Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The law of citizenship in India may be seen as located within a realm of contestation over the ideas of who belongs and how. The history of these contestations shows that their resolution followed distinct logics that determined the terms of belonging characterizing successive citizenship regimes. The enactment of the Citizenship Act of 1955 constituted a regime held together by the logic of ‘transformative’ that characterized the transition to constitutional democracy and republican citizenship; the amendment in the Citizenship Act in 1985 inserted the logic of ‘exception’ in the citizenship law for the state of Assam, to install a regime of ‘differentiated-universal’, and a system of graded citizenship; the amendment in 2003 put in place a provision empowering the Central government to prepare a National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC) to establish a regime of ‘documentary citizenship’. The protests against the NRC and the CAA 2019 have opened up complex questions about the pedigree of law and its relationship with coercion and obligation. The violence of law or conversely, its founding in notions of justice, configure, and produce fields of contest around citizenship.