‘History of Citizenship and Migration in South Asia’: A talk by Mr. Manav Kapur

Manav Kapur read law at NALSAR, Hyderabad and New York University, New York. He has previously taught law at NALSAR and Jindal Global Law School. He is presently pursuing his Ph.D. in legal history from Princeton University, New Jersey. This is a transcript of a lecture delivered as part of the lecture series at the Fall 2020 Citizenship and Statelessness Clinic, Jindal Global Law School. You can find the full recording of the lecture here.

In the course of today’s discussion I thought we’d talk about citizenship and Partition. It’s kind of interesting because many of these debates are similar to the debates that have come up over the last year or so, and what I’ve been thinking about in the past few weeks is while much has been made about how the CAA [Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019] marks a break with the liberal conception of citizenship in India and how its explicit privileging of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, and Parsis from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh is seen as a break from the earlier regime, I don’t think that’s true. This is definitely not a defence of the CAA, but it’s interesting to see how even, and partly because of the Partition, these issues came up at the very outset of the setting of the terms of citizenship. 

I’m going to start off talking about two distinct questions: first, the ways in which Partition and citizenship were imbricated, both in the popular imagination and in the legal categories – and how did this become a South Asian problem? So what’s interesting also is that Indian debates and Pakistani debates are supposed to be different, but that really wasn’t what was happening. The second question is how did India’s citizenship provisions go from being relatively uncomplicated to ones that ‘received far more attention’ than any other provision (Nehru) by the time the debates end or ‘a headache’, in the words of Ambedkar? 

What had happened after independence was, and what we need to remember is that post-colonial South Asia had changed so much from what it was even six months before independence, that you couldn’t actually assume categories of citizenship qua populations, but that this was actually a produced category that was debated and given sanction, both from the top-up and bottom. So it was a long-term project aimed at turning subjects into citizens and both populations were active participants in this process. 

Now if we go to Seervai, which is one of the basic canonical texts of Indian constitutional law, he says that citizenship is a triangular relationship, it’s a personal bond between state and citizens, whereby citizens bear allegiance to the state and in turn are given full political and other rights. There were two models of citizenship: one is jus soli i.e. the right of anybody who is born in a particular territory to be a citizen of that territory, and the second one is jus sanguinis, which comes from the Latin for the ‘right of blood’ and is linked to questions of nationality and ethnicity, where ethnicity and parentage are key. Now, both [Niraja Gopal] Jayal and [Joya] Chatterji when they’re talking about citizenship in India say that the idea of citizenship in India actually starts off as a jus soli thing. If you look at the first draft of the citizenship provisions in the constitution, and interestingly the first draft was the fundamental rights section, they didn’t even think it was necessary to have a separate chapter on citizenship. This is on April 23 1947: within six months they’ll know that this is not going to be as simple as they think it is. ‘Every person born in the Union or naturalized according to its laws and is subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ (Clause 3, April 23, 1947) was supposed to be an Indian. So this is basically jus soli simpliciter. Of course when this was being talked about this was tempered with some elements of jus sanguinis, because there was this question of what happens to  people who are born in India but whose families don’t live in India, and the converse, what happens to people whose families live abroad but are actually domiciled in India. So then domicile came up, and what is now Article 5 of the Constitution at this time. Article 5 says: 

At the commencement of this Constitution every person who has his domicile in the territory of India and:

(a) who was born in the territory of India; or

(b) either of whose parents was born in the territory of India; or

(c) who has been ordinarily resident in the territory of India for not less than five years preceding such commencement, shall be a citizen of India.

When we look at this, this is pretty simple but this doesn’t really think about what the Partition is going to do to this entire question. 

A small note on domicile: domicile is basically defined as a place where the habitation of a person has been fixed, and from where there’s no intention of moving therefrom. The reason why I’m specifically mentioning domicile is because domicile becomes specifically relevant in the context of Partition, particularly in the context of women and their citizenship. As Joya Chatterji points out, this is also useful because given that the Constitution was being drafted contemporaneously with the Partition and independence, both India and Pakistan, according to her, thought of a jus soli basis of citizenship, which is primarily territorial – so where you’re born, you’re a citizen of that country and after Partition happens, the other country really has no role to play in deciding your rights or lack thereof. But of course, this was predicated on the assumption, which later turned out to be erroneous, that Partition would not result in large-scale migrations. And interestingly, this idea that Partition would not lead to large-scale migrations persists through June, July, and August 1947. In June 1947 for example there’s a story about how Jinnah met a set of prominent Muslim leaders from Delhi and said that well, if Delhi isn’t part of Pakistan – which also wasn’t clear at the time, because the Punjab was to be divided and Delhi was at the border with Punjab—then you’re Indian citizens, and that’s the end of it. 

In order to understand citizenship, I think we have to take the idea of what Vazira [Fazila Yacoobali-] Zamindar calls ‘the Long Partition’ somewhat seriously. The ‘Long Partition’ has been defined, according to her, as ‘the ways in which two postcolonial states’– namely India and Pakistan—‘comprehended, intervened, and “shaped” the colossal displacements of Partition, and in doing so, recalibrating the categories of citizen, state, nation and territory’. All these categories seemed clear in March 1947; all of this was changed in September 1947. All of this resulted in mass migrations that started in 1947 but continued until at least the 1960s on both flanks of the border: on the Eastern flank which is the Bengal, Assam, and the East Bengal border, and the Western flank which stretches all the way from Kashmir up to Gujarat and Sindh. There’s also a note of terminological caution I want to make over here because the terms that were used were ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’, but the idea of a ‘refugee’ has to be distinguished from what we understand of a refugee now as a stateless person. At this point of time the term ‘refugee’ in India referred to those who moved to India from Pakistan, and a ‘migrant’ was seen as somebody who moved from India to Pakistan. Now importantly they were called refugees, but they weren’t refugees like stateless people, they definitely had a state allegiance and that allegiance was acknowledged by the state they were moving to, it was just that their domicile and the state that they wanted to be part of did not at that particular point intersect.  

Two dates are very significant: 1 March 1947 and 19 July 1948, and we will see this when we discuss Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution. 1 March 1947 was a significant date because it was the cut-off date for Partition violence, or so the Indian government thought, because violence started in Rawalpindi on 3 March and continued in Punjab throughout this time. And because the Eastern border wasn’t considered – as we shall see throughout this discussion, the Eastern border was considered peripheral to questions of citizenship in the ways that were fundamental to the determination of citizenship law at the time when the Constitution was being drafted. So the violence of Direct Action Day on Noakhali and stuff did not feature. 

Article 6 is something that we should spend a little bit of time on, because it talks of the rights of citizenship of certain persons who have migrated to India from Pakistan. It has a non-obstante clause at the beginning: ‘notwithstanding anything contained in Article 5’ – which is basically a jus soli conception of citizenship, with a little bit of jus sanguinis, about parents, but this is a departure from that –‘a person who had migrated to the territory of India from the territory now included in Pakistan shall be deemed to be a citizen of India at the commencement of this Constitution if he and either of his parents or any of his grandparents was born in India as defined in the Government of India Act, 1935 (as originally enacted), and’—even his little bit about the Government of India Act is significant, because before the Government of India Act, India included Burma and Aden, so both of them were excised from the idea of India, and that was particularly significant because Burma had a huge population of Indians, and Joya Chatterji does talk about that in questions around Indian nationals vs. citizens – ‘In the case where such person has so migrated before 19 July 1948…has been registered as a citizen of India by an officer appointed in that behalf by the Government….’ The important thing to note here – this is about 11 months after Partition—the very fact the Government decided to use this date [19 July 1948] meant that the Government thought that Partition migration had more or less in the ordinary course of events ended; migration after the 19^th of July 1948 was seen as exceptional, and this was only true for the Western frontier and only for the provinces of West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province. Hindus from Sindh continued to move to India until the 50s, and also from Balochistan. 

We should talk about Article 7 as well, which is another exception to the jus soli conception. This is the most controversial clause: called obnoxious by its detractors and obligatory by those who supported it, and it’s interesting even though religion is not explicitly mentioned, debates around both Article 6 and Article 7 make it very clear who is contemplated under these provisions and who isn’t, and that is largely based on religion, and in that category you see Muslims as one category and non-Muslims as another. Article 7 reads, beginning with a notwithstanding clause:

a person who has after the first day of March, 1947, migrated from the territory of India to the territory now included in Pakistan shall not be deemed to be a citizen of India:

Provided that nothing in this article shall apply to a person who, after having so migrated to the territory now included in Pakistan, has returned to the territory of India under a permit for resettlement or permanent return issued by or under the authority of any law and every such person shall for the purposes of clause (b) of article 6 be deemed to have migrated to the territory of India after the nineteenth day of July, 1948.

So basically, the person should have a permit for resettlement or permanent return and then be registered as a citizen of India. At first, this doesn’t seem like a particularly problematic position. Of course, it says if you leave in March 1947 you lose Indian citizenship, but you have a way of getting back – just register etc. It seems clear, but it isn’t. 

Now let’s get to the meat of what the problem was with the way in which these three provisions were drafted. Three questions come up: one is India’s perceived sole responsibility for Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs—the assumption is (and this comes out very clearly in the Constituent Assembly debates across party lines) that Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs don’t have any other place in the world to go to but India. There is also a related suspicion of Muslim migration into India, both the return of people who had gone to Pakistan and the movement of other Muslims to India. And this is all undergirded by the hard economics of rehabilitation – or what I would call the ‘costs’ of citizenship. 

The question of Hindus and Sikhs as fundamentally Indian was a question that arose out of Partition, and out of the belief among many members of the Constituent Assembly Debates that the Partition was not a territorial division but also an excision of a part of the Motherland. Because of this, the idea was that any Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan (which at the time included Bangladesh) were seen as the responsibility of India. P. R. Deshmukh actually very clearly and very strongly articulates this in 1949:

By the mere fact that he is a Hindu or a Sikh, he should get Indian citizenship because it is this one circumstance that makes him disliked by others. But we are a secular State and do not want to recognise the fact that every Hindu or Sikh in any part of the world should have a home of his own. We are not debarring others from getting citizenship here. We merely say that we have no other country to look for acquiring citizenship rights and therefore we the Hindus and the Sikhs, so long as we follow the respective religions, should have the right of citizenship in India and should be entitled to retain such citizenship so long as we acquire no other.

This is very similar to questions around the way in which the CAA is thought of presently, the idea of non-Muslims as being discriminated against in other parts of the subcontinent, and that Indian Muslims are not discriminated against. This idea of Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs as a lost limb comes up time and again in the Constitution. It’s something that Nehru himself mentions in his tryst with destiny speech, that we ‘feel for those who have been cut away from us in this unnatural division and we will always have a responsibility for them’.

But now what was happening, as Joya Chatterji points out, is that in the period 1947 to 1950 there was this very very complicated relationship that minorities had with the governments of the opposite dominion. When Partition happened by September 1947, the High Commissioners of the other dominion had taken charge of minority camps pending their movement, which again was ensured through military evacuations carried out by soldiers of the other dominion itself. One interesting aspect of this is that the first Pakistani High Commission in India was located in the barracks of the Sher Shah Suri mess, which is now the site of the Delhi High Court. Now of course it’s impossible for any Pakistani citizen to enter any cantonment zone, but because of the Partition, because of the responsibility both countries took over for its minorities, and because of the military escorts that they had to provide, the first Pakistani High Commission was located within an army mess in India. Also the Pakistani High Commission in Delhi and the Indian High Commission in Karachi were simultaneously organizing water, food, and medicines to camps – there are these long letters that go from the Indian government to the Pakistani High Commissioner in September 1947 about the fact that the Lal Quila camp only had two functional toilets for 40000 people. So there is that sense of responsibility for people just after Partition.

Now interestingly, what happened is that the moment you look at the idea of people moving to Pakistan, there’s this question of what the scope of migration was, or what the intent behind Partition migration was. So in the Constituent Assembly, and in a lot of writing around Partition in India, you see the idea of Muslims moving to Pakistan as part of a deliberate desire to move. So it is a conscious, well thought out decision to leave India. As Jaspat Roy Kapoor, Constituent Assembly member whose family had migrated from West Punjab to UP says: ‘Once a person has migrated to Pakistan and transferred his loyalty from India to Pakistan, his migration is complete. He has made up his mind at the time to kick this country and let it go to his own fate and to go to Pakistan and make it a prosperous country’. On the other hand, when the question comes about Hindus who continue to live in Pakistan till the winter of 1947, Justice Mahajan says something completely different. He says that: ‘In October or November 1947, men’s [sic] minds were in a state of flux. Nobody thought that when he was leaving Pakistan for India or vice-versa that he was forever abandoning the place of his ancestors’ (Mahajan J. in Central Bank v Ram Narain (1955)). Which obviously makes sense, because in 1947 there was no clarity on what these migrations meant, the only thing that happened was that in the Punjab both Governments had agreed to transfer populations pending a settlement of the situation. But the situation was never settled in any way other than the vast majority of people not being able to come back. But this distinction between the idea of Muslims going to Pakistan going with a form of malice or forethought versus people coming into India as refugees who had no other option, having lost everything, persisted through the course of these debates and is significant in the way Article 7 was both drafted and operated. 

Now the history behind Article 7 – we’ve seen that this led to a permit system for settlements or permanent return to come back to India. This seems pretty straightforward but isn’t –this is because in early 1948, after Gandhiji’s fast in Delhi and his subsequent death, and the Government’s crackdown on RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and anti-Muslim violence in much of North India, a set of people who’d gone to Pakistan started to come back. Now the numbers weren’t very huge – this table on CID Enumeration of Muslim Movements shows that the number of people who came back in  toto were about 12 to 15000. These numbers are not huge, but the way in which they were seen by the population in Delhi, by a lot of the Government, was as this one-way traffic that was coming from Pakistan of people trying to come back and take over their houses. This almost medical terminology of influx of people moving in, of this fear of contamination and infection, is what led to a permit system being put in place. Initially, from August 1947 to July 1948 there was no bar on Indians moving to Pakistan and vice-versa, in fact one of the conditions of Partition had been that there would be no restriction placed on people moving: to the extent that Nehru’s first visit to Pakistan was supposed to be 1949, but throughout the winter of 1947 Nehru was constantly going to Lahore for meetings with regard to people who were moving, and Liaquat and Jinnah were constantly coming to Delhi, and that wasn’t even considered foreign travel. 

Now a permit for permanent resettlement was one of the hardest ones to get. The permit system basically allowed permits to be given in three circumstances: for transiting, for visits and meeting divided families, and for permanent resettlement. This permit for resettlement was almost impossible to get, only 1200 got it in the first year of its installation. Again, to get the permit required a background check, a family check, and any link to the Muslim League before Partition meant that you wouldn’t get the permit. What’s interesting is not that you’d get the permit so sparingly, but the fears it aroused. The assumption was that when Muslims were coming back to India, people who had already left for Pakistan were coming back, they were coming back either as a fifth column that was attempting to destroy India from within, or coming back to take over their property. 

Now why would taking over the property be a problem? Because of the whole way in which the evacuee property regime had started to function. Now the evacuee property norms have in a lot of scholarship been described as ‘brutal’ laws, as ‘exceptional’ laws, as deeply complex laws. Their complexity comes because they were serving two contradictory purposes. In the weeks after Partition, in early 1947 as populations were on the move in Punjab, both governments came up with a set of norms by which they’d take over the property of those who’d left and hold it in trust for them until they came back. So the migrants, the people leaving were recognized as the sole owners of the property they’d left behind, but in order to protect this property, and to prevent it from being alienated in unauthorized ways, the Government would take it over and hold it in trust. But there were 2-3 things that happened at the same time. This was also harvest season, the Punjab was a very fertile land and food supplies in both countries were in a state of flux, and refugees needed to be resettled on these lands. So while refugees were resettled, the assumption was that migrants continued to be sole owners of this property but pending their coming back or the settlement of the question of compensation, refugees would be allowed to live on these lands. This was also happening because a lot of refugees, out of desperation on both sides of the border, were forcing their ways into these houses. So now evacuee property laws were serving two contradictory purposes: firstly they were safeguarding the property of those who had migrated until they returned or until an inter-governmental solution could be found (India was rooting for an inter-governmental solution; Pakistan, because the volume of property was more in Pakistan, was rooting for person-to-person exchange); and simultaneously all of this property had gone in a compensation pool to rehabilitate refugees who were living on this. 

Now especially in India, because the amount of property which Muslims had left was much lesser than property Hindus and Sikhs had left when they came to India, the whole question of Muslims coming back was seen as taking away what the already marginalized Hindus and Sikhs who came from Pakistan were going to get. So therefore it became almost impossible for the Government to actually be seen to be giving permits to people, only a few thousand were likely to return. When this was debated in the context of Article 7 of the Constitution, Nehru made a very strong point about how we can’t discriminate between Muslims who have chosen to leave in situations that were not of their volition. But he also says – and this was the way in which he tries to assuage the ‘costs’ of Muslims coming back – that only a few thousand are likely to return, and they’re ensuring  that the procedure for getting  the permit has been made extremely difficult. Now, because this was made so difficult—and not only was it made difficult, after 1951 and the Liaquat-Nehru pact the Government actually came up with a law which said that even if people are given permits for resettlement, this resettlement will not mean their property will no longer be evacuee property. So even if they come back, they are not going to get their property back. Their property is going to go into the compensation pool until an inter-governmental solution comes up; as it happens, an inter-governmental solution never came up, and the Government nationalized this property in 1957 and redistributed it. 

As we can see, what is actually happening in the period between 1947 and 1950 is that the Governments of both dominions are taking a very significant interest in the lives of minorities on both sides. The Liaquat-Nehru pact – and Amit Shah himself when he spoke of the CAA said that the Liaquat-Nehru pact is an example of this – but the Liaquat-Nehru pact is the point when this starts to break. Contrary to the discussions around CAA which state that the Liaquat-Nehru pact situated responsibility on the ‘other’ dominion, the pact actually did the opposite. A little bit of background – this pact comes in response to violence in Bengal. Throughout this time there has been very little sustained violence that happens in Bengal: in 1948 migration slowed down in Bengal, there were about 8 lakh people who moved across the border, as opposed to the Western border where 75 lakh people have moved, and this movement is continuing. In late 1949, however, there was rioting that started in East Bengal, across East Bengal, and spread to India as well. This leads to about a million and a half people moving, and the fears of a migration of the kind that happened in the West are what lead to both Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan coming together and specifically saying that minority rights are the responsibility of their own governments: 

The Government of India and Pakistan solemnly agree that each share ensure to the minorities throughout their territory complete equality of citizenship irrespective of religion..full security in respect of life, culture, property and personal honour.

Both governments wish to emphasise that the allegiance and loyalty of the minorities is to the states to which they are citizens and that it is to the Governments of their own state that they should look for the redress of their grievances.

Now on the Eastern frontier the bulk of migration happens after the 1947-1948 cutoff dates. Migration here starts in 1946, there’s some in 1947, the situation stabilizes by late 1948, then in early 1950 all of this starts again. Economics was not as important here: since there was no exchange of populations, evacuee property norms in Bengal were very different from evacuee property norms in the rest of the country. Evacuee property in Bengal continued to be property held in trust by the state for migrants who were presumed to return, and this was not distributed to refugees. The Permit system did NOT apply in the East: the free movement of minorities was supposed to ensure a feeling of security, and as a result of that you could cross the border without a permit. The very nature of the border also, because it wasn’t properly demarcated, meant there was little policing of migrants. 

But even in Bengal, particularly in Assam, you see the refugee-migrant difference coming up in the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Bill, 1950 which was enacted two months after the Constitution came into force – this was actually initially called the ‘Undesirable Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Bill’, the name was changed after a very complicated debate in the Provisional Parliament. Now we can see in this Bill that the Central Government has a lot of untrammelled power to order expulsion of certain immigrants:

‘If the Central Government is of opinion that any person or class of persons, having been ordinarily resident in any place outside India, has or have, whether before or after the commencement of this Act, come into Assam and that the stay of such person or class of persons in Assam is detrimental to the interests of the general public of India or of any section thereof or of any Scheduled Tribe in Assam, the Central Government may by order— 

(a) direct such person or class of persons to remove himself or themselves from India or Assam within such time and by such route as may be specified in the order; and 

(b) give such further directions in regard to his or their removal from India or Assam as it may consider necessary or expedient: 

Provided that nothing in this section shall apply to any person who on account of civil disturbances or the fear of such disturbances in any area now forming part of Pakistan has been displaced from or has left his place of residence in such area and who has been subsequently residing in Assam.’

This is to do with migrants, and the proviso very clearly says that this doesn’t apply to refugees. What we should think about is how similar this language and this provision is to the raison d’être of the CAA 2019. When this was discussed in the Provisional Parliament, the religious difference was very clear. It was very clear for everybody talking about the bill that reference to outside of India was only construed as Pakistan, and that too East Bengal. There were two lakh Nepali people working in tea gardens in Assam, but because they were told they were in language and religion akin to our people, this would not apply to them. That’s interesting because while Bengali and Assamese are undoubtedly different languages, Bengali, Assamese, and Nepali are also different languages. So it’s not a question of language but merely a question of religion. Now this had again emerged out of a similar fear as the return of migrants across the western border, and this will come out of this fear of Muslim migration in Assam that preceded the Partition of India, and the movement of lakhs of ‘undesirable immigrants’ (Sardar B. S. Mann, from West Punjab) who are likely to be a source of ‘separatism…with the old League mentality and outlook’ (Biswanath Das, Parliamentary Debates 08.02.1950). And these people, Muslim Bengalis, are viewed as coming with a ‘careful and calculated intent…to a country over which they have not the least claim after Partition’. Look at the language here – now ‘all those who emigrated on account of civil disturbances, are only to be construed as non-Muslims’, as ‘those who have no place in Pakistan and are thrown out mercilessly’, again this trope of the violent Pakistani populace against Hindus and Sikhs.

In conclusion, I’m going to summarize what the main argument of both the pieces we discussed were. The first, by Niraja Jayal, is that the initial definition of citizenship has been understood to be predicated on jus soli with domicile and descent complementing rather than undermining citizenship based on birth in BOTH India and Pakistan, but that has changed over time to take more elements of jus sanguinis. Joya Chatterji takes a broader picture, looks at the Indian diaspora, and argues that not only did India and Pakistan move away from jus soli, they also moved away from conventional jus sanguinis, to prevent undesirables who formed part of the diaspora from returning to India. What I actually think is significant over here is the idea that there hasn’t been a movement towards jus sanguinis as such but there’s always been this underlying current. I wanted to think about what this means in the context of citizenship in India, and what this means in the context of constitutional guarantees of equal citizenship and secularism.