On a clear July evening, over a hundred students, activists, and lawyers walked into a seminar hall in New Delhi for the launch of what is considered a breakthrough socio-legal enquiry report on the workings of the Foreigners Tribunals in the Indian state of Assam. The discussion that was to follow hinged on how the world’s largest democracy put its subjects on trial—a particularly lengthy one, to prove their identity as citizens.
During the event, one of the panel’s distinguished speakers, former justice Madan Lokur, recounted an instance where a high-ranking Indian Police Service officer, acting to illegally deport numerous Bangla-speaking Muslims on the allegation that they were illegal immigrants, rationalised his actions, saying, “They do not look like Indians.”
The obvious had to be asked: What does an Indian look like?
And in the absence of unique and strikingly distinguishable Indian features, how can you know an Indian from a neighbouring South Asian foreigner?
South Asia’s citizenship matrix: What does it entail?
The question of citizenship laws in South Asia is a particularly fraught one precisely because of the region’s vast ethno-linguistic diversity, yet striking racial similarities across borders of a particular nation-state.
In the post-partition order, citizenship was decided based on the following:
- By birth (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh)
- By descent (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, among other countries like Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives)
- By residence within the territories of the nation, before a certain cut-off date in particular (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan)
- By registration (all South Asian countries)
- By Naturalisation (all South Asian countries)
Acquiring citizenship in South Asia is not merely a matter of being born within a territory or tracing descent from one’s parents.
It requires individuals to assemble and preserve a lifelong paper trail, not just of their own, but also of their parents and their grandparents—birth certificates, school records, proof of residence, marriage documents and more; all of it ultimately converges in a standard proof of citizenship like a passport.
And yet, South Asia’s citizenship is marked differently from that in the West, in its legacy of partition, waves of domestic and cross-border migration, and periodic breakdowns of democratic order in the constituent countries of the region.
Since most citizenship laws and immigration policies often operate retrospectively, they make up a mechanism of exclusion, penalising those who are unable to produce documents tied to a cut-off date, sometimes stretching back generations.
In the absence of a humane citizenship or immigration policy, the process leaves behind a staggering number of people branded as foreigners within their own homeland, treated as a nuisance to the nation.
In such a landscape, the question as to who can be considered a citizen often hinges on administrative discretion and executive recognition.
Marred with communal prejudice, xenophobia, and the rise of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism, Indian citizenship is no longer what you claim – it is what the state chooses to confer on you.
Birth, blood and borders in South Asia
In the aftermath of partition, the nascent states of India and Pakistan faced the urgent task of ensuring that every person across the border had a recognised nationality.
Both states enshrined citizenship by birth for those born and living within their territories, while simultaneously keeping their borders open to receive, register, and rehabilitate individuals and communities seeking a place in the post-partition order.
Although entry was regulated through the Passport Entry Act, 1920, and the Foreigners Act, 1946, significant exemptions were made using special permit systems and executive notifications, which allowed streams of migrants to enter the territories of India and Pakistan without passports and other travel documents.
By 1956, as the flows of migration from both sides of the border with East and West Pakistan became smaller, the permit system was abolished.
Towards the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s, India, having made exemptions under Section 3 of the Foreigners Act, took in Tibetan and Burmese refugees, alongside the steady and continuing migration from the partitioned nations, who were forced to migrate to India, rocked by the events of 1959 in Tibet and 1964 in Burma.
While most refugees migrating from East and West Pakistan until 1964 were given land grants and means of sustenance, only a few were given citizenship.
In India, in the years following 1964, the situation only became dire, swaying the attitude of the government to non-responsive apathy for its migrating subjects.
Land grants and rehabilitation by the government in favour of immigrants became scarce. Denied meaningful rehabilitation, most were pushed into resettlements, far from the land they called home.
Yet, over the years, many migrated back. Since land grants and rehabilitation/ resettlement documents, alongside registration documents, were generally considered to be accepted proof of eligibility for citizenship, in the absence of such documents, immigrants post 1964 stood the risk of being bracketed under the category of ‘illegal immigrants’, to be deported on administrative/ executive orders.
Unfortunately, the category of ‘illegal immigrants’ is a broad one – encompassing not just immigrants, but also undocumented natives and ethnic minorities, either invisible or alien to the majoritarian nature of the state.
In terms of South Asia’s citizenship laws, Bangladesh and Pakistan have striking similarities, both drawing their framework from the Citizenship Act, 1951.
By virtue of the Citizenship Act of 1951, Pakistan grants citizenship by birth to everyone except children of foreign diplomats and enemy aliens.
Besides having its roots in jus soli, Pakistan’s citizenship system recognised migrants who obtained domicile certificates and registered before January 1, 1952; a move that was neutral to religion.
However, during the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, many Bengali-speaking citizens of West Pakistan found themselves stateless.
In another decade, Pakistan experienced another demographic shock: one of the greatest refugee inflows in South Asia’s modern history, brought on by the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan.
The country took in refugees on humanitarian grounds, making administrative and executive orders, and even granted them Proof of Registration (PoR) cards. However, no promise of naturalised citizenship was made.
The newly liberated Bangladesh, since its independence in 1971, immediately declared everyone permanently residing within the territories of the newly formed nation to be citizens.
The Citizenship Act of 1951 and the Bangladesh Citizenship Order of 1972 jointly determined the question of citizenship, leaving remedies for non-residents to acquire citizenship through descent, based either on the citizenship of their parents or grandparents.
The country also grants birthright citizenship to its Urdu-speaking population, including Urdu-speaking Bihari migrants, and has also extended its citizenship jurisprudence to confer citizenship on persons who stayed in hostile countries for purposes other than employment or studies.
Although Bangladesh and Pakistan have long avoided overt hostility towards refugees, recent policy shifts in both countries mark a departure from their restraint.
In 2023, Bangladesh’s limited repatriation efforts and relocation of Rohingyas to Bhasan Char hinted at rising impatience.
By early 2025, severe rationing and aid cuts left refugees teetering on the brink.
In Pakistan, too, the 2024-25 Illegal Foreigner Repatriation Plan triggered the pushback of over a million Afghan refugees, including those with PoR cards, signalling a changing immigration and refugee policy whose consequences can only unfold in the years ahead.
The nowhere nation
India, in particular, underwent a decisive shift in the mid-1980s with the signing of the Assam Accord and the introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 1986.
While the Assam Accord amended the Constitution to the inclusion of Section 6A, the amendment of 1968 restricted citizenship by birth in favour of a descent-based regime whereby an individual’s citizenship became contingent upon at least one parent being an Indian citizen.
With Section 6A operating retrospectively, declaring anybody who has migrated to the Indian state of Assam after the cut-off date of 1971 an illegal immigrant, thwarting their hopes for getting naturalised as citizens of India.
The 2003 amendment of the citizenship laws pushed this further, requiring either both parents to be Indian citizens or, if only one parent was an Indian citizen, the other not an “illegal migrant”.
Subsequently, the burden of rules and executive orders, issued by the government to deport individuals living in various parts of India on the mere suspicion of being illegal immigrants, was borne by a certain class of people with particular ethno-linguistic identities, most of whom could barely access standardised proof of citizenship like passports.
In penalising the mass of marginalised people for their dispossession, belonging was transformed into a privilege, rather than a right.
Perhaps, nowhere in South Asia has the drive to determine nationality and citizenship been more ambitious than in India.
The process reached its peak with the National Registrar of Citizens (NRC), which was initiated in Assam under the Assam Accord from 2013-14, resulting in the exclusion of nearly 1.9 million people, and among them, the exclusion of a significant number of Bengali Hindus.
The administrative exercise, however, did not emerge in isolation; it was preceded by the Amendments to The Passport Entry Act, 1920, and The Foreigners Act, 1946, in 2015, which created exceptions for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians fleeing religious persecutions from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, leaving Muslims outside the protective umbrellas.
With the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, India etched religion into the heart of the citizenship regime, breaking away from the constitutional promise of secularism.
In parallel, policies like the NRC in Assam and the most recent, Special Intensive Revision in Bihar, have shifted the burden of proof onto the ordinary citizens, forcing them to establish their claim to their own country.
Moreover, the absence of a uniform, standardised document to prove citizenship has left millions anxious and vulnerable to arbitrary administrative actions, ranging from electoral disenfranchisement to the spectre of detention, deportation and even pushback across borders.
Together, these trajectories tell the tale of a region where curtains are frequently drawn on claims to nationality, with millions remaining suspended between paper and politics, citizens everywhere in spirit, and yet, nowhere in law.
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