Citizenship is Essential To Enjoy Basic Human Rights The freedom fighters as well as the Constitution makers have imagined the idea of India as a participatory democracy which is secular, equal and just and where every citizen is vested with the rights and the state is duty bound to protect those rights. Amendments to the matrix of the citizenship law and mixing it up with the process of data collection about population are against those collective dreams and vision and alter the nature of socio-political fabric of the country, therefore these are deemed as unconstitutional and undesirable by majority of those who protested. Further, the exercise of NCR in Assam has created a havoc. Making it applicable to the entire nation is not feasible, neither in terms of resources, nor in terms of application of human rights framework, or within the matrix of constitutional rights. In this light, it is therefore essential to reconsider the amendments made to the Citizenship matrix. Universal Declaration of Human Rights despites its formal language presumes human beings primarily as a member of ordered political community. An individual who is being debarred from her political context is not considered as a citizen and therefore s/he is not in position to claim his or her human rights. Human rights are therefore dependent on the context of the citizenship or belongingness to a nation state and do not visualize humanity as a core of it. Human rights bestow human dignity, are inalienable and should remain valid till the existence of human being on Earth. Any dependence on the nation states defy the basic crux of the human rights and makes the framework redundant. According to Ardent, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing the juridical-political precondition of `rights to have rights’, for protection of human rights. She wrote, “The rights to have rights, or the rights of every individual to belong to humanity should be guaranteed by humanity itself”. Therefore, it is the concept of humanity that has to be evoked to protect the `rights to have rights’ of every person and any amendments to the citizenship laws must consider the ambit of citizen-state relationship through the prism of human rights framework. **************** The author is an advocate and a researcher practicing and advocating for human rights, gender and governance issues. She is associated with human rights and women’s organizations and has written several books, research papers and articles. Her recent book is titled as Women and Domestic Violence in India: A Quest for Justice. She is a co-author of The Founding Mothers: 15 Women Architects of Indian Constitution. She is publishing regularly. Some of her writings are available here and here. March 2020 Shalu Nigam Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3566904