Democracy’s paradox, the chosen people of the state, Pg8

Key Highlights:

• The Election Commission of India (ECI) is conducting a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls nationwide, leading to legal challenges regarding its authority to determine citizenship.
• The legal challenge argues that only the Home Ministry has the power to determine citizenship, not the ECI, and that an en masse SIR is not legally provisioned.
• There is no single document that serves as definitive proof of Indian citizenship, creating a conflict between evidence of status and status of evidence.
• The onus of proving citizenship lies on the individual, not the state, as per the Citizenship Act, 1955.

Detailed Insights:

• The debate over the SIR questions the presumption that all residents are citizens unless proven otherwise, highlighting a fundamental issue of citizenship governance.
• The National Register of Citizens (NRC), a subset of the National Population Register (NPR), is intended to include only citizens who have proven their eligibility, but its rollout remains uncertain.
• The Citizenship Act has been amended multiple times, with the 2003 amendment introducing the concept of ‘illegal immigrants’ and the 2019 amendment adding a religious test for citizenship eligibility.
• The Assam NRC exercise, which marked 19 lakh residents as doubtful citizens, demonstrates the challenges and potential biases in the citizenship determination process.
• The determination of citizenship often rests with lower-level bureaucracy and police, raising concerns about fairness and transparency.
• The state's authority to determine who constitutes the people presents a paradox in democracy, where the people are sovereign, but the state defines its citizenry.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Jus Soli: Citizenship based on the right of the soil, where being born within a country's territory grants citizenship.
• Jus Sanguinis: Citizenship based on the right of blood, where citizenship is conferred by having one or both parents who are citizens of the state.
• National Register of Citizens (NRC): A register containing the names of all genuine Indian citizens, mandated by the Citizenship Act, 1955.
• National Population Register (NPR): A register containing details of all usual residents of India, whether citizens or not.