India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act Asia’s Muslims. 25 Evidence suggests that Mohammad Ali Jinnah wanted a jus soli conception of Partition, 26 born out by a fascinating vignette of history where jubilant Muslim women in Delhi called on an admittedly unwell Jinnah after the 3 June 1947 acceptance to Partition, to find he asked them to ‘stay put’ in India.27 Formally, therefore, the ‘[P]artition’ was understood as the creation of two separate states — one with a majority of Hindus and the other with a Muslim majority, but with large minority populations — which explains Jinnah’s speech four days before a sovereign Pakistan was to come into effect. The mass migrations across both sides of the border that accompanied the western Partition set the tone for both states in the fraught process of ‘constituting’ a new national identity and granting citizenship rights to their population. 28 Over 10 million people moved across these newly-constituted boundaries in the first year after Partition; 29 by the early 1960s, migration on the eastern and western frontier would amount to over 20 million people. As both dominions scrambled to adjust to these new realities, a ritual deploring of these migrations was accompanied with a strident articulation of the responsibility of minorities on the other side of the border. Both India and Pakistan, however, did not do enough to stop the haemorrhage of their minorities on the western frontier, at least. 30 As we shall see, the marking out of minority populations as suspect was neither the original intent of the Partition, nor explicitly laid out in law immediately after Partition; it was, rather, the product of several unspoken assumptions made by innumerable actors — ministers, legislators, custodians and the police, to name a few. Unsurprisingly, therefore, both Constituent Assemblies — which also functioned as Legislative Assemblies at the time — were sites of discord where these responsibilities were asserted, reworked and forged. In India’s case, the rump Constituent Assembly, which had, even five months before Partition, glossed over the question of citizenship was compelled to start reviewing it in the winter of 1947. 31 Unanticipated and unprecedented population transfers in much 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Given that the main provinces contemplated in Pakistan had wafer-thin Muslim majorities of 57.1% (the Punjab) and 54.7% (Bengal), it was impossible not to understand citizenship in territorial, rather than religious terms. See MWM Yeatts, ‘Subsidiary Tables: Distribution of the Main Communities by Province and State’ in Census of India 1941 (Government of India 1943) vol I, pt I, 102–03. <http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ideologie/data/CensusIndia/CensusIndia1941/Census%20of% 20India%201941.pdf>. Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship: 1946–1970’ (2012) 55(4) The Historical Journal 1049, 1055. Abdul Rehman Siddiqui, Smoke Without Fire: Portraits of Pre-Partition Delhi (Aakar Books 2011) 290. See, eg, Zamindar (n 13) 79–119; See also Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition (Yale University Press 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils Of Partition: West Bengal 1947–67 (Cambridge University Press 2007). The Government of India conducted a ‘census of displaced persons’ from West Pakistan in October 1948 and East Pakistan in June 1949 — with 5 million people having moved from the east and 1.3 million in the west. The Government of Pakistan did not publish figures in that year, but the record of the 1951 census suggests the total number of migrants as 7.23 million, ‘the majority of which moved in the first fifteen months after partition’: Pravin Visaria, ‘Migration Between India and Pakistan, 1951–61’ (1969) 6(3) Demography 323, 323–24. The West Punjab legislative assembly, for instance, opened in 1948, with the speaker deploring ‘the empty seats of their Hindu and Sikh brothers’. West Punjab, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 5 January 1948, 3–4 (Khan Iftikhar Hussain Khan). I am grateful to Yaqoob Bangash for access to these. Chatterji (2012) (n 2626). 213