Sabin Shrestha women have been deprived of citizenship certificates, which is a great injustice meted out by the state to its underprivileged citizens”.9 A newspaper report published in The Rising Nepal on 8 December 2004 makes it clear that patriarchy has hindered the children of single parents from obtaining citizenship: Awan Kumar Pudasaini of Besithok village in Nuwakot district, adjoining Kathmandu, has just learnt what problems you can land in if you are trying to get citizenship papers for your stepchild. Pudasaini married a woman who had a child from her previous marriage. He brought up the child, Raju, as his own son. Raju grew up and applied for his citizenship certificate as he wanted to go abroad for employment. He received it too. Ironically, Pudasaini was arrested along with Raju by the district administration on charges of forgery and the citizenship certificate was cancelled. Pudasaini had stood as Raju’s father as the whereabouts of the biological father are not known. Pudasaini is now awaiting punitive action and, if found guilty, Pudasaini can be fined up to Rs. 10,000 or imprisoned for five years.10 The 2007 Interim Constitution of Nepal provided that children could obtain citizenship through either the father or mother, but this was not implemented. Moreover, the provision was made ineffective by another provision in the same constitution that children born to a Nepalese mother and a foreign father could not obtain citizenship by descent. This totally denied an independent identity of women. The emerging citizenship concept in Nepal was traditionally biased against women. Men were/are treated as full successors of citizenship rights and women were/are treated as second-class citizens of the nation. Nepalese women acquire citizenship on the basis of relationships with men, such as the father and then the husband. Widely varying cultural practices make it necessary to distinguish between groups in which social deprivation is a consequence of general and shared poverty and those in which the situation of women is more directly connected to an unequal gender-based distribution of power and resources in the family and in society. Among conservative high-caste families, for example, particularly those in the Terai, women tend to have fewer opportunities, less decision-making power, and more restrictions on their movements than men.11 Two assumptions on gender roles within the family have contributed to this inequality. First, the unity of the family is central to the patriarchal notion of national unity in Nepal. Second, and related, this unity of the family is presumed to be determined by the head of the household, who is male. Bashyal notes that these two assumptions cut across the dichotomy between the public and the private sphere and cause “two broad forms of discrimination against women in the realm of citizenship rights”. 12 He highlights that nationality of the woman is a ‘dependent nationality’, which she acquires when joining her husband who is a member of the nation. As a consequence, wives “were automatically granted the nationality of their husband, having renounced their own nationalities. Furthermore, they were not granted the same right to transfer citizenship to a foreign spouse”.13 Second, in cases of children born to parents with different nationalities, they would receive the nationality of the father. As highlighted by Bishar “[T]his in turn resulted 9 10 11 12 13 4 Ibid. p. 583. Ibid cited from The Rising Nepal, 2004. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Children and women of Nepal: A situation Analysis, (Kathmandu: UNICEF, 1987) 163. Bishnu Bashyal, “Gender Equality Act 2006: An Analytical study with reference to the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979,” diss., Tribhuvan University, 2009, 85. Ibid. p. 85. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2017/8 - © 2017 Author