India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act While Liaquat Ali Khan used Islam’s ‘great record of tolerance’ in medieval times to assure the fair treatment of minorities, Hindu members of the Assembly, having witnessed the communal violence throughout the subcontinent during the 1940s, were far less sanguine. 64 BK Datta, the Leader of the Opposition Congress, gave a relatively measured speech fearing, diplomatically, the possibility of abuse by ‘adventurers … at some future date’. 65 Sris Chandra Chattopadhyaya more stridently argued that this reduced minorities to being tolerated only on sufferance. Despite it having no formal binding value, he argued that the Resolution effectively created a herrenvolk of those who professed Islam. Indian observers were carefully watching these negotiations, even as the citizenship articles started to be discussed in the final sessions of the Constituent Assembly. As these ‘ill-fated’ citizenship clauses started to be discussed in November 1949, the return of Muslim migrants from Pakistan aroused suspicion for economic and political reasons. For JR Kapoor, of UP Khatri parentage but with close links to the Punjab, and BS Mann from East Punjab, it was shocking that property worth ‘crores and crores’ would be removed from the compensation pool, were returnees allowed to come back. The financial ramifications were clear: Muslim migration to Pakistan — even under duress — precluded migrants from having any claim, either on India as citizens or over property that they still technically owned. To allow them to return was to further impoverish what they called ‘our brethren’, at the cost of populations whose loyalty to India was deeply suspect. Nehru and others strongly rebutted these charges of misplaced secularism. Nehru’s response based itself on ‘equality and justice’ — that non-Hindus could not be treated differently from Hindus. Less reassuringly, he also pointed out that the procedure for getting the permit had been made extremely difficult — only a few thousand were likely to return, and those, either ‘nationalist Muslims’ or from ‘divided families’, were not likely to significantly affect the compensation pool. In 1951, the whole evacuee property argument was dispensed with altogether — it was decided that a ‘resettlement permit’ would not provide any undertaking about returning property of those who moved back. 66 Though economic arguments predominated, fellow-feeling for non-Muslims and their ‘first right’ on the nascent state was far from absent. 67 Rather, it was echoed in discussions at the highest political level; many drafters of the Constitution of India argued that the ‘mere fact’ of a person being Hindu or Sikh would enable him (or her) to possess Indian citizenship. 68 Ostensibly, the costs of rehabilitation were disclaimed. Lofty statements suggesting India was ‘not a land of shop-keepers’ were made, and somewhat ironically accepted, one imagines, by 64 65 66 67 68 ibid (Liaquat Ali Khan) 3. Pakistan, Constituent Assembly Debates, 9 March 1949, vol V (BK Dutta). Letter from the Prime Minister’s Secretariat to AV Pai, Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, 15 May 1955 quoted in Avtar Singh Bhasin, India–Pakistan Relations: A Documentary Study 1947–2007 (Geetika Publications 2009) 8475. This was true in both India and Pakistan. To examine how this played out in Pakistan, see Tahir Naqvi, ‘Migration, Sacrifice and the Crisis of Muslim Nationalism’ (2012) 25(3) Journal of Refugee Studies 474; see also Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, ‘A Rite of Passage: The Partition of History and the Dawn of Pakistan’ (2006) 1(1) Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 183. In the context of Bengali Hindus, see Joya Chatterji (2007) (n 28) 92–93. India, Constituent Assembly Debates, vol IX, 356. 219