In his excellently argued article on citizenship, which appeared on this website, BV Rao posits that the contours of a birthright Indian, as drawn by the State, are drawn with the graphite of metrics contained in a sheaf of documents: passports, voter IDs, Aadhaar cards. He maintains that, despite having been in possession of each of these records for much of his life, the notion of citizenship is just that, an incipient idea that can be marveled at as a legal nuance, but that cannot be held with one hand and the other planted on the chest.
Its premise is that the quest for Indian citizenship with a quiver full of documents is approaching the horizon. This argument offers an appropriate platform from which to launch an investigation into aspects of citizenship that may not be contained in state-issued credentials. This is not so much an analysis of what may or may not pass as documentary evidence of citizenship, but rather the questions that shape the philosophical notion of nation.
These are the questions I have:
What does citizenship mean if I eliminate constitutional protections and documentary evidence? As a thought experiment, if I were told that I did not have any of the documents listed in Rao’s article, all things being equal, would I still consider myself a citizen of India?
On the other hand, if I accepted the idea that state-produced records and possession of such certification defined me as an Indian, would I turn to those documents every time I considered the idea of citizenship? Does my conception of nationality exist beyond the borders of paperwork?
What ties me to this country?
Do I think of citizenship as a noun or a verb?
What do I owe to this group that I consider a nation? Does this idea that I am part of an “us” mean that there is a “them”? How do I see “them” in this context?
And finally, is my idea of being Indian an established concept?
I suspect the answers can be found in two bodies of knowledge: the constitution and the way it was written, and my own experience of living in this country for 51 years.
I’ll start with a story.
I began my career as a journalist in 1997, covering Asian-era crime in Bengaluru. After a few years on the job, my editor asked me to move on to writing about defense and aviation research. One of my main areas of concern was the Light Combat Aircraft, which was in its final stages of development at the Aeronautical Development Agency-Hindustan Aeronautics Limited facility in the city. The LCA, now designated Tejas, first took off from HAL Airport, as a technology demonstrator, on January 4, 2001. It did not have the necessary credentials to be among the aviators, scientists and journalists gathered along the runway as they watched the plane take off. Instead, he knew Bengaluru’s roads well: there was one that ran along the western wall of the airport, directly beneath the LCA flight path. I stood on the hood of a car an hour before it rolled onto the track. Wg Cdr Rajiv Kotiyal pointed the fighter’s nose toward the winter sky and its delta wing obscured my line of vision for a brief second, during which I felt elated, proud, with a sense of kinship and, perhaps vaguely, Indian.
By now, as a working adult, I had more than half of the documents Rao lists in his article, folded in a file at home. But I didn’t have to think about them to feel what I was feeling. It was a liberation from paperwork and connection to the idea of jus sol like an abstraction. This was an expressionist manifestation of nationality, not a figurative one.
This gives way to examining citizenship as a verb rather than a noun. What do I have to do to feel Indian? Once again, returning to Rao’s article may be instructive. I have paid my taxes, I have cast my vote, I have respected the law, I have submitted my biometric data. I have done everything the state requires by way of documentary evidence.
What else should I do? Is there more I can do? The answer lies in lived experience, as described above, and in the document I referred to earlier in this essay: the Constitution. But to extract something relevant to my argument, it is essential that we go beyond the limits of Articles 5 to 11 or the Citizenship Law passed five years after the Constitution became a reality. It is necessary to observe the changes that the 42nd Amendment introduced in this document in 1976, through the 11 fundamental duties described in Article 51A.
And this is where we step out of the umbrella of clear, measurable actions into the fog of questions (and insufficient answers) that Rao’s article hints at. Unfortunately, the only help we can find in 51A is that the questions are finite, their meaning and, consequently, the solutions that may arise, are not. The last two questions I asked in this essay provide the scaffolding for how this can be understood, and this must be done with two frames of reference in mind: the state and the individual. Let’s take three of the duties outlined in 51A: “Appreciate and follow the noble ideals that inspired the national struggle for freedom,” “Value and preserve the rich heritage of the country’s composite culture,” and “Develop scientific temperament, humanism and the spirit of research and reform.”
The actions prescribed here, which transform the noun into a verb, present a fundamental problem, a friction that I had hidden behind all the baggage that I have accumulated as a journalist in charge of newsrooms. It is the notion that what I believe are the duties that qualify me as a citizen of this country might not be in line with what the State or even a large part of the group to which I belong considers justifiable actions. That the ideals I consider noble, my understanding of a composite culture and the definition of research and reform, are not, in fact, entirely shared by either the State that deigns to anoint me with citizenship or the part of society that grants it this power.
This is not to say that I don’t have at least something resembling an answer. Yeah; It arises from the variation in the definition of “we” of the State, society and mine. And it is, unfortunately (and inevitably), tempered by the cynicism of a journalist. It is contained in the inverse relationship between my idea of citizenship and the amount of documentary evidence I have gathered to prove it: the more paperwork I have, the less Indian I feel.
– Finish
