Long thread on Othering and Citizenship
Citizenship can broadly be understood in two ways. The first is to look at citizenship in a legal framework where it is defined through legislative measures like the Constitution of a country.
The second idea conceives of citizenship as a broader theoretical notion that is linked to the achievement of freedom for individuals and in the case of civic republicanism, the good of the community. Citizenship, as understood in the modern sense, is a form of membership of an individual in relation to a larger collective - the nation-state. However, most individuals have other group affiliations as well which can often contradict the supposedly overarching identity of being a citizen. Modern citizenship theory is primarily derived from liberal thought. One of its earliest meanings can be traced back to Athens, where citizenship implied the act of belonging to a community of equals. If we think of citizenship as a concept that has been historically embedded, we find that the site of embedding of citizenship has been changing. While it was the Greek polis and the Roman Empire in olden times, it became the Roman town in the Middle Ages and finally the modern state. What scholars now consider deeply problematic about citizenship is the idea of exclusion which was inherent from its inception.
In the Greek city-state, women and slaves were not considered citizens as they were looked upon as those who needed to be led since it was believed that they did not possess the necessary mental or physical faculties required for the practice of citizenship in public life.
With the Renaissance, began the interrogation of feudal notions of exclusionary citizenship and the French revolution, in particular, struggled to define citizenship in terms of belonging to an all-powerful collective called the nation, where the individual’s identity as a citizen was to be privileged over other competing identities. Citizenship, therefore, had evolved with an inherited notion of exclusion which was justified on the basis of a property quotient. In the US citizenship was enshrined in a Constitution that drew from social contract theorists and considered natural rights as inalienable and self-evident. In the social contract framework, various forms of deficiency (like lack of property) were identified to make citizenship exclusive. This exclusion was enforced by denying certain groups the right to vote.
For instance, in the US women and blacks were two such groups that were denied franchises for being ‘weak and of less intrinsic worth’. More recently, John Rawls revisited the liberal position with the equation of justice as fairness practiced in the public sphere.
In Rawls’ framework the archetypal ‘moral person’ is the democratic citizen, who is free, self-originating and responsible for exercising his rights and duties. The citizen operates in the political arena to uphold it through the practice of cooperative virtues.
The communitarian or republican view of citizenship seeks to conceive of it as an activity and not as a status of membership, as is espoused in the liberal view. Not individual rights but the pursuit of the ‘common good’ is to be privileged and thereby the communitarian scholars incorporate the ideas of duty and obligations to political life and the development of civic virtues. Rawls (liberal) and Oldfield (communitarian) attempt at finding a middle ground between these two schools by suggesting that there are alternative versions of the good life given the diversity of individuals and that rights complement the common good. TH Marshall conceived of citizenship as an expansionary concept and as a process that allowed for the inclusion of new groups (like the working classes in England) into the body politic.
Marshall distinguished between civil, political, and social rights of citizenship. Civil rights were important for individual freedom in the 18th century, while political rights became important in the 19th century as they guaranteed the role of an individual actor in the exercise of political power. Marshall’s addition of social rights of citizenship makes possible the establishment of economic welfare and security as a part and parcel of normative citizenship. Critics of Marshall held that social citizenship has often been used as a substitute for civil citizenship and they cite fascism as a classic case where civil rights were suspended while social citizenship was pursued.
Modern citizenship with its emphasis on civil rights emerged simultaneously with the growth of nationalist consciousness in Europe.
With the French revolution, the democratic nation and civil rights of its citizens were rendered inseparable. Yet with the growth of cultural nationalism in Germany, for instance, nations came to be identified by collections of individuals that had the same cultural markers like language, religion or history. Individuals were then required to prove an eternal loyalty to the nation-state at the price of the denial of civil rights.
Brubaker has shown how in the cases of France and Germany, territoriality and blood ties came to be defining features of determining citizenship. The idea behind this was to create a homogenous nation-state.
Let us dwell on Brubaker for a brief moment. Brubaker studied the effect of increased postwar immigration of people into Europe and the manners in which the French and German states responded to this. He observed that while the French were more open to conferring citizenship rights on the immigrants, Germany was more exclusionary and restrictive.
For Brubaker citizenship was normatively speaking, supposed to be egalitarian, sacred, democratic, unique, and consequential while also being tied to a cultural community.
The reality, however, presented a different set of facts.
European countries had different mechanisms for defining citizenship. For instance, in Sweden and Belgium, all that was required for citizenship was a simple declaration, while in Germany there were no special provisions for second-generation immigrants.
The act of acquiring citizenship in France and Germany became a political act mediated by country-specific institutions.
For Brubaker, the overarching notion of the Nation-State did not exist. What existed were approximations of the ideal which were also rooted in specific historical trajectories and definitions of the cultural community.
The French state then bore the marks of its revolutionary rebirth and this political unity was bolstered by the striving for a cultural community. French citizenship then was based on assimilation through institutional mechanisms like the educational system.
The German idea of nationhood was, contrary to the French, ‘particularist, organic, differential and Volk-centred’. Their nationhood was defined by ethnocultural unity and citizenship exclusively by descent which Brubaker asserts is manifest in the political structure.
This emphasis on jus sanguinis as contrasted with jus soli has since been challenged on the grounds that many immigrant peoples can under the former system spend their entire lives in a territory without being citizens of it
This specific notion of citizenship is to some extent echoed by the RSS and especially in the writings of VD Savarkar and MS Golwalkar who were heavily influenced by German cultural nationalists Fichte and Herder.
Golwalkar’s We, Our Nationhood Defined and Savarkar’s Hindutva- Who is a Hindu? are considered to be the primary texts of the RSS which opens up a plethora of analytical questions about the extent to which we can draw parallels between the RSS notion of exclusionary citizenship and larger ideas of cultural nationalism were the ultimate test of citizenship was the demonstration of loyalty to the nation.
Many of the key political ideas being propagated today by the RSS/BJP originated in the 1930s in the thought of VD Savarkar. Briefly, these ideas include the belief that Hindus constitute ‘one nation’, Hinduism was under threat and ‘extermination’ from the ‘fifth column’
of Muslims, the fear of forced conversions of Hindus to Islam or Christianity, a critique of pseudo-nationalism (which is now a critique of pseudo-secularism) , a critique of the politics of vote banks, the imperative to militarize Hindudom, the view that all Muslim culture can be reduced to Quranic injunctions which would, in the long run, be treacherous to the nation and a rejection of the view that communalism was a product of British colonialism.
Savarkar was acutely aware of the Orientalist project which sought to construct Hindus as a monolithic entity, directly reducible to Hinduism on the basis of religious belief and practice. His notion of Hindutva then came to embody elements completely different but was also
strategic in that it paradoxically drew heavily from Orientalist discourse about Hinduism and constructed a primordial view of Hinduness, the essence of which was elusive.
This Hindu nation, for Savarkar, degenerated during the reign of Asoka due to the expansion of Buddhism and its doctrines of non-violence. Buddhism had sapped the nation of its virility and this had to be regained. This critique of Buddhist non-violence was also a critique of the Indian national movement’s organizing principle under Gandhi, which was civil disobedience and ahimsa.
The first marker of Hindu identity for Savarkar was citizenship by paternal descent within the geographical space called India. The second criterion was the ‘bond of common blood’, ie, one who is born of Hindu parents. #CitizenshipAmendmentAct
The third criterion of citizenship was participation in a uniquely bounded culture. For him then, Muslims in the country were actually Hindus who had lost themselves in their conversion to Islam and needed to be brought back into the Hindu fold. This too is a recurring facet of RSS ideology if we take into account the debate on the rituals of reconversion or Shuddhikaran (purification) that the RSS advocates Muslims and Christians must undergo.
In sum then, Savarkar held that Hindus were not a religious community but a civilization, an idea most famously propagated by Friedrich Max Muller. Muslims and Christians then were only seen by him as religious communities, not civilizations. So even if they were a part of the territory and race of Hindus, they were still not part of the Hindu ‘nation’.
For Savarkar
"Their [Muslims and Christians] Holyland is far off in Arabia and Palestine. Their mythology and Godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil…Their love is divided. They to a man set their Holyland above Fatherland in their love and allegiance. …
Mohammadan or Christian communities possess all the essential qualifications of Hindutva but one and that is they do not look upon India as their Holyland."
In 1938, Savarkar drew parallels between Indian Muslims and German Jews. He valorized Nazism and this was followed by most of his successors, including Golwalkar who was quite open in his praise of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’ in Germany.
They also openly praised the Nazi’s revival of the Indo-Vedic tradition and symbols (swastika) in 1939.
That the Muslim League at this time was ascendant in India is also an important aspect which governed the direction of Savarkar’s thought in that the League became an organizational embodiment of the German Jews. In 1939 MS Golwalkar (the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS in 1940)
published We, Our Nationhood Defined where he openly praised Germany for their othering of the Jews and subsequent persecution, even while asserting that India had to learn from this example.
He wrote,
"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures,
having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."
Today, Golwalkar’s text is still considered to be the vulgate of the RSS. Savarkar and Golwalkar between them laid down the exclusive and organic notions of the Indian-Hindu nation and this are echoed with little change in the RSS’ ideology today.
Section 2 of this thread: The Citizenship of 1947 in India.
The post-Independence debate on citizenship centered around one major question - in a newly independent and industrially backward country, what would citizenship mean to anyone?
In the Indian context, Independence was supposed to bring an end to socioeconomic coercion. The ideas of citizenship as understood in Western scholarship were only upheld by a handful of Indian intellectual elite who hoped to telescope the various stages in the development of citizenship in the West and succeed in ensuring political freedoms for everyone. The paradox India entered then in 1947 was that of universal suffrage and political liberty, combined with the crippling absence of those socio-economic changes that had begotten these in the West
In West citizenship expanded in theory and practice as countries progressed industrially and there was a need to include hitherto excluded ranks of people into the political mainstream. In India in the absence of strong institutions, slow industrial growth, and market changes,
the chasm between Bharat and India grew as citizens were enfranchised only to have this franchise rendered a shibboleth by the lack of economic and social progress that was a prerequisite to its strength.
This was coupled by the incapacity of the state to provide social welfare to a majority of its citizens and the emergence of state capture by powerful local elites thereby crippling the state machinery at the local level.
In such a society, Citizenship became a function of power relations in society and often mimicked social hierarchies leading to the annulment of its effectiveness as both a tool for political articulation and as an organizer of society.
In doing so, citizenship instead became vulnerable to the process by which inequalities are perpetuated.
In India, numbers were not crucial to the determination of a minority, but the sense of marginalization in political life was.
In the context of Muslims, the minority Muslims were those who had chosen not to migrate to newly created Pakistan and therefore had to support their choice by constant and perpetual affirmations of loyalty to the nation. Even in the Constituent Assembly debates,
Pakistan was referred to as the homeland for Muslims and the question then arose of thinking of India as a homeland for Hindus. The idea, as Gyanendra Pandey understands it, was to find and define a ‘genuine, unambiguously loyal citizen’.
This loyalty to the nation is only tested for those who are not deemed ‘natural’ citizens.
In the Constituent Assembly debates, there was a dilemma between the recent history of the creation of Pakistan on the basis of religious identity and the concomitant citizenship derived there along ascriptive lines on the one hand; and the intellectual ideal of thinking in terms
of establishing universal citizenship along with the Western tradition in the new Indian state, on the other.
SP Deshmukh and Shibban Lal Saksena were among those who spoke about the need to conceptualize India as a homeland for Hindus and Sikhs.
Jaspat Roy Kapoor held that those who had migrated to Pakistan and ‘kicked this country’, on their choice of returning to India should be treated as foreigners and no rights of citizenship should be available to them.
Citizenship was therefore seen by this camp as a privilege to be conferred upon Indians and which would later become an inheritance.
#CitizenshipAmendmentAct
Thakur Das Bhargava for his part felt that for aliens to become citizens they needed to be able to demonstrate their discharge of obligations to the nation.
There was also a general assertion that those who had demonstrated their loyalty to Pakistan by migrating there had forfeited the privilege of Indian citizenship.
It is interesting to note that even the Constituent Assembly debates on citizenship reveal an urge similar to that of the Hindu right today.
Mahboob Ali Baig and Brajeshwar Prasad challenged the assumption of Pakistan returnees as traitors and chastised the Assembly for thinking in terms of exclusionary citizenship, i.e., conceiving of India as a homeland for Hindus and Sikhs
Nehru, on his part, predictably adopted the secular standpoint and argued against the line taken by Deshmukh and Roy
A key factor that can be isolated in the Constituent Assembly debates is the linking of Indian citizenship to those who could prove they had no loyalty towards Pakistan.
The strange matter was that this test of loyalty was important only when one had to decide the citizenship of the individuals of the Muslim community. In fact in every speaker’s speech, Pakistan figured prominently.
#CitizenshipAmendmentAct
There was a constant refrain of Pakistani refugees and returnees and what citizenship rights could be given to them. Refugees, returnees, and Muslims who had stayed behind were accused of supporting the demand for Pakistan and by extension were classified as anti-Indian.
Implicit in the Constituent Assembly was the unsaid – can we really think of Muslims as Indian citizens? The fact that a similar debate did not rage about the granting of citizenship to Christians and Parsis, only served the purpose of isolating Muslims as constituting a somewhat special community, perhaps with the implication that they should be treated differently.
the Hindu right’s own understanding of citizenship is predicated on two rudiments. First, citizenship is identified in the tradition of cultural and ethnonationalism and the idea of identity-forming the basis of one’s inclusion in the state.
Second, citizenship is defined through the exclusion of communities (like Muslims) on the assumption that the Muslim community can never be loyal or patriotic to Hindu-India.
The idea of conceptualizing India as the land of Hindus and Sikhs had many adherents in the Assembly. Ambedkar remained silent as the debate raged and it was the strong influence of Nehru, (who turned down such interrogations into citizenship) that was the deciding influence.
The Hindu right is in the process of denying civic and social citizenship to the Muslim community across India through the twin Acts of the NRC and the #CitizenshipAmendmentAct
In this schematic, the Indian state (Rashtra), in the Hindu right’s view, is a passive entity to the extent that it is seen as unable to protect itself against home-grown Muslim subversives, supported by Pakistan.
This portrayal of the state as being helpless when confronted by internal "Muslim subversion"; and ruthless and strong when dealing with "Muslim subversion" in the form of Pakistan is an unresolved paradox. The Muslims in India have been placed on trial by the Hindu right,
I've tried to capture the context and history of the idea of citizenship and also the debate in India about citizenship in 1947-1949 and reminding people that the idea that is at the core of the #CitizenshipAmendmentAct and the #NRC was defeated once before in the Indian Constituent Assembly. Do not forget that. This fight has happened before (but in a very very democratic way).
But importantly inform and arm yourself with a background on what these concepts mean because this fight has to be fought in every living room.
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