Turning Aliens Into Citizens: A “Toolkit” for a Trans-Disciplinary Policy Analysis

Abstract

Subrata Mitra analyses the debate on the flow of liberal ideas of citizenship to non-Western societies through an inquiry into its philosophical and social construction. A flow diagram is developed to capture the dynamic process of citizen making in terms of its underlying parameters, some of which go beyond the realm of everyday politics. Towards this objective, the chapter undertakes a brief survey of the evolution of the formal category of citizens from antiquity to present day, and the inner differentiation of liberal theory of citizenship, in order to cater to its complex empirical nuances and finally, to unite the various strands of citizen making in the form of a tool kit. This neo-institutional model provides the basis for a transdisciplinary analysis of policy making with regard to citizenship.

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Citizenship is a cutting-edge issue of our times. In its various shapes and guises, it underpins debates about the modern state, nation, identity, personhood, marginality, and empowerment. These debates take place as much in the mainstream media as within political parties, interest groups acting on the welfare of immigrants and displaced people, and in committees and bureaucratic circles that are under pressure to generate appropriate and effective policy to turn aliens into citizens. This political challenge is to be found not only in the politics of transitional societies where millions of colonial subjects and homeless people moving across national boundaries find themselves within the territory of new states, but in the interstices of complex, liberal democratic, post-industrial societies where foreign immigrants live out their precarious lives, as well. More often than not, as we have seen in the previous chapters, in critical situations as these, the concepts and institutions of citizenship drawn from the liberal theory of citizenship are not adequate to explain the challenges that reluctant and excluded citizens face in their everyday lives. These gaps between theory and facts lives are the product of a different history and ontology from that of Marshall, not mediated by the European experience that molded Marshall’s Weltanchauung. The urgency for action in such cases often makes the distinction between the concept and reality of citizenship untenable, thus putting into question the very feasibility of effective policy.

The chapter responds to this hiatus of theory and experience of citizenship with a tool kit that is particularly adept at meeting the contingencies where those who feel alienated are not able to connect themselves with the institutions of the state. The path to such a heuristic device, the chapter argues, lies through the specification of a working definition of citizenship in terms of a “third space,” consisting of the overlap between the state and society (see Fig. 4.1 above). Towards this objective, the chapter briefly delves into the evolution of the concept of citizenship in the context of European society and history, and its awkward encounter with the non-European world. The cognitive hiatus that results from the attempt to map the non-Western life-world into Western concepts is expressed in terms of the phenomenology of citizenship, captured in interviews conducted in Orissa and in the North East of India.

Fig. 4.1

Overlapping circles of state and society

The resonance of these split images is plentiful. One finds them in the awkward, reluctant, and excluded citizens who one encounters in the media in terms of their dual identities, and in the exploits of terrorists who think of themselves as azadis—political actors who see themselves as freedom fighters—striving for an ideal world beyond the pale of the world as we know it. The discourse of displaced and enraged tribals some of whom are depicted as Naxalites or minority cultural communities marginalized by the steady incursion of majoritarian norms who are profiled as fundamentalists, are best understood in terms of innovative concepts such as entangled or transnational citizenships. The chapter pulls these insights are pulled together in terms of a flow diagram of aliens-into-citizens which could act as heuristic tool kit for policy makers in search of concrete measurements that can enhance citizenship (Fig. 4.2 above).

Fig. 4.2

Towards a post-liberal and transnational theory of citizenship

The State of Play: Citizenship as Ubiquitous and Conceptually Puzzling

“Citizenship for all”—aliens, immigrants, transients, subjects, minorities, and the stateless refuges of all descriptions—is a slogan that marks political discourse in long-established democracies as much as the politics of transitional societies. Spread out across the globe, the presence of citizenship and citizen rights on national and international agendas is a testimony to both the global reach of the discourse on citizenship as well as its inner complexity. Who is a citizen, who defines who a citizen is, what distinguishes a citizen from one who is not, and which minimal rights and duties constitute citizenship are issues of great emotional appeal. Existing theory, as we have seen in the previous chapters, is not necessarily helpful for clarity on these issues. Depending on where one stands in the national and international nexus of power, the status of individuals in terms of their claims to citizenship can be both confirmed and contested, depending on which strand of liberal theory of citizenship or its derivatives one draws on.¹

In the face of such theoretical disarray and conceptual complexity, how can one map the state of play regarding the status of citizenship in a given political context, or for that matter, devise policies to spread this much sought after status widely across a given population? Towards these objectives, this section undertakes a brief survey of the social constructions of citizenship and the evolution of the formal category of citizens from antiquity to present day. It considers the limitations of the liberal theory of citizenship to cater to the complex empirical nuances of citizenship. Finally, it attempts to unite the various strands of citizen-making policies in the form of a tool kit. This is done through an analysis of the conceptual basis of citizenship through an inquiry into its philosophical and social foundations. This section of the volume thus sets the stage for the construction of a flow diagram that seeks to unite the dynamic process of citizen-making in terms of its underlying parameters, some of which go beyond the realm of everyday politics.

The application of liberal citizenship theory for an exegesis of the discourse on citizenship in transitional societies, or with regard to the politics of immigration within established democracies reveals its lack of conceptual precision and empirical correlates. Under its broad banner one finds people chafing under the tutelage of the almighty state or all-demanding nations; immigrants on the move across national borders, and those who feel squeezed out of their traditional living space because of the new arrivals; minorities bearing the brunt of nation-building majorities; and workers, peasants, and ordinary folks squeezed out of their own economic, political, and cultural spaces by the grand march of the market and state. Citizenship as a public concern cuts through the barriers of race, gender, culture, and nationality. Though often isolated in their corners, and yet sharing a sense of world-wide community, these individuals and groups find a political ally in the concept of citizenship which they believe promises to make good their losses. The methodological problem is rendered even more complicated because of the diversity of meanings attached to this label which many bear proudly, and some feel just as politically self-righteous to reject.

Why does this motley crowd of people with grievances nail their complaints onto citizenship which they see as a new platform from which to conduct their search for dignity, justice, freedom, identity and space? The answer lies in the fact that the problems of citizenship in transitional societies and transitional parts of established societies, which it typically addresses, cannot be easily solved within existing theory; and it is evocative of the kind of problem where theory becomes enmeshed with action. Being is becoming, for citizenship, as one finds it on the world stage from the Arab Spring to civil libertarian groups in liberal democracies, unites both theory and action.²

The new, world-wide interest in citizenship emerges primarily from two complementary factors. First, the rise of new issues such as the arrival of non-Christian and non-white immigrants in stable Western democracies has brought a great paradox that underpins liberal democracies to the surface. How can one accommodate the “different”—groups whose core values, religions, rituals, political culture, and memories do not form part of the national myths of European democracies—within the structure of interests and concepts of long established social groups? Or, to put it simply, seen from the point of view of national majorities, how to tolerate the “intolerant” (which is how many within Western societies perceive resurgent Islam)? In the second place, in changing societies where the state was founded on the tenet of Western modernity—either in its liberal or Marxist variant of the public sphere as independent of the religious—the basic rights to freedom of religion are being eroded by the rise of intolerant national majorities. The emergence of ethnicity and identity, often as part of democratic self-assertion of erstwhile colonial subjects threatens the very basis of citizenship, namely, individual rights and freedoms.³ In postcolonial societies where the transition to democracy entails the assertion of both individual and group rights, how to reconcile both has become deeply problematic. Finally, in older established democracies, decline in electoral participation and interest in public affairs have sent a warning signal to the theorists of democracy about the urgent need to re-conceptualize citizenship. In consequence, democratic discourse, in the West as well as in postcolonial and post-revolutionary societies, has become entangled with new theoretical issues such as the distinction between active and passive citizenship, “layered” and “differentiated” citizenship.⁴

From the European Past to the Global Present: Citizenship as Linear Flow

Citizenship has been a key feature in the development of the state from classical antiquity to present day. In an apparently seamless “flow,” the core concepts of the Greek city state and the Roman Empire, representing, respectively, the salience of descent and law, became the foundation stones of the European idea of citizenship. It evolved from Greece and Rome, and subsequently, through the turbulent centuries of medieval Europe, passing through the early modern state, finally acquiring the institutional status of the citizen of liberal democratic Europe. One of the most significant results to emerge out of a symposium on “The Development of Citizenship in a Transcultural Context” produced an overview of the flow of citizenship in the European context, connecting the Greek polis and the modern democratic state.⁵ Presented by Thomas Maissen, the scheme delineated the evolution of the concept up to but not beyond the modern liberal democratic nation state.

The grand narrative one finds in Table 4.1 treats the modern nation state as the main site for the location of the citizen and does not take into account those who have dropped out of history in course of the evolution of the modern state. The “losers” in the story of the making of the modern European citizen have not, of course, vanished into complete oblivion. Their memories have been locked away into the myth of their nationhood and memories of lost battles. Such people, located at the margins of modern nation states—the Scots and the Chechens, for example—are the subjects of transcultural history, which is engaged in putting together these lost pieces of global history in order to reconstitute narratives that have gone out of focus but are not, for that reason, irretrievably lost. Focused on the “winners” in the game of state formation, the scheme presented in Table 4.1 does not take into account discontinuities, war, and breakdown of established orders. However, those who lost the battle for supremacy did not necessarily disappear. As we learn from the losers’ strategies—nationalist myths that are written into memory as the history of lost glory—and the reuse of sacred sites (the Acropolis has been successively a Greek temple, Christian church, and Ottoman mosque). One gets a more detailed picture of the story of the loss and recovery of European nationalisms.⁶ The Greco-Roman tradition did not disappear with the onset of the European medieval period which introduced the concept of trans-European citizenship into the conceptual pool. The original Republican tradition was revived by the early modern states, as the Jacobins of revolutionary France set off to liberate their own people and others in the name of restoring republican values. Eventually, the modern democratic state, as we shall see below in the formulation of Marshall, strove to extend citizenship rights to the whole population, riding on the buoyant welfare state.

Table 4.1 Thomas Maissen, concepts of citizenship in Europe

The Phenomenology of Citizenship in a Post-Colonial Context

The historical background of the evolution of citizenship within Western democracies helps explain how the concept had dropped out of political science in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and why contemporary political discourse on citizenship exhibits such a rich diversity of approaches. The problematic nature of citizenship one encounters today is in part linked to the demise of the concept of the state in the twentieth century, the very time when the powers of the Imperial state were growing inordinately. That demise was related to a sequence of factors that were of great consequence for citizenship. In the first place, within the ethos of the twenty-first century, both the state and the nation stand not as exclusive repositories of exclusive sovereignty. Instead, the individual, as citizen, is the ultimate arbitrator. The “State” was further stigmatized by linkage with a superannuated idealism of the nation’s corporate will, which passed into the equally mystical notion of “society”, sometimes an idealized world order. Marxist theory, increasingly influential, tended to reduce the state to an epiphenomenon of economic domination and class struggle. Liberal theory, which had traditionally preached a minimal and consensual state with formal-legal anchorage, tended increasingly to identify the state with the coercive power of regimes and to confuse it with the denial of freedom.

In the United States, whose new modes of political science would achieve world-wide hegemony by the mid-century, the national experience had stressed a diffused notion of political community overweighed by the activity of voluntary associations and private profit-making corporations. Political science, as it abandoned institutional analysis for behavioural analysis in the presumed interest of greater realism and empirical specificity, strove to eliminate the notion of state altogether, substituting such concepts as “group,” “political system,” and “political process,” and allying its manner of analysis with parallel developments in psychology and sociology. That same political science also tended to see the functions and jurisdictions of the state (or whatever other term was used) as the arena of countervailing social and economic forces—at most, as a regulator of competing interests without independent majesty; at the minimum, as a “black box“ where competing social forces resolved their periodically shifting claims (Kelly, 1979).⁷

The relative absence of political science from the playing field explains why there should be increasing calls for a “theory of citizenship” that focuses on the identity and conduct of individual citizens, and includes their responsibilities, loyalties, and roles. There are, however, at least two general hazards in this quest. First, the scope of a “theory of citizenship” is potentially limitless—almost every problem in political philosophy involves relations among citizens or between citizens and the state.⁸ In their survey, Kymlicka and Norman (1994) try to avoid this danger by concentrating on two general issues that have been neglected due to the overemphasis in recent political philosophy on structures and institutions—namely, civic virtues and citizenship identity. The second danger for a theory of citizenship arises from the proximity of two different concepts which are sometimes conflated in these discussions. The first is the specification of citizenship entirely as a legal status, which alone can extend full membership in a particular political community. The second is the equating of citizenship with participation in the public life of the community. An acceptable compromise between the two positions would locate it at a point where legal status and behavior balance one another. This distinction is vital for the construction of a scale that measures citizenship in countries where people not only belong to separate political communities but also belong in different ways—that is, some are incorporated as individuals and others through membership of a group. The great variance in historical, cultural, and political situations of individuals in postcolonial contexts where nation building follows state formation rather than preceding it, as in the liberal democratic states of Europe, is a crucial parameter in determining their status as citizens, as opposed to being aliens.

The landscape of citizenship which underpins the general and comparative concepts discussed above helps understand the phenomenology of citizenship as one gathers from conversations with specialists and ordinary men and women. It also helps formulate an answer to the key question: Is citizenship a universal category that takes different forms, depending on the context, or is it innately and uniquely “Western”? In his answer to this basic question, “First and foremost”, as Rajeev Bhargava (2010) puts it, “citizenship is a sense of comfort in the public domain with one another.”⁹ Starting with this all important “sense of comfort” as a point of departure, Bhargava introduces other attributes of citizenship, both in terms of what it is not, as well as what it is. He does not, for example, make it mandatory for a citizen to be a member of any existing nation state. “First of all, the author doesn’t associate it with membership in a nation-state. The idea of citizenship is much older…You can be a citizen outside the boundaries of a polity. Being part of a nation-state is a contingent feature, not a necessary condition of what citizenship is.”¹⁰ However, while citizenship is an integral part of the self-perception of the individual, it cannot be entirely self-referential. One is, necessarily, a citizen of a larger collectivity. Bhargava adds: “citizenship is, first and foremost, an issue of belonging. If you are a citizen, you are a citizen of something and normally of a polity (or of a political community) and that brings the question of what the boundaries are.” The issue of belonging introduces a series of further considerations of who is in and who is out, and what rights those who are in are entitled to, and what duties they must fulfill to maintain their status as citizens.”¹¹

If citizenship is universal, then why does it take different forms in different contexts? This question entails two further issues that underpin it. The first refers to the indigenous term in which it existed prior to the cultural and conceptual flow that connected the local with the global. The second refers to the specific form that the flow of the concept across geographic frontiers in course of its historic migration and evolution. The flow of the concept riding on the back of trade and pilgrimage has a different form of interaction and hybridization when compared to transmission through invasion and colonial rule.

Two on-site investigations into the indigenous roots of citizenship—one about the tribes of western Orissa, and the other about the tribes of India’s northeast, have yielded rich dividends. Talking about the social and political lives of the tribes of western Orissa, Nayak holds that:

there always was a concept of citizenship. But they had the very basic idea of citizenship, without which, even, I think they could not have thought about living in society. …every moment they are feeling like citizens of a particular state or area or village …that they are not just ordinary persons, but that they have rights and responsibilities towards the state. And they wanted to be under the control of the village headman, next the territorial lord, then next the king. They wanted to have a king, to be ruled by a king, and have the rights of the land and other properties like that. So, the rights of full citizens, they are very proud of that—[are based on the fact] that they belong to this area…that they are under the rule of this and that king. So that kind of feeling was there, that without the King their life was of no use, or the social living was not really functional. They had a hierarchy: King—Head—Citizen.¹²

Nayak describes this indigenous concept of citizenship specific to the tribals studied as “khunt-katidar”—a person who will have the right within a specific area to engage in slash and burn agriculture. And he will be given this right by the head or the king. They could easily slash the trees; cultivate the land and become its owners under the patronage of the king. They were not only occupying the land on their own, but they have been given permission. So, khunt-katidars were not only cultivators, but they had rights over the land cleared by them. So they used to express the idea of citizenship as khunt-katidars, meaning the rightful citizens.

Our fieldwork in Tripura led to findings that were similar to Orissa in tone and content but vastly dissimilar in intensity. In size and population, the State of Tripura is much smaller than Orissa. Tucked away in the northeastern corner of India, tenuously connected to the Indian mainland by air and in a circuitous way, by road and rail, the tribal population was reduced because of the massive immigration of Hindus from Bangladesh. Being a minority in their own, traditional homeland, the inhabitants of this State exhibit a strong but fragmented sense of identity. They rely more on language and memory than the sense of citizenship, which is understood as the shared comfort of a common public sphere. Language itself does not contribute to the common bond. Among the 19 tribes of Tripura, Kok-Borok is the lingua franca in the hills, but in towns the elite groups among the tribes (known as Thakurs), Kok-Borok is not. According to Mr Kumud Chaudhury, a linguist with many years’ experience of fieldwork in Tripura, it is a “speech community”, i.e. a community tied together more by a common linguistic link than common ethnic origin. Chaudhury also stresses that for Tripuri urban elites, the use of Kok-Borok is less frequent.¹³ Etymologically, Kok-Borok means “the language of the people.” Borog is how the “sons of the soil” refer to themselves—in many ways similar to the khunt katidar of western Orissa. But unlike western Orissa, the Borog are actively engaged in a debate on whether to write their language in the Roman or Bengali script. They have developed a concept of the noncitizen, referred to as “wanjei,” and a term of distancing—“wansa”—from those who make them feel uncomfortable and provoke worry. Yet another similarity with Orissa is the conversion to Christianity which has generated intertribal conflicts.¹⁴ Bengalis, who form the vast majority of the population, while united under the broad rubric of a common language, are nevertheless deeply divided in terms of their specific identities which remain rooted in the localities from which they migrated to Tripura.¹⁵ This makes Tripura an unusual state where few feel as if they are on their home ground as one might expect citizens to do. “In Tripura, both the tribal elites and the wanjei groups do not consider Tripura as their homeland/motherland. And yet, the wanjei groups control everything!”¹⁶

Citizenship as a “Third Space”: Entangled and Transnational Citizenship

Citizenship is a liminal category with a political edge and a moral depth. The political cutting edge entitles the citizen—as opposed to the alien and the subject—to certain rights, to be shared in common with others. The moral depth binds the citizen in empathy and solidarity with others like himself. Citizenship has to be understood as both signifier and signified of the cultural flow. It is both product and process, a window that provides a glimpse into the global flow of ideas, and is itself a product of the same conceptual flow. This common space is depicted in terms of the interface of state and society below, in Fig. 4.1.

In the contemporary world, globalization, which was meant to make citizenship and national boundaries increasingly less salient, has in fact revived their importance. The agenda of contemporary international politics is crowded with competing claims of the state and supra-stage agencies on the loyalty of individuals and ethnic groups. In the absence of a global political order with binding character, nation states, acting in their capacity as the collective voice of their citizens, remain the most important agents of accountability and enforcement. The complex process through which subjects and immigrants become citizens thus pitches territoriality and ethnicity as competing norms for the entitlement to citizenship. Caught in this double bind, citizenship has become a contested category and a political problem of global importance.

In the era of globalization, we are faced with a new context and a new challenge. Ours is a world of nation states, states without nations, nations without states, and, as often as not, people with histories but without nations or states to to which they could nail their identities. This is a world where citizenship—equal membership of moral and political communities—has steadily emerged as an entitlement. To understand these aspirations and capabilities, one needs to move beyond the frames of references and categories that are specific to the history of the European nation state.¹⁷ The method of “histoire croisée”,’which has found favor with many projects within the cluster, “breaks with a one-dimensional perspective that simplifies and homogenizes, in favour of a multidimensional approach that acknowledges plurality and the complex configurations that result from it.”¹⁸ To meet the challenge of citizenship in the contemporary world,entangled history—has emerged as a new paradigm and an alternative to national history and comparative politics. Werner and Zimmermann (2006) present the manifesto of this new paradigm in the following words.

To investigate relational configurations that are active and asymmetrical, as well as the labile and evolving nature of things and situations, to scrutinize not only novelty but also change, is one of the aims of histoire croisée. Instead of an analytical model—which would result in a statist view of things—our aim is on the contrary to articulate various dimensions and place them into movement; this requires a toolbox that, while integrating the well-tested methodological contributions of the comparative approach and transfer studies, makes it possible to apprehend in a more satisfactory way the complexity of a composite and plural world in motion, and thereby the fundamental question of change. The failure to achieve this is a weak if not blind spot within comparative and to some extent transfer, approaches.¹⁹

The liberal response to these problems as we have already seen in Chaps. 2 and 3 can be considered in terms of the mutation of the ideals of Marshall. Written during the period of post-war reconstruction in Britain, T. H. Marshall’s work on citizenship has to be seen in context of the wider debate over the welfare state and the arguments that were being promulgated at the time for an extension of state provisions. Marshall’s core contribution to the theory was to argue that the extension of citizenship could act as a political instrument of integration to counterbalance the divisive forces of class inequalities. To justify his position, Marshall constructed a theory of citizenship based upon the central claim that citizenship had grown incrementally and was expressed progressively, in three different dimensions, namely the civil, the political and the social. The eighteenth century, according to his schema, had witnessed the development of civil rights which mainly targeted the legal status and civil rights of the individual, rights which were to be defended in a law court. Core rights in this case referred to freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial and equal access to the legal system. Moving into the nineteenth century, Marshall noted the extension of political rights, an outcome of the working-class struggle for political equality, through greater access to the parliamentary process. Improvements under this rubric referred to electoral rights, the invention of the secret ballot box, the creation of new political parties and the expansion of the franchise. Finally, the twentieth century, according to Marshall, engendered “social rights” which included claims to welfare, entitlements to social security, unemployment benefits, etc. In addition to this stage-by-stage account of citizenship, Marshall observed the emergence of a “hyphenated society,” a social system where there was perpetual tension between the need for economic profitability, the taxation requirements of the modern state and the rights of citizens to welfare provisions.

An influential figure in the sociology of citizenship, Marshall has spawned a number of critics. Anthony Giddens (2002) for instance has criticized Marshall for developing an evolutionary perspective on the historical emergence of citizenship which begins to seem teleological. Giddens also pointed out that citizenship rights are not a unified, homogenous set of social arrangements and that these themselves can become the basis of conflict and contestation. It can be further added that the Marshallian explanation fails to take into account the case of postcolonial states and societies where political rights came before civil and social rights as one can see in the case of India to which we turn in the next section.

The Indian Discourse on Citizenship: Hybridizing or Reinventing Liberalism?

Citizenship in India, T. K. Oommen argues, has been “moulded by a long and tortuous history of 5,000 years.”²⁰ Oommen problematizes the relationship between citizenship and national identities from the vantage point of competiting constructions of national identities in contemporary India. The three salient foundations of these constructions are religion, language, and tribe, which are in a relationship of continuous tension with the statist conception of national identity which purports to promote harmony among all the people of India tanscending religious, linguistic, and regional or sectional diversities, as hoped by the founding fathers of the Indian constitution.

When a religion is invoked as the basis of national identity, those who do not belong to that religion are subjected to a process of “ethnification.” This means even those who are nationals (i.e. those who identify with one or another national territory as their homeland and speak the language of that nation) can be made to appear as “outsiders”. This tendency, according to Oomen, which undercuts the very foundations of the Indian polity is prevalent among the Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim “nationalists” in contemporary India. While the Hindu militants see the whole of India as their exclusive homeland, Sikh and Muslim militants view only part of India thus.

Although language and tribe are not accorded any legitimacy by the Indian state for defining national identiy, they are accepted as the bases for politico-administrative units. This results in two basic contradictions. First, it militates against the notion of single citizenship as domiciliary requirements, which are often prescribed by these units for availing some of the civil and social citizenship entitlements. Second, such prescriptions often render those who do not share the relevant linguistic and tribal identities as outsiders to these units. Thus, a second category of ethnies emerge—those who are nationals in their respective homeland (e.g. Maharashtrians in Maharashtra and Nagas in Nagaland)—but aliens elsewhere in the territory of the Indian state. Full citizenship entitlements to all members of the polity irrespective of their spatial locations can partly moderate the tensions and conflicts between ethnies and those who are denied the same rights.

The Indian constitution has taken this onboard through the concept of “differentiated citizenship.”²¹ Rajeev Bhargav, in his reponse to a question about the “amalgamation of this imported or modern idea of citizenship” says:

Yes, it was an important requirement for proper integration. It is a non-assimilationalist strategy, very important for the sense of all being together, solidarity, and recognition of difference. And of course, the caste, as you mentioned, was also important. Reservations for Dalits, that was a community-specific right…a special right. In effect, one could argue that the formation of federal states in India is grounded on the moral ground to self-government by different linguistic communities—thus, illustrating differentiated citizenship. Article 370 is an extreme version of the same thing. And, Article 371 which applies to the North East, is also something that makes government unable to alter some of the customary practices of the North East.

So, yes, we got this early on and the practice of “differentiated citizenship” was being applied in India long before the theory coined the term. Both community rights and minority rights existing in a way that permits the state to legislate on a case-by-case basis, etc. The Constitution thus tries to balance individual and collective rights. In the case of the right to set up an educational institution, it is given to a religious and/or linguistic community, but everybody can apply to the state for funds, which has major repercussions (…) if all the funds taken are coming from the state, then no religious instruction can take place there. But that is very rare, as it makes a mockery of the right. One of the reasons for this right to exist is because you want to set up something to instruct a pupil in religion, not just about all religions. But it is interesting that if it is partially funded by the state, you cannot have a policy that is exclusionary, you cannot disallow people from other religions from applying to the school.²²

The Toolkit: Turning Aliens and Subjects Into Citizens

The core idea behind the toolkit of citizenship is to identify institutions and policies that can transform rebels or the alienated into citizens. With this intention, the toolkit seeks the room to maneuver within the structure of the state. The Indian record of successfully turning subjects into citizens (discussed in detail in Chap. 7) has cross-national significance because, rather than being a unique attribute of Indian culture, it is based on an institutional arrangement containing several important parameters. The first of these are the legal sources of citizenship as formulated in the Indian Constitution (Articles 5–11), the Constituent Assembly Debates (which provide insights into the controversy surrounding specific articles), and legislation undertaken by the national parliament to enable and amend, depending on the case, the original provisions of the constitution.

“Judicialization” of citizenship is yet another method of synchronizing the provisions of the law and the new demands emerging from society. The assertion of identity and linkage to India has emerged as a supplementary basis of Indian citizenship, in addition to birth and residence. Property and citizenship have constantly been interwoven: the questions of who can own property, and how much, have received different answers across India’s regions. In the case of Kashmir, the laws have always had a slightly different tinge due to the special agreement that the Indian acts would not be normally applicable in Kashmir. In the last decade, case law has tended towards a more flexible and all-encompassing understanding of Indian stipulations with relation to property and, of course, the onset of economic liberalization has given wings to even further judicial liberalization of these concepts. Similarly, recent laws allowing NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) to own property have already been registered in case law.

Governance, as I have argued in a previous work (Mitra 2005), is possible if the state pays close attention to law and order management, strategic reform, and the constitutional incorporation of society’s core values.²³ Working out of a similar model, one can assert that India’s relative success on the issue of citizenship can be attributed to the fact that these tools of citizen-making are used with unusual vigor and imagination by the political decision makers in India. The typical strategy makes a three pronged attack on conflict issuing out of the hiatus between general legal norms of the state and the assertion of political identity contesting the state. India makes stakeholders out of rebels by adroitly combining reform, repression, and selective recruitment of rebels into the privileged circle of new elites (see Fig. 4.2 below).

The model weaves together several insights that we gain from the Indian attempt to turn subjects into citizens in a form that can be used as the basis of comparison across countries.The first and foremost of these is the fact that in the Indian discourse and public policy, citizenship is conceptualized both as a “product” and a “process”—which is tantamount to saying that citizen-making is a primary objective of the constitution, modern institutions, and public policy of the state. The three processes, on the other hand, are reinforced by the momentum generated from below, as people assert their citizen rights and articulate them through a complex repertoire that effectively combines political participation with strategic protest. Both the state and the janata—India’s generic category for politically conscious and articulate participants in everyday politics—draw on categories that are indigenous as well as imported, and the process stretches out into memory of selfhood and rights of empowerment through a chain of associations that links people in one part of the country to another. One consequence is the emergence of the hybrid citizen—a liminal category that joins the protester and the participant, stretching the accommodating capacity of the political system and blunting the edges of anti-system behavior.

The model of “citizen-making” below highlights the role of elites and strategies of reform. It also explains India’s attempts to generate differentiated and multilevel citizenship—new conceptual tools with relevance for policy making—as categories germane to her politics. That makes citizenship a significant case study of onceptual flow where practices, notions, institutions of citizenship have been transferred, imported, emulated and adapted to successfully, and unsuccessfully, meet local needs and constraints.

The putative universality of the liberal view of citizenship masks a particular historical and cultural context. The theorist Rajeev Bhargava asserts:

Well, the ‘universalist’ outlook was not universal in the first place. It was very particularistic. Once you sort the community issue, settle the issue of belonging then the basis of that citizenship becomes irrelevant. Just to take an example: if I have a school where I will only admit Catholics, then the Catholics will go to the chapel but then it will lose its religious appeal after a while since everybody shares and believes in the same thing. And then, in this context, you can say that religion doesn’t really matter since everybody has the same faith.²⁴

Considerations of citizenship of whatever kind demand an idea of citizenship. There cannot be an idea of citizenship without an account of the subject of citizenship. Yeatman (2007) argues that the subject of citizenship is “the individual” considered as an integrated unit of organic and subjective life. It is this idea of the individual that is the referent for the idea of self-preservation in early modern civil philosophy. It is difficult to appreciate the significance of self-preservation without using the vantage point of post-Freudian accounts of the self to open it up. Citizenship concerns the status of the human being considered as a person (a self).²⁵ Yeatman suggest that contemporary social movements assert a positivity and pride in group specificity against ideals of assimilation. Political actors who form part of such movements have also questioned whether justice always means that law and policy should enforce equal treatment for all groups. Embryonic in these challenges is a concept of differentiated citizenship that can be considered the best way to realize the inclusion and participation of everyone in full citizenship.

With regard to this point, Young (1989) argues that far from implying one another, the universality of citizenship in the sense of the inclusion and participation of everyone stands in tension with the other two meanings of universality embedded in modern political ideas: universality as generality, and universality as equal treatment.²⁶ First, the ideal that the activities of citizenship express or create a general will that transcends the particular differences of group affiliation, situation, and interest, has in practice excluded groups judged not capable of adopting that general point of view. The idea of citizenship as expressing a general will has tended to enforce homogeneity on citizens. To the degree that contemporary proponents of revitalized citizenship retain the idea of a general will and common life, they implicitly support the same exclusions and homogeneity. Young argues that the inclusion and participation of everyone in public discussion and decision making requires mechanisms for group representation. Secondly, where differences in capacities, culture, values, and behavioral styles exist among groups, and some of these groups are privileged, strict adherence to a principle of equal treatment tends to perpetuate oppression or disadvantage. The inclusion and participation of everyone in social and political institutions therefore sometimes requires the articulation of special rights that attend to group differences in order to undermine oppression and structural disadvantages.

Conclusion

I have argued in this chapter that progress in the field of citizenship in the direction of building a cross-cultural explanatory model of citizenship with policy relevance is contingent on a rigorous exegesis of its empirical content. This needs to be complemented with an analysis of the process of its transmission and the understanding of its complex genealogy which connects the imported liberal concept of citizenship to the indigenous meanings attributed to it in the lived-in categories that we get in anthropological studies, as well as from in-depth interviews with specialists.²⁷

The conceptual boundary of a specific phenomenon is of great interest to the research on citizenship. Is citizenship a logically bounded entity defined by a simple set of features in which all instances possessing the criteria attributes have a full and equal degree of membership? (See Rosch And Mervis, 1975 & Andersen, 2000)²⁸ In response to this question, I have formulated citizenship as an interface between state and society—a “third space”—whose inhabitants unite the rights germane to their membership of the political community and the sense of identity, identification, and obligation that membership of the society entails. As such, while we achieve some form of generality with regard to the category of the citizen, its empirical references remain bound to the context. The first approximation of the category thus opens the issue to the larger vista of the “flow” of citizenship, which is a complex theoretical problem in its own right. The commonsensical, everyday reference to the flow of objects suggests a movement from one place to another in a steady unbroken stream, and a “continuous mass,” in a manner that would be interpersonally visible, rather as one would think about the flow of blood in veins and arteries, of water flowing downstream, or electricity moving across a conductive medium. Can one attribute these characteristics to the flow of citizenship from one context to the other?

One of the main arguments of this chapter is that indeed it is both imperative and feasible for the state in the times of globalization to conceptualize and construct citizenship as a seamless flow across time and space and innovate appropriate institutions and policies to achieve this objective. Citizen-making is a prime function of the modern state and a sensible strategy for governance and administration in any society. Tracking the core concept of citizenship as it traveled from Europe to Asia, this chapter has explored the phenomenology of citizenship and the translingual and transcultural facets of its evolution.²⁹ The insights gathered in course of the research that we have undertaken makes it possible to look at citizenship in terms of a very broad spectrum of concepts, which can be a formal part of the culture, linguistically articulate, or existing in the inner world of the actor, but have not yet been articulated in terms of science, language, society, culture, or theory. The book as a whole explores the institutions, political processes, and symbols used to profile a model citizen. The complex process of acculturation, through which the imported becomes indigenized and hybridized, involves agency and strategy, innovatively producing an asymmetry reflecting the uneven nature of such flows, the cultural context, and balance of power.

The critical evaluations of Marshall’s foundational writings carry an important lesson for contemporary analyses of citizenship. Too “English” and too closely tied to the specific context of an expanding postwar economy, a stable cultural foundation and the solid framework of the welfare state, Marshall had held the elimination of social exclusion as a worthy and feasible goal of social policy. The quantitative implications of Marshall’s liberal citizenship had the attainment of full citizenship coverage where everybody will achieve his civic, political, and social rights as a goal. Even in England, as Marshall’s critics point out, the emergence of gender, race, immigration, and region as salient cleavages questioned the simple cultural premises of his basic assumptions (Bulmer and Rees, 1996).³⁰ The decline of the welfare state made the rights-driven citizenship idea even more contested. As we move from Marshall’s postwar England to the contemporary scene, the new frontiers of research on citizenship shows wide vistas of interesting empirical and theoretical problems that are in urgent need of attention.

The chapter has explored the meanings of citizenship in the inner world of the actor and the observer on the basis of conversations with experts and actors; identified the gap in the conceptual landscape of citizenship that the book seeks to meet; and sketched out a preliminary model and research design for a quantitative analysis of citizenship, which can, as I have argued in my case study of citizenship in India (Chap. 7), at best be a still picture of a dynamic reality. It is comparative and cross national in perspective. The chapter has developed a model of citizen-making. The model is both comparative and cross-national in perspective. The components of the model, which are, strategic reform, incorporation of core social values into the constitutional norms that underpin the institutional arrangement of the state, and firm, fair, transparent management of law and order have deep implications for policies intended to transform aliens into citizens. By making these unstated parameters of citizen-making explicit, this chapter has set the stage for a comprehensive discussion of citizenship in its transnational and post-liberal context. This theme will be explored further in the analytic narratives that follow.