Who Is an Indian?
India houses more democratic citizens than any other country in the world. But for weeks, it has been in the throes of an intense argument over who those citizens should be. The passage of a new citizenship law that treats non-Muslims from three neighboring countries differently from Muslim ones has sparked much outrage. Yet even though this law is new—and arguably the single largest blow to India’s secular character—debates over the country’s religious and ethnic diversity, over how its people should be defined and identified, have been part of India’s history for more than a century. Seventy years on from the implementation of its constitution, a central question continues to vex the country: Who is an Indian?
The circumstances surrounding India’s birth—the partition of British India into two separate countries, India and Pakistan—are well known. The hurried withdrawal of the British Raj, the movement of
