AT the turn of the 21st century, a number of influential scholars began to argue that the boundaries of the nation state, nationalism, and national identities, had been transcended by the ‘age of cosmopolitanism’. The concept of cosmopolitanism, which goes back to ancient Greece, signified a number of developments that had coalesced around the world in the period after globalization in the 1990s. Some of these developments were: the global movement of capital, migration of labour, strengthening of international institutions such as an international human rights regime, and the establishment of global organizations for the regulation of finance and trade.

At the same time the belief that we have obligations to the rest of human kind, irrespective of which country they or we live in, caught the imagination of scholars in western academia. The set of theories that related to obligations to ‘distant others’ came to be known as the global justice debate.

It was persuasively argued by political philosophers that the obligations we owe human beings in other countries may not be as strong as the one’s we have towards our fellow citizens. But at least we should re-imagine ourselves as not only members of a nation state, but also of a world community. Cosmopolitanism was critiqued as highly western-centric by scholars of the global South, but this trend in philosophy contributed a great deal towards the expansion of the idea of what it means to be a citizen, and of the commitment we hold to fellow human beings.

If citizenship created a political community that shares a common fate, then globalization ensured that we were indeed citizens of a global community. A decision in one part of the world, on climate change for instance, would necessarily affect the future of people across the world. Citizenship could no longer be confined within the borders of the nation state, it was bound to spill over into other societies and other cultures through interconnected processes such as financial and trade flows, interlinked legal regimes and the information revolution.

 

By the second decade of the 21st century, cosmopolitanism and the idea that we owe obligations of humanity to fellow human beings wherever they might live and work had been banished to the margins. The advent and the institutionalization of right wing populist leaders across the world strengthened narrow, exclusionary and xenophobic nationalism, deliberately cultivated deep suspicion of migrants and minorities, focused excessively on national security, fortified borders, and relentlessly emphasized the difference between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ even if the latter had been living and working in the country for years.

The former, it was held by populist leaders across the world, belonged to the nation, the latter did not. Whereas insiders were citizens of the nation state, the latter were outsiders. Boundaries between citizens were hardened, and open doors that exposed our vision to landscapes of solidarity and commitment to the well-being of others, were firmly closed, latched and locked.

 

Constricted notions of who belongs and who does not belong to the nation state replaced cosmopolitan citizenship. Civic citizenship was replaced by ethnic notions of who is a citizen, the ethno-national state was substituted for the civic nation based on rights, belonging came to be conceptualized as ties of blood, populists stepped up polarization of societies and communities were sought to be divided. The natural constituency of the right wing populist is an intolerant one.

And then the political miracle happened. People, whose claims to citizenship were at risk, resisted. And others who were not directly affected resisted alongside their fellow citizens. Protests, occupation of public land, demonstrations, and symbolic gestures of resistance have marked collective life in cities around the world. After a number of years, citizenship was propelled onto the centre of political agendas with a boom. Judiciaries have been snowed in with cases relating to who is a citizen and who is not. Citizenship has become a hotly contested concept and been destabilized. This has, however, taken its toll.

On the one hand, populist leaders encourage majority populations to flex their metaphorical muscles and declare ownership of, and monopoly over, the territory that is the site for the construction of a rigid and exclusionary nation state. On the other hand, outsiders, migrants and minorities who have mixed their labour with resources and generated profit for the societies they live and work in, demand that they be given their due – the status of citizen and the rights of citizenship. Backed by fellow citizens in a rare gesture of solidarity, they refuse to accept exclusion, they reject the idea that their citizenship depends on a handful of documents – ‘paper citizenship’ as the process of producing and showing documents is called. Those who are sought to be excluded have staked their claim to citizenship as a matter of right.

We witness, in the process, a major shift in the debate on citizenship; the shift from an emphasis on social rights as a marker of inclusion, to the troublesome concept of identity. For long, debates among academics concentrated on, at least, three dimensions of the concept. One, the notion of universal citizenship grants to each person (with justifiable exceptions to the principle) status as the bearer of rights, notably civil and political rights.

Two, these rights cannot but be compromised by social and economic inequality. If individuals are poor, if they lack access to the kind of economic and social resources their neighbours possess, it is painfully obvious that they cannot be equal. Universal adult franchise is no guarantee of social and economic equality and justice. These have to be fought for so that the project of universal citizenship can be realized.

Three, the notion of universal citizenship provides a touchstone against which lack of equal status can be evaluated. In sum, it was assumed that increased access to social and economic goods that people have a right to, at least in theory, would fulfil the presuppositions of universal citizenship. We saw the making of an inexorable connection between citizenship and class in most works on the subject following T.H Marshall’s significant work on Citizenship and Social Class 1949/1992.

 

The critique of social inequality and of discrimination meted out to people, who were treated as unequal, was made from the vantage point of universal citizenship. Increasingly however, it came to be perceived that inequality, marginalization, and exclusion were a constitutive feature of citizenship not only for economic reasons, but also for reasons of identity. In India the so-called lower castes, religious minorities, women, transgenders, and adivasi’s were treated as less than human, and therefore as partial or even non-citizens. This was for purely arbitrary reasons: of birth into a community that has been typed as the enemy, the inferior, the outsider, in short as the ‘other’ with whom there can be neither truck nor transaction.

 

This perspective had nothing to do with ‘insiders’ who belonged and ‘strangers’ who do not. It concentrated on the plight of people who in theory possessed full citizenship rights, but in practice were discriminated against for reasons outside their control. None of us can choose which community we are born into, the language we speak, the belief systems we subscribe to, the rituals we perform and the customs we adhere to. Discrimination on the basis of factors not subject to our control is not only illogical, it is unjust. Justice implies that every citizen has an equal right to the benefits that a society offers to its members. She also has an equal obligation to bear an equal share of the burdens that a society imposes upon its members. It is unjust to exclude a member from an equal share in benefits of society, and to impose excessive burdens on her just because she belongs to a community that is arbitrarily discriminated against.

Let us focus on religious minorities in this section of the argument. Injustice is compounded if our individual is targeted by hate speech, ritualized and repetitive violence, and everyday humiliation. The police, it has been widely noted, come down heavily on religious minorities, and the judiciary does not offer enough protection to vulnerable sections of society, the media slots the community in perverse ways and social vocabularies deploy offensive language that no self-respecting society should tolerate.

Minorities cannot live in neighbourhoods of their choice, and workplace politics subjects them to prejudice and bigotry. Each communal riot targets their property, person, and livelihood disproportionately and in terribly vicious ways. Each riot leaves bleeding bodies and despairing hearts as we saw in the case of the Delhi riots that took place in February 2020. The riots left 50 people dead and hundreds injured, many with gunshot wounds.

It is clear by now that the equal status principle of democratic citizenship is deeply compromised by not only social inequality but also identities. In form minorities are full citizens but in practice they have yet to cross over the threshold of full membership of the political community. Theorists and historians of citizenship had hoped that the exercise of the franchise would at some point in time produce governments that were sensitive to internal exclusions and hierarchies, to governments that intend to transform relations. This was necessary to establish a correspondence between universal citizenship or the lack thereof, equality, and justice.

 

The problem now shifted – the contradiction was not only between the claims of universal citizenship and citizenship that is partially realized. The contradiction is between citizens and denial of the status to vulnerable sections of society. The notion of universal citizenship is a chimera, people are not only marginalized by social and economic disadvantage, they are excluded because they belong to ‘this’ religious community or ‘that’.

The outburst of ethnic wars in the wake of the breakdown of actually existing socialist societies in 1989, the mobilization on the ground of identity, and the phenomenon of waves of migrants flowing into Europe in a desperate bid to escape civil war and ethnic cleansing in their own countries, foregrounded the issue of exclusion on the basis of criterion other than class. The insecurity and anxiety experienced by religious minorities in a majoritarian society like India, was compounded by the entry of right wing populist leaders that openly espoused an agenda, which privileged the majority. The development bore serious consequences.

 

From 2004 to 2014, the United Progressive Alliance government led by the Congress at the Centre passed a number of laws that granted to citizens social rights, from the right to primary education to the right to work. Scholars began to wonder whether a social democratic revolution had found its way to India. The country had finally reclaimed social rights that had been granted by the Motilal Nehru Constitutional Draft in 1928, but which were relegated to the section on Directive Principles of State Policy in the Constitution in 1950.

In 2014 the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over power. The party came back to power in 2019 with increased members in the popular house of Parliament. As members of the larger ideological brigade of the party, those who subscribe to Hindutva, began to unleash hate speech and mob lynching of Muslims and Dalits, the biography of rights took a sharp U-turn. From 2004 to 2014 we spoke the language of social rights. The year 2014 heralded a return to the days of colonial rule, when leaders of the freedom struggle had to agitate for the recognition of civil and political rights. These were subsequently enshrined in the Constitution as fundamental rights possessed by every citizen.

We had thought that our civil and political rights were secure, guarded by a vibrant human rights movement in civil society, and an independent judiciary anxious to reclaim its image of impartiality after many silences during the internal Emergency (1975-1977). After 2014 and the ascent of the religious right to power, indiscriminate arrests of human rights activists, the clampdown on civil society organizations, the rapid erosion of the rule of law and judicial autonomy, in short, the curtailment of all institutions and practices that protect the individual against the state and that mediate between the citizen and the government, foregrounded the problem of civil rights. We had to turn our attention back to civil liberties that were gravely threatened by the flag-bearers of the Hindu right.

 

On 23 June 2019, newspaper reports told us that the US Secretary of State had released the State Department Report 2018, ‘Report on International Freedom’, to the American Congress. It was released shortly after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power for a second term in May 2019 with a massive majority in Parliament. The chapter on India in the report detailed mob-related violence, conversions of minorities, threats to their legal status, and destructive government policies.

The Government of India, the report stated, had taken steps to challenge the legal status of minority educational institutions in the Supreme Court. As a matter of right, minority educational institutions have the freedom to hire faculty and to design its own curricula. Now things are different because the right wing government seeks to interfere and regulate these institutions. Cities with Muslims names have been renamed, for example Allahabad has been renamed as Prayagraj. The contribution of the Muslim community to India’s art, literature, architecture, painting and music is sought to be erased. This, the report continued, has led to intensified tension between communities.

The report narrated incidents of religiously motivated killings, assaults, riots, discrimination, vandalism and restriction on the rights of citizens to practice their own religious beliefs and proselytize. Authorities have failed to penalize the perpetrators of killings in the name of the cow. Reportedly the police, the administration and the judiciary are reluctant to act when it came to mob violence against religious minorities. The ruling party has marginalized communities and attacked critics of the government. Senior officials of the Bharatiya Janata Party have made inflammatory remarks on the Muslim community. Authorities have protected speakers of abuse from prosecution. As of November 2018, there have been 18 such attacks. Eight people have been killed during the year stated the report.¹

 

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), reported the same newspaper on the front-page on the same day, slammed the US for bias against the Modi government. In most such cases, the spokesperson stated, these instances are the result of local disputes and criminal mindsets against minorities and weaker sections of society. The spokesperson Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi continues to be the minister of minority affairs in the second term of the government controlled by the BJP. He is reported to have said to The Hindu in an interview that Mr Modi had directly established contact with the minorities, and exposed the hypocrisy of earlier modes of engagement with them. According to him such reports were part of the ‘haar ka horror show’, a horror show directed by political parties that were defeated in the 2019 elections.²

The statement exhibits indifference to our own people at best, and political cynicism at worst. The minister should reflect on the sorry state of his fellow citizens who are subjected to vicious attacks, merely because they belong to another belief system that the religious right is institutionally against. More significantly, when the minister for minority affairs declares that lynchings have nothing to do with religious animosities, he engages in nothing but sophistry. He ignores a remarkable coincidence in our public life. Hate speech and crimes against minorities have risen since 2014 when the BJP came to power.

 

In October 2019, newspaper reports chronicled that Muslims were the targets of 51 per cent of violence related to the cow from 2010-2017. Out of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents 24 were Muslims, that is they formed 86 per cent of the victims of violence. The website IndiaSpend, whose report the newspaper had drawn on, had carried out a content analysis of the English media on cow related deaths. Ninety seven attacks over bovine issues were reported after the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014, and half of cow-related violence, i.e. 32 of 63 cases came from states governed by the BJP. More than 124 people were injured in these attacks. More than half the attacks were based on rumours.³

Muslims have been attacked in trains, on the road while legally transporting cattle, in agricultural fields, and even in their homes on the mere suspicion of carrying or storing meat. They have been publicly lynched and brutally killed. Lynchings continued in 2019 after the Modi government returned to power. Muslims are threatened by violence even when they perform their duties as citizens of India. On Republic Day, 26 January 2018, in Kasganj, western U.P., gangs of thugs mounted on motorbikes roared into the flag-hoisting area and attacked residents. Muslims predominantly inhabit the neighbourhood. In the violence that followed, a 22-year old youth, Chandan Gupta, was killed when a stray bullet hit him.⁴

Lynching of Muslims merely on the suspicion that they are engaged in transporting cattle has initiated a new trend of unspeakable intimidation and violence in Indian politics. Death by lynching in a public place where people stand around and watch, or worse film the despicable event on their phones and upload it on social media, is the new normal. Violence has become a spectator sport, rivaling ancient Rome that had devised unique ways of putting men to death in public forums to storms of applause from the audience. In contemporary India, the audience claps even as their own fellow citizens die painfully for no reasonable cause, except the assertion of brute power, or perhaps just sport.

 

Alongside violations of civil rights to life and liberty, political rights that form the backbone of the status of citizenship began to be threatened by dire warnings of things to come, of tragedies that will be unleashed on the people of India in the near future. The government placed the onus of proving that we are citizens of India upon us. Now we have been forced to return to the basic question: who is a citizen? Issues relating to social inclusion of all irrespective of creed and belief systems have been dismissed. Today inclusion into the democratic polity of India depends on what religion you belong to. Legal activists are compelled to raise issues that we thought had been settled long ago. For long we had taken our citizenship for granted. Today the government tells us that not all Indians are citizens, many are infiltrators. These will be detected, stripped of citizenship and of any rights that protect them against the state, and sent to desolate detention camps that are being constructed in various parts of the country. Here people who are declared non-citizens are expected to live bare lives in a space that is left undefined, but which hovers very closely to the notion of statelessness.

 

In Europe the debate has focused on the question of whether migrants from other countries should be granted citizenship. In India, the issue is different, that of reclaiming constitutional rights. The moment religion was introduced into the concept and procedures of citizenship in the case of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), forced through Parliament by the help of a brute majority in December 2019, minorities were in danger. According to the act refugees from the three Islamic countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, will be granted Indian citizenship. Muslims are, however, excluded from this process. The government plans to administer a National Population Register and a National Register of Citizens in the near future to sift out who is a citizen and who is not.

The minorities are wracked by anxiety that they will be declared non-citizens and illegal migrants if they cannot fulfil the requirements of government officials who scrutinize documents and decide on the legal status of the individual. Their anxiety is intensified by a hate-filled populism that relentlessly focuses on protest and dissent as anti-national. And we, confronted by a judiciary that refuses to take up civil liberty cases on an urgent basis, and a pulverized civil society, wondered who would confront those who have set themselves up as arbiters of citizenship.

 

And then our own political miracle happened. On 15 December 2019, students belonging to the Jamia Millia Islamia university came out in large numbers to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act. As the procession marched through the streets of an upper middle class colony in South Delhi, students carrying banners that rejected the CAA demanded withdrawal of the legislation that connected citizenship rights with religion. The police attacked and shot young people, students were injured, the library was ransacked, and the campus destroyed. The violence inflicted on the student body set off a chain of protests by university students and citizens in the rest of the country. Thousands of citizens, and particularly university students, marched and demonstrated against the inhuman treatment meted out to students of Jamia Millia, Aligarh Muslim University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University by right wing elements and the police.

The objective of the major demonstrations, that took everyone and particularly the government by surprise, was to protest against the imminent disenfranchisement of minorities. Protestors challenged the division of society on religious grounds, taking the Constitution of India as their referral. Public readings of the Preamble to the Constitution transformed the Constitution from a legal document into a political one. Never has India in the seventy-two years it has been independent seen the enactment of citizenship on this scale and with such fervour.

Student protests have been remarkably creative and imaginative. Singing revolutionary songs, young people carried posters expressing their determination not to allow the proposed National Register of Citizens to be implemented in their country. Women demonstrated in many parts of India, and the sit-in by women in Shaheen Bagh in South Delhi for more than three months, has become a global symbol of protest against the denial of basic rights. Little children painted the national flag on their cheeks, and performances were staged against the backdrop of portraits of national icons – Gandhi, Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh.

 

Photographs in the morning newspapers, and screened by television channels indicated the democratic nature of the protest: a young woman holding up an admonishing finger to the police, students offering roses to flummoxed police personnel, novel art forms that focused on the plurality of India and the determination to protect it, and chants of solidarity with Muslim fellow citizens. Thousands of citizens peaceably assembled on the streets and in public places to demand that the government observe constitutional morality. This was India’s civil society moment.

Protestors have been met by threats of violence and perverse stereotyping of Muslim neighbourhoods, which staged protest, as Pakistan. In the period before the elections to the state assembly in Delhi, BJP politicians engaged in hate speech and openly called upon their supporters to fire guns at the protestors. On 16 February 2020 communal violence that rapidly turned into ethnic cleansing led by mobs chanting slogans of death and destruction broke out in North East Delhi. Fifty people were killed, their bodies dumped in drains, showrooms plundered, houses, vehicles and human beings set on fire, small workplaces ransacked, and entire neighbourhoods destroyed.

 

The provocation for the onset of mob fury against the minorities was expectedly democratic protest against the CAA and the proposed National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens. In a democracy, civil society has the right to monitor acts of omission and commission of the government. The democratic protests that broke out in December 2019 were intended to achieve precisely this objective. The protesters opposed the targeting of minorities, and condemned the killings, abusive speeches, and hateful acts that had rendered a vulnerable minority even more vulnerable ever since the BJP came to power in 2014.

These protests have brought forth an issue worth reflecting on. Citizenship gives us authorization to demand and benefit from security and services offered by the state – passports, education, health, housing, post-retirement benefits, the right to travel, the right to employment and above all the right to vote. The right to vote gives us the capacity to hold accountable those in power. Citizenship embodies a democratic relationship between the state and its citizens.

But there is more to citizenship. Citizens of a political community owe each other an obligation of justice and solidarity against state repression. Citizenship, our young people reminded us, is not only about our status as a holder of rights, it is about membership of a political community. It is a relational concept that establishes a bond based not on blood but on belonging to a civic community defined by a Constitution. It is precisely solidarity that a large section of Indians expressed towards their fellow citizens when they supported the latter’s protest against draconian laws.

The protests fell into the category of what is called performative citizenship. Indians marched holding the national flag in one hand and a copy of the Constitution in the other, they assembled against the background of the national flag, sang the national anthem, read out the Preamble of the Constitution that promises liberty, equality, justice and fraternity, and transformed the Constitution into a publically accessible, and democratic document. The Constitution is the anchor of our identity, the protector of our rights, our legacy and our culture. The occupation of public spaces, the sit-ins on public roads, the coinage of innovative slogans realized, proclaimed and enacted popular sovereignty.

 

Witness again the political miracle. For five and a half years the ruling party had appropriated the symbols of nationhood, collapsed the democratic state into the nation, and the nation into the government. Any protest against the government was typed as anti-national, those who moved petitions before the Supreme Court became Urban-Naxals, a term that is an oxymoron at best and absurd at worst. The protests enacted the basic rules of citizenship that rulers often forget. The paramount rule is that ‘We the People of India’ are the repositories of power. The government is elected by us and responsible to us. The right to citizenship has been re-appropriated, popular sovereignty reclaimed, and the government is sought to be put into its place.

Despite the bloodletting in Delhi, these protests continued to challenge and interrogate the power of the ruling classes. The entire concept of paper citizenship disseminated by the Government of India has been derailed, destabilized, and rendered insecure. What we see today is citizenship as performance.

 

The rulers declare that the Citizenship Amendment Act will not take away citizenship from anyone. But as our young people recognized, the provisions of the act will set the ground for further disenfranchisement of those who have lived and worked in India since birth, who possess rights as full citizens, who own the Constitution and the national flag, and who are citizens of India by virtue of membership of a territorially grounded political community. The second significant issue placed on the political agenda is that of solidarity with fellow citizens who may be stripped of full citizenship rights, deprived of the right to live and work in a location of their choice, deprived of the right to have rights, to protest, to assemble peacefully and without arms, and to share equally in the burdens and the benefits that a society has to offer.

These protests do not ask for the grant of citizenship to outsiders, protestors reassert their right as citizens and as insiders to hold an elected government accountable for acts that harm those who voted them into power. They demonstrate that the people of India will not accept any act that might deprive them or their fellow citizens of their rights in the near or the far future. They have reclaimed their basic constitutional rights.

In the process an important question has been thrown up onto the political agenda. We have to, once again, articulate our relationship to the state and obligations to fellow citizens in the civic language of constitutional rights. We have to dismiss the implications of the CAA that India is a natural homeland for all Hindus wherever they live. The belief is dangerous, it will further divide the country; civic citizenship will unite us. We have to periodically reinstate our obligation to vulnerable citizens in the vocabulary of solidarity. We have to insist that civic obligations are grounded in the place we live, in common memories, and in the experience of sharing equally the benefits and the burdens of a society. The notion of civic citizenship critiques the distinction between citizens on religious grounds as illegitimate and undemocratic. It informs us that there is a need to repeatedly side with our compatriots in the struggle against hierarchies and marginalization.

 

Till now the BJP has declared through words and deeds that any sort of dissent will not be tolerated and whoever disagrees with the government will be charged with sedition. Today citizens tell the government that they will not tolerate the corruption of citizenship by the introduction of a religious criterion, that they will not allow any tampering with the Constitution of India which is our legacy.

Protestors proclaim that the right to citizenship is theirs by reason of birth, by reasons of belonging, by reasons of fidelity, by reasons of solidarity with fellow citizens, and for the simple reason that they bow their heads before the national flag and stand up in reverence when the national anthem is sung. This is performative citizenship, citizenship as enactment, citizenship as participation in the political decisions of a society, citizenship as articulation of popular sovereignty, citizenship as owing obligations to fellow citizens, citizenship as status, and citizenship rights as a prized possession. What is the significance of paper citizenship before performative citizenship?

 

Footnotes:

1. Shriram Lakshman, ‘US Report Expressed Concern on Communal Violence in India’, The Hindu, 23 June 2019, p. 14.

2. ‘BJP Slams US for Bias Against PM’, The Hindu, 23 June 2019, p 1.

3. http://www.hindustantimes-com/india, 12 October 2019, accessed on 9 December 2019.

4. Chaitanya Mallapur, ‘Communal Violence Rose by 28 per cent from 2014 to 2017, but 2008 Remains Year of Highest Instances of Religious Violence’, Firstpost, 9 February 2019.