PARTITION TO CAA: WHO HAS BELONGED IN INDIA?

How the 1952 passport/visa regime suddenly hardened a once-porous Partition border, turning “belonging” into a documentary test and setting the template for today's citizenship politics.

- TDG NETWORK

In March 2024, the Indian government finally notified rules to implement the Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2019 (CAA), ending over four years of uncertainty since the law's passage.

This marked a new chapter in India's long debate over citizenship and belonging. The CAA offers a fast-tracked path to Indian citizenship for migrants from six minority religious communities - Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians - coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, so long as they entered India by 2014. By explicitly excluding Muslims, the CAA breaks with India's post-independence legacy of religion-neutral citizenship laws. The delayed rollout has begun modestly: early data from regions like Assam and Vidarbha indicate only a handful of approvals so far (just 2 people in Assam by early 2025, and around 55 in Vidarbha by late 2025). Yet, even as these numbers trickle in, the Act's implementation is rekindling fundamental questions first posed at India's birth: Who belongs in India, and on what terms? To answer that, one must look back at the subcontinent's tumultuous history of partition, migration, evolving citizenship laws, and the shifting sands of national identity.

PARTITION AND THE BIRTH OF CITIZENSHIP