Citizenship Securitization in India: Reflections from Debates in the Constituent Assembly and the Indian Parliament

Abstract

Citizenship policies to manage, control, and filter secure identities from insecure identities are influenced by citizenship securitization, an emotive and contentious subject due to the Partition and multiple migrations in India. The idea of citizenship securitization that had entered into the discourse after the Partition, knitting varieties of unease and danger into a patchwork of insecurities became harder with time, rendering Indian citizenship exclusionary. This paper attempts in-depth content analysis of the Constituent Assembly and Parliamentary Debates on citizenship in order to follow the development of citizenship securitization.