The Citizenship Debate: A Clash of Visions
Manabi Majumdar
THIS LAND IS MINE, I AM NOT OF THIS LAND: CAA-NRC AND THE MANUFACTURE OF STATELESSNESS by Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh Speaking Tiger Books, New Delhi, 2021, 421 pp., 499.00
December 2022, volume 46, No 12

Who is a citizen of India and on what terms? This is the momentous question that this anthology poses before us with a compelling force, in the increasingly unsettling climate of vulnerability and fear that the recently sculpted trinity of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019)-NRIC-NPR has produced in our Republic. With much care, analytical sophistication, and citizenly conscience, a number of researchers, legal scholars, social activists, journalists, and creative writers examine through the pages of this edited volume the conceptual, constitutional, socio-political and affective dimensions of citizenship, and more pertinently, its denial, and the entangled issues of rightlessness and statelessness that such disenfranchisement engenders.  With probing pens and a variety of accents, they focus on the shift in the foundational constitutional principle of citizenship by birth within the Indian territory to that by descent, on the special case of the State of Assam around which the debate on ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘external aggression’ swirls, on the dehumanizing living realities of the detainees in some of the detention centres in this State, on the composition, agenda and modus operandi of the Foreigners’ Tribunals causing a major blow to the very principle of due process, and above all, on how people ‘see’ the state, respond to its incessant demands for documents with courage, resilience, creative expression, and of course, at times with a forced sense of resignation, but always with a quest for freedom and fairness against all odds.

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