From India to the US, a citizenship crisis is burning across the world

The sinister idea of national redemption by treating some as lesser humans or insufficient citizens is taking root across democracies, from the BJP’s pursuit of an India for Hindus to Trump’s purge of immigrant families. Citizenship is becoming a privilege doled out in return for regime support

Samir Nazareth

Published: 11:30am, 11 Jan 2020

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Across the world, there are fires burning and they are not only climate-change induced or climate threatening. The concept of who is a citizen of a nation and what are their rights has become a burning topic.

Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians who are Amazonian Indians are increasingly under threat. In Bolivia, the fall of leader Evo Morales has disenfranchised indigenous Bolivians. Many living under US President Donald Trump are worried about their lives and the well-being of their families, and fear deportation despite being an integral part of American socioeconomics.

As Brexit looms, there is trepidation among many Europeans who have made Britain their home. The Roma in many parts of Europe continue to face persecution from their governments.

There are upheavals in the middle economies of the world too, with millions in Hong Kong and tens of millions in India facing an uncertain future. The unfulfilled obligations in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the Hong Kong government’s increasing coordination with Beijing has unsettled many citizens of the special administrative region.

In India, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has decided to implement a two-pronged strategy which threatens the country’s secular ethos. This government’s amendment of a 1955 citizenship act grants citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries belonging to religions other than Islam. This legislation has been amended in the past to limit citizenship to those having at least one Indian parent and, later, to the parent not being an illegal immigrant.

Simultaneously, there is a plan to conduct a biblically inspired National Register of Citizens which will be the arbiter on the citizenship of each Indian. Though the implementation of both or either is perceived as targeting Muslims, the collateral damage will be in the millions because many people do not have, or have insufficient, documents to prove their citizenship.

Through these initiatives, the BJP, as the political organ of the hard-core Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is implementing the philosophy propounded by the organisation’s chief ideologue Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar: that India needs to regain its ancient glory, that India is only for Hindus and Indian citizens of other religions should get a lower level of citizenship.

Many fear that, as part of the march to regain the land’s past glory, this right-wing government will convert non-Hindu citizens into second-class citizens.

Across the world, this crisis is highlighting that the rights, privileges and responsibilities of citizens and the responsibilities of the state towards them are no longer based on descent (jus sanguinis) or birth within the territory (jus soli) or a synthesis of both. What was a sacred covenant between individual and state enshrined in a nation’s constitution has been converted into weapons on the personal whims, or bigoted philosophies, of duplicitous leaders.

Unfortunately, there are precedents. European discoverers planted the flag of their kingdoms on what they believed to be the new world, ignoring the original inhabitants. As modern nations formed, these original inhabitants had citizenship thrust down their throats and were re-educated. Despite all these efforts, their rights as citizens of these new nations were given short shrift for economic profit.

The juggernaut of pillage has now been transubstantiated into a political ideology. Sure, the earlier greed and blind covetousness was so bad that it required a rereading of Christianity and other religions to give the plundering credence but there was a morality that eventually curtailed it.

The abolishing of the slave trade and the acceptance of human rights and its gradual implementation are cases in point. However, there is something sinister in a political ideology that views treating some as lesser humans or insufficient citizens as being nationally redemptive and virtuous, and/or a necessary process of nation building.

It is not preposterous to suggest that democratically elected governments have a lot in common with communist and authoritarian regimes. At the very basic level, such philosophies aid in ruling a nation because it translates into sociopolitical eugenics creating a monoculture of belief and behaviour.

That this is another version of promulgating and promoting a sonnenkinder mentality and the Lebensborn Nazi project cannot be ignored. Besides the administrative benefits, this philosophy is politically expedient in democratic countries as it spawns a favoured class. Thus, a ruling party’s bigoted motives are accepted and furthered because they are assured of unstinting support.

Despite allegations of corruption and nepotism, Bolsonaro retains support because many profit from his deregularisation of the Amazon. Many Indians back Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government’s Hindutva agenda despite their citizenship coming under threat, the abysmal condition of the economy and government reprisals because officials accept the bringing-back-India’s-ancient-glory tripe.

Trump’s alleged profiteering and culpability, incompetence and the pain his policies are causing millions of Americans are ignored by the evangelists because he is now anti-abortion and diluting environmental laws.

Though these leaders espouse similar philosophies, what differentiates Trump and Bolsonaro from Chinese President Xi Jinping, India’s Modi and others of their ilk is that the latter believe in their twisted philosophies.

Trump is an opportunist who found his market while Bolsonaro, an ineffectual hate-driven politician, filled a vacuum created by the failings of his socialist predecessors. Interestingly, the philosophies of Modi and Xi provide for re-education, giving individuals an opportunity, enforced or otherwise, to become citizens.

Today, in some countries, citizenship is being converted into a privilege to be lavished on a few at the cost of the many. In other nations, it is identified with loss of freedom and a way of life. The label “have-nots”, used to describe people without material wealth, may soon come to mean those whose citizenship has been stripped.

Samir Nazareth has worked in the development sector and writes on sociopolitical and environmental issues. He is the author of the travelogue, 1400 Bananas, 76 Towns & 1 Million People

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