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SOUTH ASIAN HISTORIES OF CITIZENSHIP, 1946–1970*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2012

JOYA CHATTERJI
JOYA CHATTERJI*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ[email protected]
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Abstract

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asia's nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 1049 - 1071
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Sunil Amrith, David Feldman, John Lonsdale, Fiona McConnell, and David Washbrook for their detailed comments on an earlier version of this article; to Tim Harper for kindly organizing a workshop to discuss its main themes; to Jasdeep Brar for summarizing the rich case law on the permit system; to the Newton Trust which provided a small grant for that purpose; to Newal Osman who procured rare published sources from Karachi and Islamabad; and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), which funded the early stages of this research.

References

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41 Note from Lt Col Kirpal to the Joint Defence Council, 28 Aug. 1947. Mountbatten papers (Mountbatten papers database, University of Southampton), section i (MB1), D/46/3.

42 The role played by social workers in shaping policy will be discussed in the larger work on which this article is based. Joya Chatterji, The disinherited: migrants, minorities and citizenship in South Asia, 1946–1970 (forthcoming).

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48 Enclosure in Jairamdas Doulatram to Patel, 24 Sept. 1947, SPC, iv, p. 373.

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57 Such cases run into the thousands. See, for instance, MEAI/F.9–10/48-Pak i.

58 See the introduction to the Government of East Punjab Evacuees (Administration of Property) Act, 1947 (Act XIV of 1947).

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62 M. L. Mehra to the district commissioner of Delhi, 9 Oct. 1948, DSA, DC, 16/48.

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68 Superintendent of police to deputy inspector general of police, Delhi, 20 Dec. 1947, DSA, DC, 259/47.

69 Deputy inspector general of police to the chief commissioner, Delhi, 20 Dec. 1947, DSA, DC, 259/47.

70 Nehru to Patel, 6 Oct. 1947, SPC, iv, p. 400.

71 Ibid.

72 Ordinance xxxiv of 1948, MEAI/ F.26–189/48-Pak i (Secret).

73 ‘Rules regarding permit system introduced between India and Pakistan’, Notification No. ii(55)/48-General, Gazette of India, 14 Sept. 1948.

74 Zamindar, The long partition, p. 82.

75 Ibid., pp. 79–95.

76 V. D. Moray, Bombay CID, to A. Jayaram, 14 Sept. 1948, MEAI/Pak-i Section, F. 26–189/48-Pak i (Secret).

77 See, for instance, the lengthy discussions about whether the permits of Noor Mohamed and Ishaque Khan, two Muslims ‘found’ in Nagpur, were fake or authentic. Ibid.

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81 For the difficulties appellants faced in proving their claims, see any of the 6,000-odd cases fought in the Indian courts; e.g. The State of Mysore v. Abdul Salam on 5 July 1951; or Nazir Hussain v. The State on 13 Dec. 1951, in which the judge described the plaintiff's case as ‘balderdash’.

82 ‘An ordinance to provide for the administration of evacuee property and for certain matters connected therewith’, Ordinance No. xxvii of 1949, Gazette of India, 18 Oct. 1949, MEAI, F. 17–39/49-AFRI.

83 The reasons why India excluded West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura from the evacuee property regime are addressed in Chatterji, The disinherited.

84 Ordinance No. xxvii of 1949.

85 T. H. Marshall, ‘Citizenship and social class’ (1950), reprinted in Manza, J. and Sander, M., eds., Inequality and society (New York, NY, 2009)Google Scholar.

86 Kim, Aliens in medieval law, passim; Caitlin Anderson, ‘Britons abroad, aliens at home: nationality law and policy in Britain, 1815–1870’ (doctoral dissertation, Cambridge, 2004), passim.

87 Pakistan promulgated a central Evacuee Property Ordinance in Oct. 1949. ‘The problem of evacuee property and efforts made to solve it’, MEAI/11(21)/49-Pak iii (Secret).

88 (India) Act XXXXIV of 1954, 9 Oct. 1954.

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