New Delhi: The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls has become an instrument of mass disenfranchisement, with nearly 60 million voters having lost their right to vote. Disenfranchisement on this scale holds out the spectre of alienating citizens, not just from their political rights, but from citizenship itself. The SIR has raised the question: which document(s) can prove that one is an Indian citizen? 

The multiple identity documents that Indians typically have are not proof of citizenship. Nor, apparently, is the passport. 

We find ourselves in a situation very different from the founding moment of our republic, when both the Constitution and the Citizenship Act 1955 enshrined the inclusive principle of unconditional jus soli, citizenship based on birth on the soil of the country. We have been slowly and incrementally moving away from the principle of unconditional jus soli for some decades now. The foundational conception of universal equal citizenship in our constitution and in the law on citizenship was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship. That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced by a presumption of universal alienage. 

The presumption of alienage is the principle underlying the National Register of Citizens (NRC); it is the principle underlying the SIR; 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. 

The presumption of alienage is finding expression in different aspects of governance and with alarming regularity. One day, it is an amendment to the law on citizenship; another day, it is a new method for the routine task of revising electoral rolls; yet another day, it is a throwaway comment about whether passports constitute proof of citizenship. All of these tend to the same purpose, the same objective: the presumption of alienage. 

How did we get here? 

This is one of the two critical aspects of the citizenship question I will focus on in this essay: who is/can be an Indian citizen. I will also, secondly, reflect on how equally (or unequally) the rights of citizenship are distributed among the citizenry. The influence of both RSS ideology and BJP policies and practices on the first aspect—i.e., who is/can be a citizen—is more significant, but in the present, this also has consequences for the second. In both aspects, the RSS vision fundamentally contradicts the constitutional vision. 

1. Who is/can be/ought to be an Indian citizen? 

The RSS vision of this question is fundamentally anchored in Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva (1923), especially his distinction between punyabhumi (sacred or holy land) and pitrabhumi (ancestral land or fatherland). The RSS sees the work of the Partition as incomplete and Indian Muslims as a blot on the body politic who can, at best, be treated on sufferance as second-class citizens. It construes Indian citizenship as faith-based, in consonance with the idea of a Hindu majoritarian nation (Hindu Rashtra), of which Hindus are natural citizens, while Muslims belong to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Perfecting this congruence between religion and territory is the objective of their project to reinvent citizenship, which has obviously received a fillip with the BJP coming to power. 

This ideology has been the inspiration for the two most important amendments to the Citizenship Act 1955, enacted in 2003 and 2019, the first by the Vajpayee government and the second by the Modi government. There was one amendment to the Citizenship Act before these—this was in 1985, and it was an amendment that gave effect to the Assam Accord. It made the principle of jus soli conditional. Anybody born before 1 July 1987 would be an Indian regardless of their parentage. After this date, a person born on Indian soil after 1 July 1987 could become a citizen only if one of their parents was an Indian.  

The amendments to the Citizenship Act in 2003 and 2019 were much more consequential. 

The 2003 amendment did three things:

- First, it did away with even conditional jus soli and made ineligible for citizenship any person born in India who had one parent who was an “illegal migrant” at the time of their birth. The term illegal migrant was code for Bangladeshi—ergo Muslim—migrant.

- Second, the Rules of the Act were amended such that the stigma of the term ‘illegal migrant’ would no longer attach to Hindu migrants who had come in from Pakistan, into the border states of western India, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. If the amendment to the Act smuggled in a religious category covertly by the term “illegal migrant”, the amendment to the Rules did so explicitly by exempting Hindus from this category.

- Third, the National Population Register (NPR) and the National Register of Indian Citizens were introduced. 

The 2019 amendment, as everyone knows, offered fast-track citizenship to ‘migrants’ other than Muslims, and introduced a formal religion-based differentiation into secular law. 

The cumulative effect of these amendments has been to stigmatise and exclude Muslim citizens, in a way that abandons the constitutional vision of universal equal citizenship in favour of the RSS ideal of a hierarchy of citizenship in the Hindu Rashtra. In this way, the history of citizenship law shows a gradual move from unconditional jus soli to conditional jus soli to jus sanguinis—an accretion over time. The question of citizenship is now yoked to the service of a majoritarian agenda, approximating Savarkar’s dream. 

So, if we are to envision the possibility of more propitious circumstances, how might we think about the reconstruction of citizenship? Here’s a wish-list—it could be considered a fantasy or a delusion, but for whatever it’s worth:

- India should once again affirm and restore the principle of unconditional jus soli, as in the original, pre-amendment version, of the Citizenship Act 1955.

- This would require the repeal of amendments, especially those of 2003 and 2019.

- Undoing the 2003 Amendment may be tough, because it is part of a complex web that now includes the Assam NRC and the Foreigners’ Tribunals. Lawyers would need to weigh in on how and to what extent this can be undone, perhaps using a legislative instrument akin to the Repealing and Amending Act, 2025.

- The NRC and the NPR should definitely be scrapped, as should the SIR, which has become a proxy for these.

- The Supreme Court has yet to pronounce on the legality of CAA 2019, but this amendment should be repealed.

- The nomenclature of ‘illegal migrants’ needs to be changed in the language of the Citizenship Act and its Rules. The insidious distinction between ‘illegal migrants’ (code for Muslims) and ‘refugees’ (code for Hindus) must go. 

Let me turn now to the second aspect of citizenship: 

2. The distribution of the rights of citizenship: inclusion and exclusion. 

Paternalism is a core element of the public philosophy of the BJP and its mothership, the RSS. It is expressed in political discourse and policies at the highest levels of government, emphasising citizens’ duties rather than rights. Two recent Chief Justices of India have championed the view that real rights come from the performance of duty. The Prime Minister himself has chided citizens for having wasted time over the last 75 years by talking about and fighting for rights. This, along with a neglect of their duties, he said, had “played a huge role in keeping India weak.” 

State paternalism and the emphasis on citizens’ duties are in sharp contrast to the Constitutional provision of a range of equal rights for all citizens (fundamental rights from freedom of speech to freedom of worship), supplemented over time by a range of statutory rights (forest rights, right to information, right to work, food security, etc.). 

Today, civil liberties are thoroughly compromised; even the equal political right to vote has been undermined by the draconian way in which the SIR is being implemented. Social and economic rights, even to the modest extent they were available, are presently under threat. 

Two aspects of the attrition of social and economic rights are notable: first, the philosophy of welfare, which is a philosophy of welfare as charity rather than entitlement or right; and, second, access to welfare getting tied to the question of who is an Indian. 

In this context, the ongoing SIR is very important. Up until now, one’s voter registration was limited to determining one’s eligibility to vote. Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual’s citizenship status and their access to welfare provisioning. 

The SIR has implications for both the civil and political rights of Indian citizens—in the form of mass disenfranchisement—as also for their social and economic rights. Welfare provisioning is now contingent on your name being on the electoral rolls: neither the Supreme Court nor the Calcutta High Court have seen fit to correct this. 

The relationship between citizenship and the vote is being inverted: from citizenship being the condition of the vote to the vote becoming an instrument for sifting citizens, for inclusion and exclusion, and for casting doubt on the citizenship of citizens, especially those who bear identities that are increasingly, at the behest of majoritarian politics, being disparaged in society.

So, what is to be done?

- First, and most urgently, the delinking of the voter list and welfare provisioning to mitigate the worst effects for those excluded by the SIR.

- The BJP’s citizenship project is not solely state-directed. It is as much a societal project, underwritten by a concerted ideological campaign and grass-roots mobilisation, with impunity for vigilante violence and hate crimes. Hence the redress cannot be directed entirely at institutions and laws; it must also involve civil society.

- The toxicity that has been systematically made to penetrate society is outside the domain of institutions, laws and policies. The revival of civil society is imperative for addressing it.

- Civil society must focus on (a) the restoration of civil liberties and freedoms; (b) the restoration and the expansion of social and economic rights; and (c) the fostering of inter-community relations and the removal of inter-community distrust. This will entail systematically combating misinformation in order to revive even a semblance of the secular project, even though we recognise that it was never particularly robust.

- The one institutional domain that needs attention, in this context, is the judiciary. In an earlier time, the alliance between the judiciary and civil society had enabled the recognition of many rights. Such an alliance is once again needed to restore the fundamental rights of citizenship, including, and especially, social and economic rights.

Let me return to the presumption of alienage. The Citizenship Act 1955 provides no independent mechanism for identifying aliens. If someone is suspected of not being a citizen, it is the state that has to prove the allegation. The burden of proving that someone is not a citizen lies on the state. This is in contrast to a colonial law which does not seem to be undergoing decolonisation anytime soon – the Foreigners’ Act 1946, which places the burden of proof on the individual charged with being a foreigner. This is also the case in the NRC, which effectively places an entire population under suspicion of alienage. 

There is another similarity between the Foreigners Act, the NPR and the SIR: under the Foreigners Act, any person who has reason to believe that a foreigner has entered India without valid documents or is staying in India beyond their authorised period of stay is duty-bound to inform the nearest police station within 24 hours. In the National Population Register, any individual can report their neighbour as a foreigner, and the latter gets deemed a Doubtful person. The SIR takes this to another level altogether: anyone from the same assembly constituency can submit as many objections as they wish. This provision can and has encouraged vigilantism—from Madhya Pradesh to Bihar, the targets of vigilantism have been overwhelmingly Muslim voters. 

Before we can think about reconstruction, therefore, we may need to think about deconstruction—not in the sense in which it is used in literary theory or cultural studies, but in the sense of undoing damage that has been done. This implies not just a staccato recognition of the multiple and discrete ways in which constitutional democracy is being undermined on a daily basis, but also the making of connections between what appear unrelated but are not. 

The question of citizenship is one such. 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. Their de facto second-class citizenship has already been achieved through the normalisation of everyday discrimination, through the emboldening of vigilante violence, and impunity for these. Now, the task is to render India’s largest minority as not just de facto, but also de jure, second-class citizens.

This is a modified version of a speech that Jayal gave at a conclave of the Constitutional Conduct Group at the  Constitution Club in New Delhi on 4 July 2026.

(Niraja Jayal is a political scientist and Advisory Board Member of Article 14. Her research focuses on citizenship, democracy and welfare in India. She is the author of four books, including, most recently, Citizenship Imperilled: India's Fragile Democracy.)

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