment did something important.
[06:05] It made jus soli conditional.
[06:08] This was the first move towards making jus soli conditional.
[06:13] That is, anybody born before July 1st, 1987 would be an Indian regardless of their parentage.
[06:19] But after this date, that is a person born even on Indian soil after July 1st, 1987 could become a citizen only if one of their parents was Indian.
[06:33] The amendment to the 2003 Act went much further.
[06:37] And was extremely consequential.
[06:39] It did three things.
[06:41] First, it did away even with conditional jus soli.
[06:45] It made ineligible for citizenship any person born in India who had one parent who was an, within quotes, illegal migrant at the time of their birth.
[06:56] And the term illegal migrant was code for Bangladeshi or Muslim migrant.
[07:04] Second, the rules appended to the Act were amended such that the stigma of the
[07:11] The term illegal migrant would no longer attach to Hindu migrants who had come in from Pakistan into the border states on the west of India.
[07:19] Um, that is Gujarat and Rajasthan for the most part.
[07:24] So if the amendment to the Act smuggled in a religious category covertly by the use of the term illegal migrant, the amendment to the rules did so explicitly by exempting Hindus from the stigma of the label of illegal migrant.
[07:43] A third thing that the 2003 amendment did was that it introduced the national population register and the national register of Indian citizens.
[07:55] 2019, and that amendment is very well known to all of us, including to the youngest members of the audience here, offered fast-track citizenship to migrants other than Muslims and introduced a formal religion-based.
[08:11] Differentiation into secular law.
[08:14] The cumulative effect of these amendments has been to stigmatize and exclude Muslim citizens in a way that abandons the constitutional vision of universal equal citizenship in favor of the RSS ideal of a hierarchy of citizenship in the Hindu rashtra.
[08:35] In this way, the history of citizenship law shows a gradual move from unconditional jus soli from the time of the adoption of the constitution through to the Citizenship Act and beyond to conditional jus soli to what we are now in which is more or less well jus sanguinis and accretion over time.
[09:00] The question of citizenship is now yoked to the service of a majoritarian agenda approximating Savarkar's dream.
[09:08] So, if we are to envision the possibility, which is what we are here.
[09:12] To envision as Professor Devi has got us all together to talk about this in a futuristic sense.
[09:19] If we are to envision the possibility of more propitious circumstances, how might we think about the reconstruction of citizenship?
[09:29] So, here's a wish list.
[09:30] It could be considered a fantasy.
[09:31] It could be considered a delusion, but for whatever what worth India should in my view at any rate, once again affirm and restore the principle of unconditional use solely in the original pre-amendment version of the Citizenship Act of 1955.
[09:50] This would require the repeal of amendments, especially those of 2003 and 2019.
[09:57] Undoing 2003 may be tough because it is already part of a complex legal, judicial, administrative web that includes the Assam NRC and the Foreigners Tribunals.
[10:12] Lawyers, uh, and I'm not a lawyer,
[10:14] Lawyers would need to weigh in on how and to what extent this can be undone, perhaps using a legislative instrument akin to the one that was used, uh, last December for some other legislations called the Repealing and Amending Act of 2025.
[10:30] NRC and NPR should definitely be scrapped, as should the SIAC, which has become a proxy for these.
[10:37] The Supreme Court has yet to pronounce on the legality of the CAA 2019, but this amendment should be repealed.
[10:45] And the nomenclature of illegal migrants needs to be changed in the language of the Citizenship Act and in the rules.
[10:54] There's an insidious distinction which must be gotten rid of, the distinction between illegal migrants, quote, for Muslims, and refugees, quote, for Hindus.
[11:02] This must go.
[11:05] Let me turn now to the second aspect of citizenship that I mentioned.
[11:13] Namely, the distribution of the rights.
[11:14] Of citizenship.
[11:17] Who is included, who is excluded?
[11:19] [gasps]
[11:19] Paternalism is a core element of the public philosophy of the ruling party and its mothership, the RSS.
[11:26] It is expressed in its political discourse, in policies emphasizing citizens' duties rather than rights from the highest levels of government and in fact the highest levels of the judiciary as well.
[11:39] Two recent Chief Justices of India have championed the view that real rights come from the performance of duty.
[11:46] The Prime Minister himself has chided citizens for having wasted time over the last 75 years talking about rights and fighting for rights.
[11:55] This he said, along with the neglect of their duties had played a huge role in keeping India weak.
[12:02] So state paternalism and the emphasis of on citizens' duties is in sharp contrast to the constitutional provision of a range of equal rights for all citizens, fundamental rights from freedom of.
[12:16] Speech to freedom of worship and many others, supplemented over a period of time by a range of statutory rights, forest rights, the right to information, the right to work, food security, etc.
[12:29] Today as we know, civil liberties are thoroughly compromised.
[12:33] Even the equal political right to vote has been undermined by the draconian way in which the SIR is being implemented.
[12:42] Social economic rights, even to the modest extent that they were available, are presently under threat.
[12:51] Two aspects of the attrition of social and economic rights in particular are notable.
[12:57] First, the philosophy of welfare, which is now a philosophy of welfare as charity rather than as entitlement or right.
[13:07] And second, access to welfare getting tied to the question of who is an Indian.
[13:15] This is the context in which the ongoing.
[13:17] SIR is extremely important.
[13:19] Up until now, one's registration as a voter was limited to determining one's eligibility to vote.
[13:29] Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual's citizenship status and in determining their access to welfare provisioning.
[13:40] So, the SIR has implications for both the civil and political rights of citizens in the form of mass disenfranchisement, but also in terms of their social and economic rights.
[13:50] Welfare provisioning is now contingent on your name being in the electoral rolls, and neither the Supreme Court nor the Calcutta High Court have seen fit to correct this.
[14:04] The relationship between citizenship and the vote has been inverted from citizenship being the condition of the vote to the vote becoming an instrument for sifting citizens for inclusion and exclusion, for casting doubt on the.
[14:19] Citizenship of citizens, especially those who bear identities that are increasingly at the behest of majoritarian politics being disparaged in our society.
[14:33] So, to borrow the title of a once famous tract, what is to be done?
[14:38] First and most famous and most urgently, the delinking of the voter list and welfare provisioning to mitigate the worst effects for those excluded by the SIR.
[14:51] But remember that the BJP's citizenship project is not a state-directed project alone.
[14:57] It is as much a societal project underwritten by a concerted ideological campaign, by grassroots mobilization, with impunity for vigilante violence and hate crimes.
[15:10] So, the redress, as we think about it, cannot be directed only or exclusively at institutions, laws, and policies.
[15:19] It must also involve civil society.
[15:23] The toxicity that has been systematically made to penetrate society is outside the domains, somewhat outside the domains of institutions, laws, and policies.
[15:32] The revival of civil society is imperative for addressing it.
[15:38] And the tasks before civil society are formidable.
[15:42] It has to focus on the restoration of civil liberties and freedoms, on the restoration and the expansion of social and economic rights, and the fostering of intercommunity relations and the removal of intercommunity distrust.
[15:59] This will entail systematically combating misinformation in order to revive even a semblance of the secular project, even as we recognize that it was never particularly robust.
[16:13] The one institutional domain that needs attention in this context, apart from the Election Commission, of course, is the judiciary.
[16:18] In an earlier time, the alliance between the judiciary and civil society had enabled the recognition of.
[16:26] Many rights.
[16:29] Such an alliance is once again needed for the restoration of the fundamental rights of citizenship, including and especially social and economic rights.
[16:36] So, let me, in closing, return to what I started out with, which is the presumption of alienage.
[16:43] The Citizenship Act of 1955 provides no independent mechanism for identifying aliens.
[16:50] If someone is suspected of not being a citizen, it is the state that has to prove the allegation.
[16:55] The onus of proof lies on the state.
[16:59] The burden of proving that someone is not a citizen lies on the state.
[17:04] This is in contrast to a colonial law, which we don't seem to be talking about, and which is not clearly undergoing decolonization anytime soon.
[17:12] This is the Foreigners Act of 1946, which places the burden of proof on the individual charged with being a foreigner.
[17:21] This is also the case with the NRC, which effectively places an entire population under suspicion of alienage.
[17:29] There's another similarity between the Foreigners Act, the NPR, and the SIR.
[17:35] Under the Foreigners Act, any person, anyone, who has reason to believe that a foreigner has entered India without valid documents or is staying beyond the authorized period of stay, is duty-bound to inform the nearest police station within 24 hours.
[17:49] In the National Population Register, any individual can report their neighbor as a foreigner, and the neighbor then becomes doubtful, a doubtful person, a D.
[17:59] The SIR takes this to another level altogether.
[18:01] Anyone from the same assembly constituency can submit any number of objections to the voter status of any number of people.
[18:12] And this provision can and has encouraged vigilantism.
[18:14] From Madhya Pradesh to Bihar, the targets of vigilantism have been overwhelmingly Muslim voters.
[18:23] So, before we can think about reconstruction, Professor Devi, with respect, we need we may need to think.
[18:29] About deconstruction, not in the sense in which literary theory and cultural studies use the term, but in the sense of undoing the damage that has been done.
[18:39] Um, this implies not just um staccato recognition of the multiple and discrete ways in which constitutional democracy is being undermined on a daily basis, but in making the connections between what appear to be unrelated issues, but are actually not.
[18:57] The question of citizenship is one such issue.
[18:59] Apparently innocuous developments are occurring in different, ostensibly distinct, domains, but they are all converging on a common purpose, to make Muslims into de jure second-class citizens.
[19:12] Their de facto second-class citizenship has already been achieved through the normalization of discrimination, everyday discrimination, through the emboldening of vigilante violence, through the impunity for vigilantes, and and so on.
[19:24] The task now seems to be to render India's largest.
[19:30] Minority as not just de facto, but also de jure second-class citizens.
[19:36] Thank you.
[19:37] [applause]