Citizenship Deprivation and Majoritarianism

Radhika Mongia

“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.

Under the stewardship of the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), citizenship in India is currently under a sustained and unmitigated assault. A primary objective of this assault is to formally and legally define religious minorities, particularly Muslims, as noncitizens. These attacks complement and intensify the persistent assault on substantive dimensions of citizenship that Muslims and other minorities in India have long endured. 

In this essay, I discuss the deeply troubled and troubling terrain of formal citizenship in India. I focus on two recent events: First is a largely bureaucratic exercise called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that sought to ascertain the citizenship of every resident in the northeastern state of Assam by requiring applicants to submit documentary evidence. The exercise was completed in August 2019 and deemed nearly two million people noncitizens and, potentially, stateless. Second is the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019. Working as a de facto and highly selective refugee law, the legislation makes provisions for people of six non-Muslim faiths from three neighboring Muslim-majority countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan) to gain Indian citizenship. 

Contextualizing the entangled genealogies of the NRC and CAA are important to analyzing the form of citizenship deprivation they embody.

A Brief History of the NRC and CAA

Three of the most common avenues for acquiring modern citizenship are jus soli (right of soil, or birth on the territory of a given state; commonly called “birthright citizenship”), jus sanguinis (right of blood, or descent from a citizen of a given state), and naturalization (a formal process that varies across states). All three were affirmed in the expansive definition of citizenship outlined in the Constitution of India that came into effect on 26 January 1950, following independence on 15 August 1947. In addition, the Constitution authorized Parliament to enact legislation concerning the acquisition and termination of citizenship. Premised on this authority, Parliament enacted the first Citizenship Act in 1955, hewing closely to the definitions and provisions of the Constitution. 

The 1955 Citizenship Act remained unaltered till the mid-1980s, when changes were forced due to vigorous contestations concerning migrants in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, which borders Bangladesh and Myanmar. Led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU), the “Assam Movement” was an anti-immigrant agitation that emerged in the late 1970s. It claimed that recent migrants from neighboring Bangladesh were present on electoral rolls in the state. 

This provoked a series of legislative amendments that chipped away at the capacious definition of citizenship articulated in the 1955 Citizenship Act. 

A 1985 amendment stipulated that to qualify as a citizen by birth, at least one parent had to be an Indian citizen at the time of the birth. Niraja Jayal has observed that the amendment constituted a sea change in the country’s citizenship regime, moving away from a definition that equally honored jus soli and jus sanguinis notions to one that privileged the latter, decisively narrowing the eligibility for citizenship. 

Additional amendments to the Citizenship Act followed. Most important were three changes to the Act in 2003 that intensified the trend toward a restrictive jus sanguinis conception of citizenship and set the stage for the NRC and the CAA in 2019. The 2003 amendments further limited eligibility by birth to those with at least one parent who was an Indian citizen and the other not an “illegal migrant” at the time of the birth. The amendments also stipulated that “illegal migrants” were ineligible for citizenship. Finally, they directed and authorized the executive to compile an NRC, verifying the citizenship—or lack thereof—of every person in India.

Despite vociferous demands from Assam, the government took few steps to compile an NRC even in the state for a decade—let alone across India. The process was finally initiated in Assam in 2015 by special order of the Supreme Court, with plans—or threats—to expand it nationally. 

In Assam, to count as a citizen of India, people must demonstrate that they, or their ancestors, were included in either the NRC conducted in Assam in 1951 or were on the state’s electoral rolls prior to midnight of 24 March, 1971. The latter date marks the beginning of the Bangladesh Liberation War, which ended in December 1971 and led to the formation of Bangladesh. 

The results of the NRC exercise in Assam have produced disastrous consequences. While about 33 million people submitted applications, it is entirely likely that, for a variety of reasons, some did not even attempt the exercise. Of these 33 million, the final NRC, released on 31 August 2019, excludes more than 1.9 million people who were deemed noncitizens or “illegal migrants.” 

However, a lack of documentation does not necessarily indicate a lack of legitimate legal status. It might be an indication of socio-economic marginalization, which disproportionally affects certain groups: those who are poor or illiterate, particularly Muslims and Dalits; members of transgender communities who have fled their natal homes; or women who have married and moved away from their natal homes and have little access to the relevant documents. 

The results of the flawed NRC have been met with disappointment and alarm by different factions for different reasons. Some, such as the AASU and its allies, critique the NRC on the grounds that it does not identify sufficient numbers of noncitizens. Others, such as members of the right-wing, Hindu-nationalist BJP, are disappointed that a large number of those identified as noncitizens are (Bengali) Hindus. Still others, such as progressive and left-wing groups and international organizations like the UN Human Rights Council, are concerned about the implications of rendering people noncitizens, “illegal migrants,” or stateless persons. While the NRC deems people—presumably from Bangladesh—as noncitizens or illegal migrants, this determination is not equivalent to their being legally acknowledged as Bangladeshi citizens—a point to which I shall return. 

The already dire situation produced by the NRC was worsened by the CAA, passed in December 2019. This amendment suspends the citizenship ineligibility stipulated by the 2003 amendments of some illegal migrants: people of six non-Muslim faiths (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian) from three neighboring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, who had been resident in India prior to 31 December 2014. The Act provides no rationale for the 2014 “cut off” date and is silent on other neighboring countries, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, or China. 

The upshot of the CAA is that some people are exempted from the category of “illegal migrant” and can apply for citizenship on the prima facie grounds of religious persecution in neighboring Muslim-majority countries. In other words, non-Muslim “illegal migrants” are granted amnesty while Muslims, by definition, cannot be deemed refugees eligible for citizenship in India.

Like the NRC, the CAA was critiqued and opposed on several grounds—most vigorously by citizens’ protests, often led by women. Again, different protestors had different rationales for their opposition to the Act. Some, particularly in northeastern border states such as Assam, Mizoram, and Tripura, protested on the grounds that the Act opened the floodgates to refugees and threatened the cultural, linguistic, and religious balance in these states. 

Others protested that, by introducing religion as a basis for citizenship, the Act undermined the secular underpinnings of the Indian Constitution and was unconstitutional. Such objectors identify several flaws with the legislation. First, some religious minorities (e.g., the Muslim Ahmadiyya in Pakistan or the Hazara in Afghanistan) are also persecuted in the specified countries but are not offered protection by the Act. Second, there is religious persecution of people in other neighboring countries—notably, the Rohingya in Myanmar or Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka—who are not included in the Act. Finally, the 2014 date is arbitrary, mysteriously implying no persecution beyond that date. 

All manner of protests came to a halt with the lockdown imposed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As widespread public protest became impossible, momentum was lost. Draconian criminal charges were brought against protestors, particularly those voicing critiques on constitutional grounds. Muslim protestors were specifically targeted. Some, such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, have now been detained for five years and have repeatedly been denied bail.

The CAA has had profound consequences for the everyday life of India’s Muslim population, including Indian citizens. Because implementing such legislation depends on bureaucratic and administrative measures, it must be understood in conjunction with the long-standing practice of “detecting” foreigners in Assam, the securitization and militarization of the borderland region of northeast India, and the more recent NRC exercise. 

Scholars have described the many botched processes of “foreigner identification”—often followed by detention—that preceded the NRC. Others have documented the widespread bureaucratic discretion, harassment, and corruption that attended the NRC. More recently, through an analysis of some 1,200 orders issued by the Gauhati High Court, scholars have shown that there is no systematic legal reasoning and little evidence of a consistent use of robust legal principles in justifying decisions that deem people foreigners. 

The perils of such compromised and corrupted legal and bureaucratic processes for Muslims are grave, since the CAA does not offer a path to citizenship for those deemed to be Muslim migrants. Even Muslims who are long resident in and/or citizens of India can be rendered stateless and “illegal” by bureaucratic fiat.

Alongside the NRC and CAA, a range of additional measures instituted since April 2025 have deepened the crisis of formal citizenship in India. These measures include hasty revisions of the electoral rolls in several states. Dubbed the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the outcome has been to delete millions of Indians from voter lists, disenfranchising them. 

As with the NRC, innumerable examples of bureaucratic failings have been documented in the SIR process. People who are alive have been deemed dead; some who have died are recorded as alive. Others who live in their natal villages have been recorded as having moved. People from poor, marginalized communities, especially women, have been disproportionately impacted. Yogendra Yadav writes that “[b]y the time this round of SIR is over, more than 7 crore [70 million] names may be erased from the voter rolls.” To put this number in perspective, consider that, according to UN estimates, as of June 2025, the global stateless population was 4.4 million people. 

Citizenship Deprivation and Majoritarianism

This is an admittedly condensed synopsis of the legal antecedents and bureaucratic functioning of the NRC and CAA. But even this synoptic view on citizenship deprivation processes discloses the profound transformation of Indian democracy. I wish to place these issues within the ambit of debates on citizenship revocation.  

Legislation on citizenship revocation in places like the UK and, for a brief period, Canada targets specific individuals for alleged criminal activity or for posing a security threat. As these countries are signatories to the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, such processes require that those targeted for citizenship revocation be dual citizens, deportable to their other country of citizenship (and they are often naturalized citizens). 

Scholars use a range of terms to describe the involuntary loss of citizenship that is initiated by the state: “denationalization,” “denaturalization,” “citizenship revocation,” and “citizenship deprivation.” While, in empirical situations, these might blur into each other, each term has a unique valence. “Denaturalization,” Audrey Macklin explains, “refers to the non-consensual deprivation of citizenship acquired by naturalization, while ‘denationalization’ encompasses deprivation of citizenship, however acquired.” Both terms are frequently used interchangeably with “citizenship revocation.” 

The changes to citizenship underway in India are distinctive and better understood as citizenship deprivation. Common synonyms for “revoke” are “rescind,” “reverse,” or “cancel,” suggesting a formal process through which citizenship was granted and later revoked; common synonyms for “deprive,” on the other hand, are “dispossess,” “strip,” “divest,” or “deny.” The latter better capture the violence of processes underway in India. 

The NRC exercise in Assam required all persons to provide proof of citizenship through lineage and proof of residence, preferably stretching back 70 years to 1951, or at least 50 years to 1971. Given this high bar, in some ways it is surprising that only 1.9 million people were excluded from the final tabulation. The more recent SIR makes a similar demand of documentary evidence of identity from all adults seeking to be included on the electoral rolls and exercise their right to the franchise. 

Along with “illegal migrant” and “infiltrator,” “Bangladeshi” (and, increasingly, “Rohingya,”) is also deployed as a slur to target those deemed noncitizens. However, this label is patently inaccurate. As Talha Rahman observes, the finding—accurate or otherwise—that a person is not a citizen of India does not imply that India can accord the person a different citizenship. 

India has repeatedly assured Bangladesh that the NRC is an “internal” exercise; Bangladesh, for its part, has maintained that those deemed noncitizens in India are not Bangladeshi nationals. Thus, those not included on the NRC are rendered stateless and potentially confront lives in “perpetual detention,” where deportation is not an option. India has not signed the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness; it is under no legal obligation to adhere to its mandate. 

We often sound an alarm against discriminatory laws—for instance, around surveillance—that might apply to noncitizens of a given jurisdiction, noting that it is but a matter of time before they will apply to citizens. Many citizens ignore such alarms, seeing citizenship as a cloak of protection and often being unconcerned with the fate of noncitizens. But, though rarely noted, what the NRC and SIR assume is that everyone is a noncitizen, until and unless they affirmatively prove otherwise. Everyone is required to provide proof of legal belonging. Everyone is a suspect, a potential “infiltrator,” unless they can furnish documents to the contrary. 

Reversing a key premise of the common law tradition, here everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Indeed, this reverse burden of proof is literally required by the Foreigners Act, 1946 (reiterated in the new Foreigners Act, 2025). In other words, the NRC and SIR operate in and have produced a field of generalized criminality. Despite this generalized criminality, the combined effect of the NRC, SIR, and CAA is that the burden of proof falls differently on different bodies: namely, all Muslim bodies are rendered perpetually suspect. 

In other words, through such processes of citizenship deprivation, in India today, majoritarianism has supplemented substantive inequalities with formal, legal inequality.

Radhika Mongia is associate professor of sociology at York University, Toronto, and the author of Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Duke University Press, 2018; Permanent Black Press, 2019).

Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.

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