INDIA’S CITIZENSHIP (AMENDMENT) ACT: A THROWBACK TO DEBATES AROUND THE ‘LONG PARTITION’ MANAV KAPUR * My paper examines the prehistory of India’s controversial new Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (‘CAA’), which expedites citizenship procedures for non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Through looking at a longue durée examination of British India's Partition, I argue that the Partition's dislocation conflated the otherwise oppositional categories of ‘citizen’ and ‘refugee’ in the formative years of the Republic. Through examining Constituent Assembly and parliamentary debates, judicial precedents and archival files and file notings between 1947–65, I demonstrate how taking responsibility for non-Muslims in Pakistan went hand in hand with ring fencing Muslims at a point where the relationship between the state, citizenship and nationality was abruptly prised open. Rather than an aberration, therefore, the CAA is the culmination of a strand of ideas and decisions that have informed Indian citizenship since Independence, which perhaps a refugee law could go some way to ameliorate. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction........................................................................................................... 209 The Long Partition and Its Migrants: Not Refugees, but Citizens ........................ 211 A The Western Border: ‘Returnees’ Versus ‘Refugees’ .............................. 216 B The Eastern Frontier: Of ‘Half-Open’ Borders and Continuous Migration .................................................................................................. 221 C The ‘Sentinel Qui Vive’ or ‘A Dead Letter’: The Judiciary and Citizenship in the 1950s and 1960s .......................................................... 227 Conclusion: Is The CAA a Return to an Earlier Paradigm? .................................. 232 We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens, and equal citizens, of one State. — Mohd Ali Jinnah, 11 August 1947 1 Here we are an entire nation, with a history of thousands of years, and we are going to discard it, in spite of the fact that the Hindu and Sikh has no other place in the wide world to go to. * 1 Manav Kapur is a lawyer and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University. He is working on property rights and citizenship in South Asia in the aftermath of the Indo–Pakistan Partition of 1947. The author would like, very much, to thank Aymen Mohammed, with whom this paper originally began in a very different avatar much before the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The author would also like to thank Kalyani Ramnath, Rakesh Ankit, Prof Amita Dhanda, Prof Gyan Prakash, Prof Hendrik Hartog, Adil Hasan Khan, Mohsin Alam Bhat, Andrew Halladay, Srivatsan Q and Adhitya Dhanapal for their very insightful comments which have shaped this paper. All errors, needless to say, remain the author’s alone. Pakistan, Constituent Assembly Debates, 11 August 1947, 20 (Mohd Ali Jinnah).