Recovering the ‘Other Side of Silence’: Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 and the refugee versus immigrant...

The concept of citizenship has traditionally been an integral part of the idea of security and entitlement in the nation-state paradigm. The idea of a state as a political community within a given territory is incomplete without an understanding its stakeholders living within it. In its common understanding, citizenship is connected to the idea of complex imagination of and identifying and defining stake holders within this political community through a normative index – which determines who are the citizens and who are not. In its normative sense citizenship is both an inclusive and an exclusive mechanism – which differentiates citizens from aliens. As a concept citizenship is a paradox that creates on the one hand, a hierarchy among the people living within the state and hence inequality and on the other hand claims to create a sense of equality amongst a section of people identified as citizens by making the promise of ‘free and equal membership’ within them. Therefore the concept of citizenship is aimed at creating possibilities and opportunities for some people and deprivation and denial for others who share the same territory.