What do the Citizenship Act amendments and 'One Nation, One Election' mean for India?

Two major developments ahead of the 2024 polls.

Mar 15, 2024

Welcome back to India Inside Out.

I was originally going to focus this week on all the last-minute moves made by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the days before the election dates are likely to be announced, and what that might tell us about how the party and Prime Minister Modi see this upcoming election.

Things like re-building their alliances with regional parties in a number of states despite widespread expectations that the BJP will cruise to victory, rejigging the party leadership in other states, finalising a trade deal with the four-nation European Free Trade Association replete with promises of jobs, investment and safeguards for India, announcing the names of the four astronauts (Bharatnauts? Desinauts?) who will be on India’s first crewed mission to space, and revealing the successful test of a long-range missile that can carry multiple warheads, the development of which puts India in a rather select club.

But these eve-of-election moves also included two crucial developments with long-term implications, and so we will be focusing on them this week.

First, the Citizenship Act Amendments.

I spoke about ‘CAA’ on this week’s episode of the Election Tricycle (which I co-host with Emily Tamkin and Tom Hamilton), on which we also got into the question of immigration rhetoric in the US and the UK:

Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or elsewhere, and send us feedback, questions, or suggestions of what we ought to discuss.

Citizenship Act amendments

Back in 2019, the BJP-led government passed a law that made a few key changes to India’s citizenship laws: There was previously a complete bar on anyone who had illegally entered the country applying to become a citizen. That bar was relaxed, creating a pathway for some ‘illegal migrants’ to qualify for Indian citizenship, with the new amendments also fast-tracking applications in this case by reducing the residency prerequiste to just six years of living in the country, versus 11 before.

These amendments, which came to known as ‘CAA’, were sold to the public as a way of addressing the statelessness of refugees – particularly persecuted minorities – who fled neighbouring countries, in many cases some decades ago. On the face of it, few could argue with the intent of such a law.

But the details lay in how the government drafted the law, and whom it would apply to: Only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan could apply for this fast-track path to Indian citizenship. The law explicitly excluded Muslims1 and it only applied to refugees from three neighbouring Muslim-majority states.

This prompted huge demonstrations across India in 2019, with protesters occupying public spaces and demanding the repealing of a law that was seen as discriminatory and attacked a core feature of India’s secular fabric.

There were numerous of concerns about the law, which was also challenged in the Supreme Court – though those petitions have yet to be heard. But here were the key bits:

One, India’s constitution prohibits treating individuals or groups differently under law unless there is a reasonable classification of different groups of people. The government has struggled to come up with a legally convincing explanation of why it picked only those sets of communities and those countries to include in the law. Home Minister Amit Shah has in the past claimed CAA was meant to protect minorities fleeing neighbouring countries to save their lives, and that it was doing justice to communities left behind during Partition.

Yet Afghanistan was never part of British India and wasn’t party to Partition. Moreover, India’s neighbourhood features other countries where minorities have been persecuted – the Rohingya (a Muslim community) in Myanmar, Tamils (including Hindus and Muslims) in Sri Lanka – who have not been included in the. law. And there have been instances of minority Muslim communities, like Ahmadiyya or Hazaras being persecuted in the countries listed, but they are not covered by CAA either.

Shah and the BJP’s underlying argument that this law addresses a core injustice of Partition is, as I have written, actually a wilful misreading of what took place on the Indian Subcontinent in the 1940s: the idea that Pakistan was created as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, which then made India a natural home, a safe haven, for Hindus, and everyone who isn’t Muslim. This simply isn’t true. Though the framers of India’s constitution debated whether India should be a Hindu nation, the country was ultimately founded as a secular republic.

Which takes us to the more fundamental objection against the law: It includes, for the first time, a religious test to qualify for Indian citizenship. And a manifestly arbitrary one at that. For many who protested the law, the danger of accepting such a faith-based criterion – even if with the intent of aiding persecuted refugees – is that it would lead the country down a slippery slope.

A slope that the government has, in fact, pointed to and mapped out: As the law was passed in 2019, Home Minister Amit Shah and many other BJP leaders promised that the CAA would be followed by a National Register of Citizenship, seeking to create a list of every single person in the country who counts as a citizen. A deeply flawed (given the sheer difficulty of finding appropriate documents for millions of people) state-level effort in Assam saw a massive 1.9 million people declared stateless, an outcome that even the BJP refused to accept.

Shah insisted that Indians should pay attention to the chronology: First the government would pass the Citizenship Act amendments, then it would institute a nation-wide NRC. No non-Muslim need worry though, Shah asserted. Even if you were declared a ‘foreigner’ by the NRC, the CAA gave you an easy way to receive Indian citizenship. If you were Muslim though, you were at risk of being declared stateless.

As Niraja Gopal Jayal, who literally wrote the book on Indian citizenship, explained:

“Though the Citizenship Amendment Bill ostensibly relates only to migrants seeking the legal status of citizenship, this is not just about migrants. The threat, rhetorical or otherwise, of a nationwide NRC shows that the fig leaf of illegal immigration is being used to bring the citizenship of all Muslim citizens into question. Migrants – beginning with those in Assam – are fast becoming a pretext to fabricate and advance a much more ambitious and nationwide project of ‘othering.’
…
The politicisation of religious identity, finding articulation in and through the law, is a worrying portent for the founding vision of Indian nationalism which was emphatically civic-national in form. The march from a jus soli to a jus sanguinis conception of citizenship is also simultaneously a march from civic-nationalism to ethno-religious nationalism, from a universalist and inclusive form of nationalism to an exclusionary form that renders difference as graded hierarchy. This is nothing less than a radical re-invention of the imagination of India that informed and inspired the freedom struggle and found embodiment in the Constitution.”

The widespread protest movement in 2019 prompted the BJP-led government to first step back from promises of instituting a nation-wide NRC, and then to also leave the CAA itself in suspended animation: Without rules notifying the law, it could not be implemented, and that was the case until this week.

Those rules have now been notified, days before the election dates are likely to be announced – making the political intent of the move impossible to ignore. The government has gone on an overdrive insisting that Muslims need not be afraid, and that the law is not aimed at taking away anyone’s citizenship. The Home Ministry also issued a shoddily drafted FAQ that, among other things, argued that the Act “protects Islam from being tarnished in the name of persecution.” That FAQ was eventually taken down, though Siddharth Varadarajan’s annotation of it is a worth a read.

In spite of these efforts to reassure the public, the constitutional implications of introducing a religious test to India’s citizenship laws remain evident and unaddressed by the government. With the party explicitly calling on the Indian public to give it 370 seats in the Lok Sabha – a reference both to the BJP’s move to strike down Article 370 in Jammu & Kashmir, and also the 2/3rds majority that would be needed to alter the constitution – and its leaders even promising constitutional changes, suspicions of what may follow remain very much present.

One Nation One Election

Another effort put forward by the BJP-led government that could fundamentally alter the way Indian democracy works saw a fresh development this week.

Modi’s government has repeatedly spoken of the need for ‘simultaneous elections’, wherein elections to India’s 28 states and hundreds of local bodies ought to by synced up and held at the same time as the General Elections that usually take place every five years. India’s democracy uses a Westminster-style Parliamentary system where governments can fall or be dissolved mid-term, leading to fresh elections.

Over the years, that has meant that what was once a very straightforward election calendar has, after the 1960s, fragmented. Every year now features elections in some part of the country. The government has argued that this leads to a waste of resources, disruptions to governance – since the ‘Model Code of Conduct’ in place ahead of elections prevents some government actions – and even broader impacts for the economy:

“Taking data of the election years — 1962, 1967, 1977, 1980, and 1984-85 — and the period of two years before and after the election year, the report found that GDP growth increased by 1.5 percentage points more from pre-election to post-election period in a simultaneous year compared to the corresponding period around a non-simultaneous year.”

As a result, the government has been pushing for a way to re-sync India’s election calendar, which it refers to as ‘One Nation, One Election.’ A committee chaired by former President Ram Nath Kovind was tasked with looking into the question and putting forward recommendations.

That committee’s report is now out, and, expectedly, it calls for simultaneous elections:

“After examination of all relevant evidences, including the macroeconomic analysis, the Committee finds that the loss of simultaneity in elections after the first two decades of India’s independence has had a baneful effect on the economy, polity and society…
The Committee, therefore, recommends that the Government must develop a legally tenable mechanism in order to restore the cycle of simultaneous elections.”

Here’s how it would operate if the government were to immediately accept recommendations, with the aim of the first simultaneous elections being held in 2029:

After this year’s General Elections,tThe Lok Sabha tenure – with elections next expected in 2029 – would be the benchmark for all General and State elections.
Any state elections that take place between these two dates, 2024 and 2029, would lead to a government with a shortened tenure – due to end in 2029 – so that elections can be conducted simultaneously that year.
If any government were to fall or be dissolved, fresh elections can be held, but the resulting government would also face a limited tenure, the ‘remainder of the term’ – only up to the next Lok Sabha election date, when elections would be held again.

There is much more in the report itself, including details of how the government could actually get there through constitutional amendments that, in a number of cases, the committee argues would not require ratification from the states. It also brushes aside the primary criticism, that simultaneous elections would be inherently centralising, with benefits accruing to the national party in power at the Centre, saying:

[Members] unambiguously emphasised that such amendments to restore simultaneous elections will not be anti-democratic, or anti-federal, violate the basic structure of the Constitution, or will result in a presidential form of government. Similarly, with regard to concerns arising about the dominance of national parties including the ruling party over regional parties, the experts concluded that such apprehensions were misplaced. They were also of the view that the Indian electorate is sagacious enough to differentiate between national and regional issues, as also between national and regional parties.”

Since it just came out, expect more analysts and experts to parse the document and examine its findings, over the next few weeks. I’ll be happy to collect links to those in upcoming editions.

But what is evident is that the BJP intends to move ahead with this idea, and were it to win the elections with the margins that have been forecast, it might have sufficient political capital to move forward on a proposal that once seemed obscure and impossible to implement.

India Inside Out by Rohan Venkat

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