India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act The BJP proved quick to capitalise on these. By 1993, its leader in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Parliament of India, reasserted India’s ‘historical responsibility’ towards non-Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. 163 While initially tempering its rhetoric after coming to power, religion entered India’s citizenship regime expressly in the final year of AB Vajpayee’s term as Prime Minister. Replacing the earlier inchoate regime of discretionary ‘long-term visas’, Citizenship Rules now allowed District Collectors in the border states of Rajasthan and Gujarat to grant Pakistani minorities Indian citizenship. This required them to (i) have been resident in India for more than five years and (ii) belong to a minority community in Pakistan. 164 Doing so served an important purpose — while it included Christians, with whom the Sangh had had an uneasy relationship, it also served to ring fence Muslims as the definitive ‘other’. Additionally, it allowed the Government of India to exclude Ahmadis — considered Muslim in India but not so in Pakistan — and Shias, who, though subject to persecution in Pakistan, were still Muslim. Under Narendra Modi’s Government in 2015, new amendments to the law changed the definition of ‘illegal immigrants’ to exclude Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and Buddhists from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh; from there to the CAA itself was a short step, especially after the BJP’s unprecedented victory in 2019. The Government of India has justified the CAA as a benevolent piece of legislation, indeed, as a quasi-refugee law. 165 Those who assert this note that the legislation cites ‘religious persecution or fear of religious persecution’ as the basis for granting citizenship. Nevertheless, examining the motives and categories created by the CAA makes clear that, if anything, the CAA is a reversal of the logic of refugee law. Limiting the operation of modified citizenship laws to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and religious minorities within these two communities, speaks both to a particular conception of a historical ‘Bharata’ and a need to mark out its denizens through a religious prism. As I have argued, this links to two related concerns. Firstly, it speaks to a continuing preoccupation with the Partition of India as the vivisection of the homeland for all Indians. 166 Secondly, it marks out states with Muslim-majority populations in the subcontinent as particularly intolerant to their minorities — whether officially Islamic (Afghanistan or Pakistan) or constitutionally secular (Bangladesh). Once Partition had occurred, the argument seems to be that Muslim immigration into India needed to have additional limits placed upon it, especially from Muslimmajority countries. How is the CAA likely to be received by those it benefits? If earlier amendments to the citizenship law are anything to go by, the answer is somewhat equivocal. Migrants have often argued for citizenship as providing a higher form of protection to vulnerable communities, both symbolically and in terms of its concrete 163 Sikandar Bakht, then Vice-President of the BJP, made this statement in 1993: see Farzand Ahmad and Soutik Biswas, ‘BJP Hopes to Reap Political Dividends By Communalising Bangladeshi Immigrant issue’, India Today (15 May 1993). 164 Citizenship (Amendment) Rules 2004 (India) s 3(2)(ii) quoted in Niraja Gopal Jayal (n 12) 67–69. 165 Adil Hasan Khan and Michelle Foster, ‘Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and International Law’, (Brief, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, 1 April 2021) 10 [27]. 166 While votaries of Hindutva have often spoken of an Akhand Bharat as encompassing large swathes of South East Asia, including Sri Lanka (a region that has strong geographical and cultural links with modern India), the CAA does not include either Rohingyas in Myanmar, which was a part of British India until 1937, or Tamils in Sri Lanka. 233