A Return to Midnight: Understanding India's Citizenship (Amendment) Act Through British India's Long Partition

In my proposed presentation, I examine India’s controversial new Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (‘CAA’), which expedites citizenship procedures for non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, while simultaneously making it harder for Muslims from these states to become Indian citizens. Through looking at a longue durée examination of British India's Partition, I argue that the Partition's dislocation conflated the otherwise oppositional categories of ‘citizen’ and ‘refugee’ in the formative years of the Republic, and that this is key to understanding the political imperatives of this Act. To do so, I examine Constituent Assembly and parliamentary debates in India to demonstrate how taking responsibility for non-Muslims in Pakistan went hand in hand with marking out Muslims as inherently suspicious at a point where the relationship between the state, citizenship and nationality was abruptly prised open. Because this question was undergirded by issues around rehabilitation and evacuee property—ie- the property of those who emigrated across the border, this marking out served an economic purpose in allowing for the state to push out Muslims and take over their property. This process continued through the 1950s and 1960s in different ways across the Eastern and Western flanks of the Indo-Pakistan border, even as both India and Pakistan drafted ostensibly secular citizenship laws. As I bring out, both lawmakers and the judiciary acquiesced in and furthered this process. Though represented as a benign substitute for a robust refugee law regime, the CAA, enacted with barely any debate in India's parliament, represents an explicit return to the 'unsettling' that emerged with British India's partition. In doing so, it inflects minority rights—particularly those of Muslims—with regimes of surveillance and control that were drawn up in its aftermath, even as it asserts India’s perceived responsibility for non-Muslims in the subcontinent. In contrast, an actual refugee law could not only ameliorate actual intolerance in the aforementioned countries, but also address injustice on persecuted minorities like Ahmedis and Rohingya in the wider region.