Documentary citizenship versus democratic citizenship: Amended Indian citizenship law and the Bengali Muslims of West Bengal, India

In 2019, the Parliament of India passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which has been perceived by scholars as discriminatory towards the Muslim community (Jayal 2019). Since then, electoral politics in the border districts of the state of West Bengal has witnessed a major change. Bengal’s borderlands with Muslim majority areas are one of the most marginalized places, something scholar van Schendel (2004:3) called ‘the periphery of the periphery’. More than the legal discourse around the amended act, the political rhetoric on Muslim citizenship has caused religious polarization at the local level. Based on ethnographic insights with local political workers and voters in the Uttar Dinajpur district in West Bengal, this paper will argue that borderland politics challenges local contestation around Muslim citizenship, even more so during the electoral battles in the region. To build my argument, I focus on the 2021 assembly elections in the state of West Bengal, which was the first electoral battle since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led Government of India passed the CAA. The political rhetoric around the law targeted Bengali Muslims of India as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. This prompted poor migrant workers from the community living in other parts of India to travel and vote in this election, even if they had to exhaust their meagre savings. By voting, these migrants confirmed their names on the electoral rolls in their respective regions, and therefore on state registers. In this paper, I contend that the fear of losing citizenship documents has affected the electoral behavior of Bengali Muslim migrant workers. Though scholars like Kamal Sadiq developed the concept of documentary citizenship to emphasize the role of documents in acquiring citizenship (‘whether the documents are legal or not’), but I argue that after the amended citizenship law it is not enough for the Bengali Muslims. Mere possession of documents is not enough for them to lay claim on the infrastructure of citizenship in India. It is through elections and democratic participation where they rely on local networks and kinship ties to develop regional claims on political membership in a community. The paper highlights how citizenship laws such as the CAA can fundamentally alter the notion of political belonging at the local level in countries of the Global South. Both documentary and democratic citizenship are important for a marginalised community like Bengali Muslims in India.