India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act In this paper, I use the experiences of both flanks of the border in the years after Independence, during and after the framing of the Constitution of India, to suggest that both the imperatives that the CAA is based on — the perceived responsibility for non-Muslims and the desire to ring fence Muslims — were inherent in the tensions around Indian citizenship at its inception. I argue that privileging citizenship regimes over a refugee law regime can and should be understood through the many and competing processes and practices created in the immediate aftermath of the ‘long [P]artition’ 13 — between 1947 and 1965 — when political, bureaucratic and judicial actors conflated the legally distinct (and often oppositional) categories of ‘citizen’ and ‘refugee’ in national discourse, and, as we shall see, marked out religion as a significant, albeit unofficial, marker of citizenship. This question, in turn, turns on the position of minorities in South Asia ‘after empire’ — at a point of decolonisation in wider swathes of Asia and Africa, where the relationship between state, citizenship and nationality was abruptly rendered open, a flashpoint that continues to be of immense significance in the way both states view themselves and each other. THE LONG PARTITION AND ITS MIGRANTS: NOT REFUGEES, BUT CITIZENS Examining the many ways in which British India’s Partition played out both at the international level and at various sub-national levels helps us understand both why minorities from Pakistan and Bangladesh (and to a lesser extent Afghanistan) are viewed differently and why the refugee–citizen distinction played out differently in this regard. Rather than viewing Partition as the end point of negotiations around the future of British India and a solution to the ‘minority problem’, I take Ted Svensson’s lead in viewing Partition as the origin of the creation of India and Pakistan, a messy and complicated disentangling. 14 Independence in August 1947, therefore, becomes a moment both of continuity and rupture for many statebuilding processes, including the question of citizenship and national belonging. As we shall see through examining legislative and constitutional debates, India and Pakistan’s creation, and the long and complicated relationship between them, was not predetermined, or even the outcome of a clear, linear process, but contingent on shifting regional realities and political constraints. As Independence loomed closer and Partition became inevitable in the summer of 1947, the ‘numbers game’ became significant in determining where the boundary line was to run. 15 Both a ‘cartographic and legal conundrum’, 16 eventually geographical, economic, political and ‘other factors’ would determine the final boundaries in the divided provinces of Bengal, the Punjab and Assam. This sundered the cartography and human geography of a thickly populated region 13 14 15 16 See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press 2007) 79. Ted Svensson, Production of Postcolonial India and Pakistan: Meanings of Partition (Routledge 2007). Lucy Chester, Borders and Conflict in South Asia: The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester University Press 2009) ch IV. See also Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape 1947–52’ (1999) 33(1) Modern Asian Studies 188, 185–6. Hannah Fitzpatrick, ‘The Space of the Courtroom and the Role of Geographical Evidence in the Punjab Boundary Commission’ (2019) 42(1) South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 188, 195. 211