The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics PDF

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f I N DIA N P OL I T IC S 9780198894261_Book.indb 1 30-Mar-24 11:07:54  OUP UNCORRECTED...

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f I N DIA N P OL I T IC S 9780198894261_Book.indb 1 30-Mar-24 11:07:54  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN 9780198894261_Book.indb 2 30-Mar-24 11:07:54  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN The Oxford Handbook of INDIAN POLITICS Edited by ŠUMIT GANGULY and ESWARAN SRIDHARAN 9780198894261_Book.indb 3 30-Mar-24 11:07:54  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2024 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number ISBN 978–​0–​19–​889426–​1 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198894261.001.0001 Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. 9780198894261_Book.indb 4 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Šumit Ganguly dedicates this volume to the memory of Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr., dedicated scholar, trusted colleague, and loyal friend. Eswaran Sridharan dedicates this volume to the memory of S. K. Singh, former diplomat, governor, and institution builder. 9780198894261_Book.indb 5 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN 9780198894261_Book.indb 6 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN CPP1 Introduction and Acknowledgements CPP2 This collective effort has been in gestation for the better part of half a decade. It represents an attempt to provide as complete an overview of contemporary Indian pol- itics as possible. While it takes into account the changes that have taken place since the 2014 and 2019 general elections, it situates these changes in the longer run-​up to these developments, thereby covering both the long-​term trajectories of Indian politics and important changes in the recent past and the present. To that end it deals with political institutions, processes, and outcomes, as well as theories and debates, all of which have evolved alongside political developments. We have made every effort to provide as com- prehensive coverage as possible of the gamut of issues associated with the country’s pol- itics. Also, we have made every effort to avoid providing mere snapshots of the subjects covered and have instead sought to focus on ongoing trends and directions. CPP3 We are acutely cognizant that, despite our best efforts, events will, no doubt, overtake many of these discussions. Nevertheless, it remains our fervent hope that the analyses in this volume will have identified certain core and enduring features of Indian politics. Finally, we would like to believe that the depth and breadth of this project will render the volume useful to scholars, analysts, and students of contemporary Indian politics as an essential source and reference point. CPP4 The outcome of this project, temporarily halted by the ravages of the Covid-​19 pan- demic, is now finalized, thanks to the efforts of a great many people. The enterprise stemmed from a generous Presidential International Research Award from the Office of the Vice President of Research at Indiana University, Bloomington. Accordingly, we wish to thank Professor Fred Cate, the vice president for research, who chaired the committee that awarded us this grant. CPP5 We also wish to thank Professor Michael Dodson, the academic director of the Indiana University Gateway in New Delhi for his support for this project. Our thanks are also owed to Zafeena Suresh, the director of the Gateway, and especially, to Minu Thomas, the program coordinator, for her unstinted support during the conference. Also, in New Delhi, we thank Tishya Sethi, the associate director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi, for her generous assistance with the logistics of the conference, and Anuradha Bhasin for her excellent copyediting of all the chapters. CPP6 Additionally, we thank Aashna Khanna, a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been associated with this project from its very inception, and she diligently tackled a range of tasks associated with it. We also thank Kate Vernallis, a graduate student in the department, for her 9780198894261_Book.indb 7 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN viii   Introduction and Acknowledgements unstinted support with the conference logistics. Finally, we thank Spenser Warren, an- other doctoral student in the department, who helped with the final preparations for the conference. CPP7 And last but not least, we thank all the contributors who have enabled this volume for their participation in this scholarly enterprise. 9780198894261_Book.indb 8 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Contents List of Figures  xiii List of Tables  xv Notes on Contributors  xvii I C OR E I N S T I T U T ION S 1. Rights and Citizenship  3 Niraja Gopal Jayal 2. The Lok Sabha  17 M. R. Madhavan 3. The Rajya Sabha: A ‘Federal Chamber’ or a Mere Upper House in the Indian Parliament?  31 Sandeep Shastri 4. The Indian Cabinet  47 Ajay K. Mehra 5. The Supreme Court  65 Ronojoy Sen I I F E DE R A L I SM A N D L O C A L P OL I T IC S 6. The Changing Nature of Federalism in India  81 Rekha Saxena 7. Political Leadership in India  97 Ashutosh Kumar 8. Politics in the Third Tier: Municipalities and Panchayats  111 George Mathew 9780198894261_Book.indb 9 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN x   Contents I I I E L E C T ION S 9. The Election Commission of India and Its Evolution  127 Banasmita Bora 10. Elections in India: A Journey over the Last 7 Decades  143 Sanjay Kumar 11. Media Exposure, Vote Choice, and Polarization in Indian Politics  157 Rahul Verma I V T H E M AJ OR PA RT I E S 12. The BJP’s Ideology, Structures, Sociology, and Strategies  179 Christophe Jaffrelot 13. The Congress Party in Decline  195 Zoya Hasan 14. Regional Parties  211 Adam Ziegfeld V PA RT I E S A N D C OA L I T ION S 15. Political Parties: Centralized Electoral Machines  227 K. K. Kailash 16. The Party System  249 Rekha Diwakar 17. Coalition Politics in India  271 Eswaran Sridharan V I C A ST E , G E N DE R , M IG R AT ION 18. Caste and Politics: Limits of Democratization  291 Suhas Palshikar 19. Women in Indian Politics  305 Carole Spary 9780198894261_Book.indb 10 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Contents   xi 20. The Politics of Interstate Migration in India  327 Ashwani Kumar and Shashwat Dhar V I I M ON E Y A N D P OL I T IC S 21. Political Finance in India  349 Milan Vaishnav 22. State-​Business Relations in India  369 Kanta Murali V I I I SE C U L A R I SM A N D M I N OR I T I E S 23. Indian Secularism at Crossroads: An Interpretation  391 Rajeev Bhargava 24. Communalism  405 Ashutosh Varshney 25. Muslim Representation  427 Adnan Farooqui I X P OL I T IC A L E C ON OM Y 26. The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policy in India  447 Surupa Gupta 27. The Evolution of India’s Economic Regulation: From Dirigisme to the New Regulatory State and Beyond  461 John Echeverri-​Gent 28. The Politics of Public Service Delivery in India  481 Diego Maiorano X P OL I T IC A L V IOL E N C E 29. Insurgencies and Political Violence in India  497 Paul Staniland 30. Coercive Instruments of the State  513 Arvind Verma 9780198894261_Book.indb 11 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xii   Contents X I F OR E IG N P OL IC Y A N D SE C U R I T Y 31. The Evolution of India’s Foreign Policy  527 Šumit Ganguly 32. The Functions and Challenges of Indian Defence Policy  545 Arzan Tarapore 33. Drivers of India’s South Asia Policy  557 Happymon Jacob 34. India’s Civil-​Military Relations  577 Anit Mukherjee 35. The New Normal: India’s Quest for the ‘Credible’ in Nuclear Deterrence  593 Gaurav Kampani Index  615 9780198894261_Book.indb 12 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN List of figures Figure 2.1 The Lok Sabha Sits Less Frequently 18 Figure 2.2 A Significant Portion of the Scheduled Time Is Lost to Disruptions 18 Figure 2.3 The Total Number of Hours Met by the Lok Sabha Has Declined 19 Figure 2.4 Votes Are Recorded for Few Bills 25 Figure 11.1 Exposure to Traditional Media, 1996–​2019 160 Figure 11.2 Exposure to Traditional Media and Vote Choice: 1996–​2019 (in %) 163 Figure 11.3 Exposure to Social Media and Vote Choice in 2019 (%) 163 Figure 11.4 Party Preference and Trust in Media Sources 171 Figure 12.1 Caste and community representation in the Hindi Belt (1962–​2019) 190 Figure 14.1 Regional Party Vote Shares (1951–​2019) 215 Figure 16.1 Average Effective Number of Parties (ENP) in India National Elections, 1952–​2019 254 Figure 16.2 Timeline of Formation of Major Parties in India 254 Figure 19.1 Women in Lok Sabha Elections 1962–​2019 307 Figure 20.1 Average Net Flows of Interstate Migrants in India, 2011–​2016 331 Figure 24.1 Hindu-​Muslim Riots in India, 1950–​2018 418 Figure 24.2 Lynchings in India, 2009–​2019 419 Figure 24.3 Lynchings by Victim’s Religion (Deaths) 420 Figure 24.4 Lynchings by Victim’s Religion (Injuries) 421 Figure 24.5 Breakdown of Parties in Power by Lynching Incident 421 Figure 27.1 GNI Growth Rate: 5–Year Moving Averages, 1953–54 to 2019–20 469 Figure 27.2 Gross Fixed Capital Formation as Percent GDP (at current market Prices) 469 Figure 27.3 India’s Net Foreign Investment Inflows, 1990–91 to 2020–21 (in US $ Millions) 470 Figure 27.4 Total Trade as Percent of GDP, 1949–50 to 2019–20 471 9780198894261_Book.indb 13 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN 9780198894261_Book.indb 14 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN List of Tables Table 11.1 TV News Viewership and Newspaper Readership: 2014–​2019 160 Table 11.2 Exposure to Social Media since 1996 (%) 161 Table 11.3 BJP and Congress Social Media Penetration (Followers in Millions) 164 Table 11.4 Estimates of Campaign Expenditure: 1998–​2019 166 Table 11.5 Social Media Activity Leads to Political Polarization 170 Table 11.6 Level of Trust in the Media (%) 171 Table 11.A.1 Dependent Variables 176 Table 12.1 BJP Performance in General Elections (Seats and % of the Vote) 181 Table 12.2 Castes and Tribes among BJS and BJP Voters in 1971–​2009 184 Table 12.3 The 2009, 2014, and 2019 LS Elections: Votes by Caste, Tribe, and Religion 186 Table 15.1 Political Parties in India 228 Table 15.2 Centralized Electoral Machine 235 Table 16.1 Parties in Indian National Elections (Lok Sabha), 1952–​2019 252 Table 16.2 Summary Results of National Elections (Lok Sabha), 1952–​1967 256 Table 16.3 Summary Results of National Elections (Lok Sabha) 1971–​1989 258 Table 16.4 Seat Share and Vote Share of National and Regional Parties in the Lok Sabha, 1952–​2009 259 Table 16.5 Coalition Governments in India at the National Level, 1989–​2009 261 Table 16.6 BJP’s Performance in National (Lok Sabha) Elections, 1984–​2019 263 Table 17.1 Coalition and Minority Governments (by Indian Definition of Government) 276 Table 17.2 Parties in Coalition Governments (by Indian Definition of ‘Government’): Names and Numbers 278 Table 17.3 Effective Number of Parties by Votes and Seats 281 Table 19.1 Descriptive Representation of Women among Elected MLAs across Indian States (1962–​2021) 308 Table 20.1 Population Share of Interstate Male Migrants in Major Indian Cities 336 9780198894261_Book.indb 15 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xvi   List of Tables Table 24.1 BJP/​BJS Vote share 413 Table 25.1 Muslim Nomination and Election 1952–​2019 428 Table 25.2 Lok Sabha Constituencies by Muslim Population 429 Table 25.3 Percentage of Muslim Nominees as per the Constituency Profile 1962–​2019* 432 Table 25.4 Party-​wise Patterns of Muslim Nomination and Election (1952–​2019)* 433 Table 25.5 Percentage of Muslim Representatives State/​UT-​Wise 1952–​2019 437 Table 25.6 Percentage of Muslim Representatives as per the Constituency Profile 1952–​2019 437 Table 25.7 Muslim Voting Patterns in National Elections for Major Parties, 1996–​2019 439 Table 29.1 Actors and Types of Political Violence in India 502 9780198894261_Book.indb 16 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Notes on Contributors Rajeev Bhargava is an Honorary Fellow at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and the director of its Parekh Institute of Indian Thought. He was also the Centre’s director (2007–​2014). He has been a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. Bhargava has been a fellow at Harvard University, Institute of Advanced Studies, Jerusalem; Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin; IWM, Vienna; a Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University, Tsinghua University, and the New York University; and a professorial fellow at the Institute of Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, Sydney. Bhargava’s publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (2010), The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (2010), and Between Hope and Despair (2023). His edited works include Secularism and Its Critics (1998), Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (2008), and Politics, Ethics and the Self: Re-​reading Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (2022). Banasmita Bora is a research associate at the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management, Election Commission of India. At IIIDEM, she is involved in the development of various International and National training modules. Prior to ECI, she worked at Lokniti, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies from August 2003 till June 2012. Her areas of research include Governance, Indian Politics, Election Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies. Her articles titled ‘On the Electoral Process’ (2009) and ‘Sikkim: The Pro-​Incumbency Factor’ (2004) have previously been published in Economic and Political Weekly. Recently, she has been a principal investi- gator to the case study ‘Challenges and Prospects for the Enfranchisement of migrants in India’, for International IDEA. Shashwat Dhar is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Vanderbilt University, USA. He studies migration, democracy, and political representation in comparative per- spective, with a regional focus on South Asia. His dissertation examines the political consequences of internal economic migration on citizen-​state relations in migrant-​ losing areas. His work relies on original survey, experimental, and qualitative data obtained during a year of fieldwork in Madhubani, Bihar, a high-​migration corridor in eastern India. His research has been supported by the American Political Science Association, American Institute of Indian Studies, Survey, CTO, and the Vanderbilt LAPOP Lab. 9780198894261_Book.indb 17 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xviii   Notes on Contributors Rekha Diwakar is a senior lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex, UK. She has previously held academic positions in the UK at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Goldsmiths College, University College London, and King’s College London. Her research interests include Indian and comparative politics, especially electoral competition and voting behaviour, size of party systems, and research methods in Political Science. John Echeverri-​Gent is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. His books include The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States (University of California Press 1993) and Interpreting Politics: Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy (coedited with Kamal Sadiq; Oxford University Press 2020). His published articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, World Development, Asian Survey, and India Review, among others. He serves on the editorial board of Political Science Quarterly. He chaired the American Political Science Association’s Task Force on ‘Difference and Inequality in Developing Societies’. Adnan Farooqui is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Prior to this, he was a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India (2003–​2008). He has authored a chapter ‘Chronicle of Janata Parivar Foretold: Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United) in Bihar’ in the volume How India Votes: A State by State Look (edited by Ashutosh Kumar and Yatindra Singh Sisodia). He also has other coauthored publications in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, Economic and Political Weekly, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Seminar, and Contemporary Perspectives: History, Sociology of South Asia. Šumit Ganguly is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University for the academic year 2023–​2024. A specialist on the international and comparative politics of South Asia, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of over 20 books on the region. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the editor-​in-​chief of the International Studies Review, and the founding editor of The India Review. His most recent book, coauthored with Manjeet S. Pardesi and William R. Thompson, is The Sino-​Indian Rivalry: Implications for Global Order (Cambridge University Press) in 2023. Niraja Gopal Jayal is the Avantha Chair and a professor of Politics at King’s College London. She is also currently Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics Department of Gender Studies and formerly a professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her most re- cent publications are Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black 2021) and Re-​Forming India: The Nation Today (editor; Penguin Random House 2019). Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press 2013) won 9780198894261_Book.indb 18 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Notes on Contributors    xix the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press 1999). She has coedited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (Oxford University Press 2001). Surupa Gupta is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her research focuses on the politics of India’s domestic and foreign economic policy. Her recent publications include ‘Economic Nationalism and India-​US Trade Relations during the Modi-​Trump Years’ in India Review (2023) and ‘India’s Engagement with the International Monetary Fund: Growing into an Ownership Role’ in Contemporary South Asia (2022). She has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern California. Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Distinguished Professor at the Council for Social Development, New Delhi. She has been a professor at the Centre for Political Studies and the Dean of the School of Social Sciences, JNU. She has published widely on Indian politics; most of her work has focused on state-​ society relations, democracy, political mobilization, and issues of equality and so- cial justice. She is the author or editor of 19 books. Her publications include, among others, Politics of Inclusion: Caste, Minority and Affirmative Action (Oxford University Press 2011); Congress After Indira: Policy, Power Political Change (1984–​2009) (Oxford University Press 2014); Agitation to Legislation: Negotiating Equity and Justice in India (Oxford University Press 2018); and most recently, Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Polarization and the Growing Crisis of the Congress Party (2009–​19) (Oxford University Press 2022). Happymon Jacob is an associate professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research, New Delhi. Prior to joining JNU in 2008, he held teaching positions at the University of Jammu in J&K and Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, and research positions at the Centre for Air Power Studies, Delhi Policy Group, and Observer Research Foundation. He is an elected member of the Pugwash Council since 2013. His recent publications include Line on Fire: Ceasefire Violations and India-​Pakistan Escalation Dynamics (Oxford University Press 2019) and Line of Control: Traveling with the Indian and Pakistani Armies (Penguin Viking 2018). His concurrent engagements with the Indian media include a column with The Hindu and hosting of a weekly video show on national security on The Wire.In. Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow at CERI-​Sciences Po/​CNRS, a pro- fessor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College (London) and president of the French Political Science Association. He is also a non-​resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, permanent consultant at the Centre for Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (since 2008) and columnist in 9780198894261_Book.indb 19 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xx   Notes on Contributors The Indian Express (since 2013). Among his recent publications are Business and Politics in India (as a coeditor with A. Kohli and K. Murali; Oxford University Press 2019), The Majoritarian State. How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (as a coeditor with A. Chatterji and T. B. Hansen; Hurst 2019), India’s First Dictatorship. The Emergency, 1975-​7 7 (as coauthor with Pratinav Anil; Hurst 2020), and Modi’s India. Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy (Princeton University Press 2021). K. K. Kailash is with the Department of Political Science, University of Hyderabad, Telangana, India. His research interests focus on political parties and elections, coalition politics and processes, and issues of federalism in contemporary India. He is a member of the Editorial Managing team of the Studies in Indian Politics. He is a member of the Lokniti Network, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and an honorary fellow at the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, New Delhi. He has coedited the volume Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States (with Louise Tillin and Rajeshwari Deshpande; Oxford University Press 2015), and his work has been previously published in Studies in Indian Politics, India Review, Asian Survey, Contemporary South Asia, and Economic and Political Weekly. Gaurav Kampani is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa, with a PhD from Cornell University. His research interests centre on international se- curity, focusing on the relationship between domestic institutions and strategic policy, military strategy, operations planning, and weapons development. He is the author of India’s Nuclear Proliferation Policy: The Impact of Secrecy on Decision Making, 1980–​2020 (Routledge 2020). Ashutosh Kumar is a professor of Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. He was Dr T. N. Seshan Chair Professor (visiting), India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management (IIIDEM), Election Commission of India during 2022-​2023. His areas of specialization include electoral and federal dynamics in Indian states. His research papers have been published in national and international journals such as India Review, South Asia Research, Asian Ethnicity, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Economic, Studies in Indian Politics, and Political Weekly, and Seminar. He has also authored and edited books related to Election Studies in India. Ashwani Kumar is a professor at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). He is the author of Community Warriors-​State, Peasant and Caste Armies in Bihar and one of the chief editors of London School of Economics Year-​ Book Global Civil Society; Poverty and Activism. He has recently coedited Migrants, Mobility and Citizenship in India’ (Routledge India 2021). In his policy advisory role, he has served as a member of Central Employment Guarantee Council (Government of India). He is also a recipient of the Senior Fellowship of Indian Council of Social Science Research. He holds a PhD from the University of Oklahoma. Sanjay Kumar is currently a professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. He served as the director of CSDS between 2014 and 2020. His main areas 9780198894261_Book.indb 20 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Notes on Contributors    xxi of research include electoral politics, voting behaviour, and the Indian youth. He has several publications to his credit, Elections in India: An Overview (Routledge 2021) and Women Voters in Indian Elections: Changing Trends and Emerging Patterns (Routledge 2021) being the latest. His other important publications include Post-​Mandal Politics in Bihar: Changing Electoral Patterns (Sage 2018), Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class (Sage 2013), and Measuring Voting Behaviour in India (with Praveen Rai; Sage 2013). He has contributed chapters to edited volumes and written numerous re- search articles in national and international research journals. He writes regularly for both English and Hindi newspapers and is a well-​known face on Indian television. M. R. Madhavan is the president and cofounder of PRS Legislative Research, New Delhi. His work focuses on improving the effectiveness of legislatures as the key decision-​ making bodies in a democracy. He is a frequent columnist on issues related to legislative issues and representation, and has contributed several book chapters on these topics. Prior to starting PRS in 2005, he worked with ICICI Securities and Bank of America in Mumbai and Singapore as an analyst covering equity, interest rate, and the currency markets of Indian and South-​East Asian economies. He has a PhD and MBA from IIM Calcutta, and holds a BTech degree from IIT Madras. Diego Maiorano is a senior assistant professor at the University of Naples ‘L'Orientale’ and visiting fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He has previously worked at the National University of Singapore, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Liege. He is the author of Autumn of the Matriarch—​Indira Gandhi's Final Term in Office (2015) and coauthor of The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India (2020). George Mathew was the founder director and is currently the Chair of the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. Previously, he has been a visiting fellow of the University of Chicago South Asian Studies Centre (1981–​1982) and a visiting professor at University of Padova (1988); he was also awarded the Fulbright Fellowship in 1991. His major publications include Communal Road to a Secular Kerala and Panchayati Raj from Legislation to Movement and the following edited works, Shift in Indian Politics; Dignity for All: Essays in Socialism and Democracy; Panchayati Raj in Karnataka Today: Its National Dimensions; Panchayati Raj in Jammu and Kashmir; Status of Panchayati Raj in States of India 1994; Status of Panchayati Raj in States of India in 2000; Grassroots Democracy in India and China: The Right to Participate (coeditor); and Inclusion and Exclusion in Local Governance: Field Studies from Rural India. Ajay K. Mehra is a political scientist. He was Atal Bihari Vajpayee Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2019–​2021. Earlier, he was the principal of Shaheed Bhagat Singh Evening College, University of Delhi. He was awarded the Ford Foundation Chair in Dalit Studies at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, in 2008. He has also been a visiting professor at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris several times between 2002 and 2014. He was also Foreign Policy Fellow 9780198894261_Book.indb 21 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xxii   Notes on Contributors at the School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park for 6 months in 1991. He has published widely on issues relating to institutions (police, political parties, the Indian Cabinet, the voluntary sector, and the Prime Minister) and processes (elections) as the author or co-​author of books and monographs, in academic journals, and in the print media in India. Anit Mukherjee is a Senior Lecturer at Kings College, London. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He joined RSIS after a postdoctorate at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. From 2010 to 2012, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. He is the author of The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Military in India (Oxford University Press, 2019). Formerly, he was a Major in the Indian Army and is an alumnus of India’s National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla. Kanta Murali is an associate professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include comparative political economy of development, Indian politics, politics of growth and economic policy, state-​business relations, labour policy, state capacity, and inequality. Her publications include Caste, Class and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India (Cambridge University Press 2017) and a coedited volume (with Atul Kohli and Christophe Jaffrelot) Business and Politics in India (Oxford University Press 2019). She received a PhD in Politics from Princeton University. Suhas Palshikar is retired professor of Political Science based at Pune, India, and founder-​editor of the journal Studies in Indian Politics. He has been involved in the National Election Studies and other research activities of Lokniti (Programme for Comparative Democracy at CSDS, Delhi) since 1996. He was one of the principal investigators of the international project on Democracy in South Asia (Rounds One and Two). He has written extensively in academic publications on the theme of democratic politics in India and has been a frequent contributor to The Indian Express and journals such as Seminar and Economic and Political Weekly. His recent publications include Politics and Society between Elections (coedited with Siddharth Swaminathan; Routledge 2020), Indian Democracy (Oxford India Short Introductions, Oxford University Press 2017), Electoral Politics in India: Resurgence of Bharatiya Janata Party (coedited with Sanjay Kumar and Sanjay Lodha; Routledge 2017), and Party Competition in Indian States (coedited with K. C. Suri and Yogendra Yadav; Oxford University Press 2014). Rekha Saxena has been a full professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi, for more than a decade. Additionally, she is the honorary vice-​ chairperson of the Centre for Multilevel Federalism, New Delhi, which is a member of The International Association of Centers for Federal Studies. She is also Honorary Senior Advisor to the Forum of Federations, Ottawa, Canada. Her important publications include: New Dimensions in Federal Discourse in India (Routledge 2021), 9780198894261_Book.indb 22 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Notes on Contributors    xxiii Varieties of Federal Governance: Major Contemporary Models, Foundation (Cambridge University Press, India 2010), and Mapping Canadian Federalism for India (editor; 2002), Situating Federalism: Mechanisms of Intergovernmental Relations in Canada and India (2006), India at the Polls: Parliamentary Elections in the Federal Phase (2003); Indian Politics: Constitutional Design and Institutional Functioning (Third Edition; Prentice Hall, India 2021), Federalizing India in the Age of Globalization (coauthor; Primus 2013), The 2019 Parliamentary Elections in India (2022), The Value of Comparative Federalism (Routledge 2021), Indian Judiciary: The changing Landscape (2014), and The Indian Judiciary: The Changing Landscape (coeditor; 2007). Ronojoy Sen is a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies and the South Asian Studies Programme in the National University of Singapore. His latest book is House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2022). He is also the author of Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press and Penguin 2015) and Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism, and the Indian Supreme Court (Oxford University Press 2010). He has edited several books, the latest being Media at Work in China and India (Sage 2015). He has worked for over a decade with leading Indian newspapers, most recently as an editor for the Times of India. He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago and read History at Presidency College, Calcutta. Sandeep Shastri is Director-​Academics, NITTE Education Trust. His research focuses on Election Studies, federalism, and political institutions and processes. He has authored 13 books, over 50 chapters in edited volumes, and over 100 articles in prestigious research journals, in addition to more than 350 op-​ed page articles in leading international and national newspapers. He is also a political commentator and the National Coordinator of the Lokniti, an all-​India network of social scientists involved in survey-​based election and opinion studies. He is a consultant to prestigious international bodies such as the United Nations, World Bank, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, and the Forum of Federations and chaired the Drafting Committee of the Karnataka State Youth Policy. Carole Spary is an associate professor and director of the Asia Research Institute at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament (with Prof. Shirin M. Rai; Oxford University Press 2019) and Gender, Development, and the State in India (Routledge 2019). She was pre- viously a lecturer in Politics at the University of York and a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Warwick. She has a PhD from the University of Bristol. Eswaran Sridharan is the academic director and chief executive, University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in Delhi. He is a political scien- tist whose published work includes that on political parties, party system change, co- alition politics, political finance, political economy of liberalization, the Indian middle classes, and international relations theory and India as an emerging power. He has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics; the Institute of Developing Economies (Tokyo); University of California, Berkeley; and the Institute of South Asian 9780198894261_Book.indb 23 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN xxiv   Notes on Contributors Studies, Singapore. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of 10 books, with four forth- coming titles, and has published 96 academic articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. He is the Editor-​in-​Chief of the refereed Pan-​Social Science India-​dedicated journal, India Review (Taylor and Francis, UK). Paul Staniland is a professor of Political Science and Faculty Chair of the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago, and nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, examines how insurgent groups are organized and the circumstances under which they can sur- vive counterinsurgency. Networks of Rebellion won the Joseph Lepgold Book Prize, Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, and Myres McDougal Prize. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-​ State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, examines when and how states and armed groups clash, cooperate, or learn to live with each other. It won the Giovanni Sartori Book Award and Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Award. Arzan Tarapore is a research scholar at Stanford University. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-​Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation; the East-​West Center in Washington, DC; and the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi. His work has been published widely, including by Carnegie India, the National Bureau of Asian Research, the Center for a New American Security, and in The Washington Quarterly, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Joint Force Quarterly, War on the Rocks, The Hindu, and The Interpreter. Prior to his academic career, he served in the Australian Defence Department in a variety of analytic, management, and liaison positions. He holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London. Milan Vaishnav is senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. His primary research focus is the political economy of India. He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press 2017), which was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation book prize for the best nonfiction book on contemporary India, published in 2017. He is the editor of Institutional Roots of India’s Security Policy (Oxford University Press, 2024) and coeditor (with Devesh Kapur) of Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India (Oxford University Press 2018) and (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press 2017). His work has been published in scholarly journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Asian Survey, Governance, India Review, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Studies in Indian Politics. Ashutosh Varshney is the Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and a professor of Political Science at Brown University, where he also directs the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia. Previously, he taught at Harvard 9780198894261_Book.indb 24 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN Notes on Contributors    xxv (1989–​1998) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2001–​2008). His books include Battles Half Won: India’s Improbable Democracy (2013), Collective Violence in Indonesia (2009), Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (Yale 2002), India in the Era of Economic Reforms (Oxford India Press, 1999), and Democracy, Development and the Countryside: Urban-​Rural Struggles in India (Cambridge 1995). The awards based on his research include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carnegie Fellowship, the Gregory Luebbert Prize, and the Daniel Lerner Prize. He has also won research grants from the Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council, US Institute of Peace, Open Society Foundation, and Indian Council of Social Science Research. Arvind Verma served as an IPS officer in Bihar and is now a professor of Criminal Justice at Indiana University. He has served as the managing editor of Police Practice and Research: An International Journal and has also been an advisor to the Bureau of Police Research and Development in India. His current research interests are in policing, criminal justice issues, Indian police, and Department of Criminal Justice (CJUS) data analytics. His recent publications include books such as She Must Not Die (Thompson Reuter), Counting Crime: An Exercise in Police Discretion (Routledge), and Combating Corruption in India (Cambridge University Press) and journal articles such as ‘Process Oriented Intervention for Citizen-​Friendly and Accountable Policing’ (Indian Journal) and ‘The Sociological Conception of Corruption: A Case Study of Karnataka Lokayukt’ (India Review). He is affiliated with the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and has established a centre for Criminal Justice research to promote research on the Indian police. Rahul Verma is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research. He is also visiting assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University. His research interests include voting behaviour, party politics, political violence, and media. He is a regular columnist for various news platforms and has published papers in several peer-​reviewed journals. His book coauthored with Pradeep Chhibber, Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India (Oxford University Press 2018), develops a new approach to defining the contours of what constitutes an ideology in multiethnic countries such as India. He also coedited Dalits in the New Millennium (with Sudha Pai and D. Shyam Babu; Cambridge University Press 2023). Adam Ziegfeld is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His book, Why Regional Parties? Clientelism, Elites, and the Indian Party System was published in 2016 by Cambridge University Press. His other research examines a range of topics related to electoral pol- itics, including voter turnout, electoral rules, dominant political parties, and dynastic politics. This work has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Comparative Politics. He is cur- rently working on a new book on election alliances in India. 9780198894261_Book.indb 25 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Sat Mar 30 2024, NEWGEN 9780198894261_Book.indb 26 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN P1 Pa rt I C OR E I N ST I T U T ION S 9780198894261_Book.indb 1 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN C C1P C1P C1P 9780198894261_Book.indb 2 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN C1 Chapter 1 Rights and C i t i z e nsh i p Niraja Gopal Jayal C1P1 The integral relation of rights to citizenship is perhaps nowhere captured more pro- foundly than in Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase the right to have rights.1 This encapsulates the two most consequential elements of citizenship: the first use of the term ‘right’ signifying legal status, representing the threshold condition which alone makes it possible to have any other rights, and the second, referring to the specific rights to which citizens, holding such legal status, are entitled. Both these dimensions characterize the relationship between the citizen and the state, and though relations between citizens, such as those of identity and belonging, are also an important aspect of citizenship, the focus of this chapter is on the first two. C1P2 In any democracy, it is rights or entitlements that are foremost in the popular im- agination of citizenship, invariably presuming legal membership in the political com- munity, which is the prerequisite for the enjoyment of these rights. Such membership may be inaccessible, as in colonialism, or hollow, where citizenship is graded, with some groups enjoying more rights than others. Even where it formally exists, it could be de- void of substance if there is a gap between the formal equality of citizenship rights and the substantive inequality of their realization. Redress for this most challenging but also most common divergence between the formal and the substantive often takes the form of a distinction between broadly two types of rights: civil and political rights (e.g. the freedom of speech and expression or the right to vote, which may be equally available to all) and social and economic rights (e.g. the right to education or work or food), without which the conditions for effective citizenship may be seen to be lacking. The rights of so- cial citizenship, in other words, are seen as essential for the meaningful realization of the civil and political rights that citizens enjoy by virtue of the formally equal status of legal citizenship. C1P3 These dilemmas were well apprehended by the founders of the Indian republic. Even before independence, when Indians were mere subjects, several decades away from 1 Arendt 1962. 9780198894261_Book.indb 3 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN 4   Niraja Gopal Jayal becoming citizens, a lively discussion on rights—​civil and political, but also social and economic—​was underway in the public sphere.2 The right to free speech, the right to the vote, and the right to resistance were, already in the 1920s, seen as inseparable from citizenship, and a part of the claim to national self-​determination. The Motilal Nehru Committee Report (1928) recommended an extensive range of rights—​from equal civil and political rights such as universal adult suffrage and the freedom of religion, to the rights to education, health, work, and a living wage.3 Social and economic rights were as much part of the discourse of rights in colonial India as were civil and political rights. The Karachi Resolution of the Congress in January 1931 bears eloquent testimony to this as does the closing speech of Dr Ambedkar to the Constituent Assembly in November 1949, which, couched in the language of equality, illustrates the prescient recognition of the contradiction between political and social citizenship, and of the fragility of political C1P democracy in the continued absence of social and economic equality. C1P4 In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have in- equality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.... How C1P long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life?... We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which is Assembly has to laboriously built up.4 C1P5 The salience of the legal dimension of citizenship (and its Others, viz. alienage and state- C1 lessness) is a peculiarly contemporary phenomenon. In the Global North, citizenship in the ‘thin’ legal sense was simply taken for granted up until the 1990s; it was the project of building ‘thick’ citizenship, through multicultural policies, that engaged these societies. C1P Today, legal or thin citizenship is being acknowledged anew as a necessary precon- dition for any other kind of citizenship, with an affirmation of juridical personhood, being as important as moral personhood for what Arendt called the right to have rights. Social or substantive citizenship is obviously unavailable to those who lack formal legal C1P citizenship. C1P6 As far as the basis of legal citizenship is concerned, it has been customary to divide the world of sovereign states into those where the basis of citizenship is jus soli (‘birth on the soil of the country’) or jus sanguinis (‘blood, descent, or race’), with the first being considered the more progressive of the two. Of late, a hybridization of these two has occurred all over the world, including in India. These two rival bases of citizenship were the subject of a contentious debate in India’s Constituent Assembly, which expressed an unambiguous preference for citizenship by birth (jus soli), describing it as the more 2 Jayal 2013, Chapter 5. 3 Chandhoke 2016, 191–​2. 4 Rao 1968, 944–​5. 9780198894261_Book.indb 4 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN Rights and Citizenship    5 enlightened, modern, civilized, and democratic conception of citizenship, as opposed to the principle of jus sanguinis, which was described as an idea of racial citizenship. However, the provisions of the Indian Constitution on legal citizenship, the first type of right in the Arendtian phrase, were a stopgap solution, restricted to the status of people moving between India and Pakistan in the extraordinary times of the Partition. For the longer term, the Constituent Assembly left it to Parliament to determine the answer to the question of who is or can be an Indian citizen, which it did in 1955 with the passage of the Citizenship Act. The normative framework provided by the Assembly found ex- pression in this law, which gave a statutory basis to the idea of jus soli or citizenship by birth, in addition to providing for citizenship by birth, descent, naturalization, and registration. C1P7 In terms of what citizenship offered, the Constitution provided for a universalist con- ception of equal citizenship to all, regardless of religion, race, caste, and gender, with a fairly elaborate set of rights (in the second Arendtian sense). While the placement of social rights in a chapter titled Directive Principles of State Policy did generate some dissatisfaction, some of these later found recognition as fundamental rights, through public action and judicial pronouncements. C1P8 In the pages that follow, I will examine separately the major challenges to citizenship (in terms of legal status) and rights (in terms of civil, political, social, and economic rights), and then bring them into conversation with each other on a common template, that of formal and substantive citizenship. C1S1 Citizenship as Legal Status C1P9 Over the last few decades, the principle of jus soli has come to be increasingly weakened and eroded in favour of the principle of jus sanguinis. Several amendments to the law on citizenship, since 1985, have inserted new requirements and new exceptions to the prin- ciple of jus soli as the basis for citizenship. C1P10 The original trigger for this was the political discontent in Assam, which had witnessed in-​migration from 1947 onwards, over the dilution of the Assamese iden- tity, its culture and language. This peaked in 1971, when the bloody creation of the new state of Bangladesh led to the influx of 10 million refugees, and continued steadily there- after. Many of these immigrants had acquired forms of what Kamal Sadiq has called ‘paper citizenship’ or ‘documentary citizenship’ through ‘networks of complicity’ and ‘networks of profit’.5 In 1985, in the wake of the gruesome Nellie massacre of 1983, the Assamese student organizations that had led the agitation against the enfranchisement of migrants from Bangladesh entered into the Assam Accord with the Rajiv Gandhi government, leading to an amendment in the provisions relating to naturalization in 5 Sadiq 2009. 9780198894261_Book.indb 5 30-Mar-24 11:07:55  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN 6   Niraja Gopal Jayal the Citizenship Act. This amendment created three categories of eligibility for citizen- ship based on the year of migration. All of those who came before 1966 were declared citizens; those who came between 1966 and 1971 were struck off the electoral rolls and asked to wait 10 years before applying for citizenship, and those who came after 1971 were simply deemed to be illegal immigrants. Though these provisions were a response to the genuine grievances of the Assamese, they already contained the seeds of the pol- iticization and incipient communalization of the issue of migrants. C1P11 Today, anyone born in India before 1987 is legally an Indian citizen. However, persons C1P born in India between 1987 and 2003 are not entitled to citizenship by birth, unless they have one parent who is an Indian citizen. Since 2004, persons born in India who at the time of their birth have one parent who is an ‘illegal migrant’ are ineligible for citizenship by birth. Because many of the migrants into Assam from Bangladesh were Muslims, the category of the ‘illegal migrant’ was a way of covertly introducing a religion-​based excep- tion to the principle of citizenship by birth. This was complemented, in the same year, by an amendment to the Citizenship Rules that excluded ‘minority Hindus with Pakistani citizenship’ from the category of ‘illegal migrants’. Thus, Hindu migrants who had come into the border states of Western India from Pakistan were legally destigmatized. C1P12 The most recent, and immensely controversial, amendment is the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (henceforth CAA), which breaks with the past in introducing an explicit religious criterion into the law. It facilitates a fast-​track pathway to citizenship C1P by naturalization for Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, and Parsi ‘illegal migrants’ from three countries—​Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—​and promises citizen- ship by birth to their descendants. The Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill stated that this provision was meant to help religious minorities who were victims of persecution. However, the text of the amended law nowhere mentions religious per- secution, and only the Rules, as and when they are formulated,6 will clarify if there is any requirement to establish persecution or any procedure to validate it or, indeed, even to validate the religious identity of an individual. What the text of the law does say is that such persons will no longer be called ‘illegal migrants’; by implication, only Muslims will. C1P13 The BJP’s position that the CAA is a way of completing ‘the unfinished business of partition’7 does not explain the inclusion of Afghanistan, which was never a part of British India. Conversely, the obvious exclusion of Muslims from this list of faiths, as well as the exclusion of Sri Lanka and Myanmar as neighbouring countries from which migrants may and do come, has been interrogated. The official justification is that the new law will only cover persecuted religious minorities in the three specified countries who are, by virtue of such persecution, deserving of India’s compassion. Further, the cut-​off date of 31 December 2014 suggests that persecution has been discontinued since. 6 The Rules are required to give effect to the Act, and the Home Ministry has already sought nine extensions to frame them. 7 Press Trust of India, “CAA an ‘unfinished’ business of independence, partition: Panda.” Business Standard, January 8, 2020. 9780198894261_Book.indb 6 30-Mar-24 11:07:56  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN Rights and Citizenship    7 The implication is, first, that only Muslim states are persecutors, and their targets are people belonging only to these six faiths; and second, that non-​Muslim (Buddhist) states like Sri Lanka and Myanmar do not persecute anyone at all. This flies in the face of the well-​documented persecution of Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan, Hazaras in Afghanistan, the Rohingyas in Myanmar, and Tamil Hindus from Sri Lanka. It also fails to account for why groups that have suffered other forms of persecution, ethnic, racial, political, or any other, should not be entitled to the compassion of Indians. C1P14 If the CAA opens up pathways to citizenship for favoured groups of migrants, welcomed only on grounds of their faith and their countries of origin, a twin initiative, the National Register of Indian Citizens (henceforth NRC), opens up paths to state- lessness for groups that are disfavoured, equally exclusively, on the basis of their faith. Together, the NRC and the CAA signal the transformation of India into a majoritarian polity in which some categories of citizens would enjoy the privileges of inclusion, while others would suffer the disabilities of exclusion. The creeping move from soil to blood as the basis of citizenship represents a shift from a religion-​neutral law to a law that differentiates based on religious identity. Once a reasonably successful experiment in pluralism and diversity, India’s delicate social fabric is now fraying as a result of this and other ways in which the marginalization of minorities has been effected, leading to an erosion of the cultural rights constitutionally guaranteed to them. C1P15 This social and political transformation has been in the making for at least 2 decades.8 The undermining of the constitutional design of civic universalism reflects the marked shift towards religious majoritarianism that has come to dominate Indian political dis- course since the ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (henceforth BJP). The party’s ascent to power over 2 decades ago was based on its claim of representing the cause of Hindu unity and of counteracting the alleged ‘appeasement’ of religious minorities, under previous secular regimes, which was accomplished through a demonization of India’s largest religious minority, the Muslims. Its strategy of political mobiliza- tion deployed a narrative in which practically every component of its programme was projected as a form of redress for the historical grievances of Hindus, and of undoing and avenging the history of Hindu oppression by Muslim rulers 1000 years ago. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 was an important milestone on this journey, and, while the BJP first held power from 1998 to 2004, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee stewarded a coalition government in which divisive issues were placed on the backburner. In 2014, the BJP led by Narendra Modi became India’s first majority government since 1984 and the first non-​Congress government ever to win such a ma- jority, giving an impetus to the project of Hindutva. In the latter phase, exclusionary hypernationalism has encouraged societal practices such as the systematic ‘othering’ of, and even vigilante violence against, vulnerable religious minorities. The amendments to the law of citizenship are a key element of this political project. 8 Cf. Jaffrelot 2010. 9780198894261_Book.indb 7 30-Mar-24 11:07:56  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN 8   Niraja Gopal Jayal C1P16 The idea that citizenship can be based on faith, with a hierarchy of citizenship rights, C1P undermines the constitutional principle of universal equal citizenship. The idea that it is acceptable to discriminate between citizens on the basis of religion strikes at the root of everything the Indian Constitution and the Indian nation-​building project have stood for. It also provokes the concern that once the principle of discrimination on the basis of religion is admitted on the question of who can be a citizen of India, it may not be possible to limit or contain its further application to other realms; it could plausibly be extended to a graded citizenship in which different sets of rights and entitlements accrue to different tiers of citizens. The constitutionality of the CAA is yet to be jur- idically determined, but what is unquestionably at stake is the foundational vision of a pluralist inclusive polity in which citizenship is universal and equal, and where re- ligious identity is immaterial to the rights of citizens. As a shift from a civic-​national conception of membership in the political community to an ethnic-​national conception of these, it also has significant political implications. The reluctance to accept the equal moral and legal personhood of all exposes the weakness and even hypocrisy of India’s commitment to human rights. Finally, from an international perspective, it highlights again the long-​standing refusal to sign international treaties on refugees and the reduc- tion of statelessness. C1S2 The Rights of Citizens C1S3 Civil and Political Rights C1P C1P17 The debate on the CAA brought to public attention the first two of the fundamental rights in the Constitution: Article 14, which guarantees the right to equality, a broad and generous constitutional provision that applies to any person in India, and Article 15, which provides that the state will not discriminate against any citizen on the basis of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. The Supreme Court’s verdict on the con- stitutionality of the CAA in relation to these two provisions, when it comes, will be a pronouncement on the ambit and the limits of the constitutional guarantee of equal citizenship. C1P18 The assumption that the guarantee of civil and political rights in India has—​with the exception of the Emergency period (1975–​1977)—​been robust lies at the heart of cele- bratory narratives of the success of India’s democracy. The law and Constitution have indeed provided individuals with the full range of civil and political rights: freedom of speech and expression, of conscience, of religion, of peaceful assembly, and of as- sociation; the right to free and compulsory education; the right to vote; and the right against exploitation. The provision of this extensive panoply of rights is a testament to India’s progressive Constitution and its founders’ vision of a liberal-​constitutional democracy. Its sustenance, over 7 decades, is also undoubtedly a considerable achievement. 9780198894261_Book.indb 8 30-Mar-24 11:07:56  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN Rights and Citizenship    9 C1P19 Nevertheless, there are at least three ways in which this constitutional vision has been diminished and even tarnished. The first of these is in the constitutional provisions themselves, which qualify the fundamental rights with considerations of ‘public order’ and morality. Thus, even as the freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed, the state may make any law that limits this right if it is ‘in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality... ’.9 Determining the necessity for such restraints on the exercise of the freedom by citizens is the domain of the executive branch, though the courts have the last word in adjudicating this. Here, the record of the courts is fairly mixed. For several decades, they were well disposed towards restraints on free speech on grounds of public order or morality, and most of all, on grounds of giving offence to the sentiments of a community. The jurisprudence on the subject, it has been argued, has reflected a tension between two approaches: the liberal-​individualist and the pater- nalist.10 The first, favouring individual freedom, is wont to interpret laws on obscenity or defamation restrictively; the second tends to give the state greater power to ban speech that may be offensive, dangerous, or subversive. More often than not, the judiciary has favoured the paternalist approach, thereby encouraging criminal defamation suits and book bans. In the digital sphere, India has been the world leader in internet shutdowns since 2018, with the highest total number of shutdowns worldwide in 2022.11 Freedom of speech and expression, including academic and artistic freedom, has also been vul- nerable to threats by vigilante censors on social media, sometimes actually instigating violence. Similarly, civil society organizations working in the fields of human rights and environmental justice have been muzzled by the use of tax laws and regulations governing foreign funding.12 C1P20 There has also been an alarming tendency in recent years to make arbitrary arrests for sedition, under Section 124A of the colonial-​era Indian Penal Code. Despite judicial pronouncements declaring that speech would be considered seditious only if it is a call to violent insurrection or the overthrow of the government, the law on sedition has been promiscuously used to quell even the mildest forms of political dissent and criticism of government. In 2011–​2013, the Tamil Nadu police booked about 9000 people under this law as punishment for their peaceful protest against the establishment of a nuclear power plant in Kudankulam.13 Similarly absurd was the charging in November 2019 of 10,000 Adivasis in one district of the state of Jharkhand with sedition, in response to the Pathalgadi movement for the protection of tribal land rights.14 In the midst of these retrogressive measures, there is one case—​Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015)—​in 9 Article 19(2). 10 Bhatia 2019, 494. 11 Kaskar 2023. ‘India Remains Internet Shutdown Capital of the World for Fifth Year Running’. The Wire, 28 February. 12 Jayal 2019, 40. 13 Janardhanan 2016. 14 Sharma 2019. 9780198894261_Book.indb 9 30-Mar-24 11:07:56  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN 10   Niraja Gopal Jayal which the court defended free speech by striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. This section, which criminalized ‘offensive’ online speech, had been used to arrest and imprison two young girls one of whom had, in a Facebook post, lamented the shutdown of the city of Mumbai for the funeral of a politician, and the other had ‘liked’ it. C1P21 Secondly, there are significant impediments—​predominantly social and cultural—​to the realization of these rights for historically disadvantaged groups such as Dalits and Adivasis, as well as those belonging to economically underprivileged classes. The ability of the poor to access rights on an equal basis with other citizens or even to invoke the principle of the rule of law—​equality before the law and equal access to the law—​when their rights are violated is routinely thwarted. The high rate of crimes against Dalits and the low rate of prosecution for the perpetrators of such crimes points to the obstacles to securing justice under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. The disproportionate presence of lower castes and minorities in the ranks of those on death row is also disturbing.15 C1P22 The guarantee of universal adult suffrage is also an inadequate guarantee of sub- stantive political equality, as policies on poverty and basic needs do not reflect the preferences and interests of the poor, despite their larger numbers. The stranglehold of C1P money on the conduct of electoral politics is well known, as is its nexus with muscle and even crime.16 The fact that the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Lok Sabhas have been the most plutocratic in the history of India’s democracy is also indicative of the limitations of formal equality. C1P23 Finally, the celebration of the equal rights of citizenship and the rule of law often occludes from sight the enduring background presence of extraordinary laws. A standard feature of colonial governance, a series of such laws, beginning with the Preventive Detention Act 1950, has been enacted in the postindependence period, in- variably justified by the imperatives of state security. To the extent that such laws place inordinate powers in the hands of the coercive machinery of the state, their operation inevitably entails a sacrifice of civil liberties and human rights. Such laws have also often C1S been used in ways that are politically and ideologically partisan. The ostensible pur- pose of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act 1971 (MISA) was the control of Maoist C1P violence, but it was deployed most notoriously against political opponents during the National Emergency (1975–​1977) on grounds of countering threats to national security such as sabotage sponsored by foreign powers. It provided for the indefinite preventive detention of individuals, for search and seizure without warrants and for tapping of telephone lines. It was used to arbitrarily imprison and torture political opponents who could be preventively detained for indefinite periods under this law. The MISA was repealed in 1977 by the Janata Government, but a swathe of other such legislations followed, including the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act 1985 (TADA), enacted to 15 Sen 2016. 16 Vaishnav 2017. 9780198894261_Book.indb 10 30-Mar-24 11:07:56  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Thu Mar 28 2024, NEWGEN Rights and Citizenship    11 deal with the Khalistan movement in Punjab, but also used extensively in the early 1990s by state governments such as those of Rajasthan and Gujarat to imprison hundreds of people, mostly Muslims. In 1998, the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act (POTA) succeeded the TADA, and it became an instrument of partisan politics—​deployed se- lectively against Muslims in the Godhra violence 2002 (declared a terrorist act) but notably not used to punish the perpetrators of the anti-​Muslim violence that followed in the rest of Gujarat in 2002. In 2008, the National Investigation Act was enacted, as draconian as the POTA, with only one significant departure (viz. that confessions be- fore a police officer would not be admissible in court). Other than this, the presump- tion of guilt unless proved otherwise remains. Successive amendments to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act 1967 (UAPA) have made it increasingly draconian. This law has been freely used to designate activists and political dissidents as terrorists, who can be detained without the state being required to produce incrimating evidence and ex- tremely stringent bail conditions, thus resulting in a large number of arrests but very few convictions. To the extent that extraordinary laws like the UAPA enable the exercise of arbitrary power by the state, they diminish the citizen’s access to the most basic rights of life and liberty. C1P24 If TADA was used as an instrument to contain identity politics (e.g. Sikhs in Punjab and Muslims in Kashmir, Assam, and Bombay),17 studies of the POTA—​including civil society reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the People’s Union for Democratic Rights—​have pointed to its selective and partisan targeting of minorities and the human rights abuses that it has facilitated. A constant has been the use of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958 (AFSPA) to deal with counterinsurgency in the north-​east. This is a law that protects security personnel from prosecution and has al- legedly done so in cases of serious human rights violations—​such as shooting at and killing innocents—​by security forces. C1S4 Social and Economic Rights C1P25 To the extent that the inequalities of social class (or indeed caste, tribe, gender, or race) render vacuous the formal equality guaranteed by the law, it is through welfare policies that the mitigation of these inequalities is attempted. In a society marked by class in- equality, citizenship itself becomes what T. H. Marshall called the architecture of le- gitimate social inequality. For Marshall, the public provisioning of health, education, legal aid and housing were intended to achieve not absolute equality but the removal of inequalities that could not be considered legitimate. His canonical definition of social citizenship thus entails ‘the whole range from the right to a modicum of economic wel- fare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society’.18