Citizenship and Its Discontents

At the founding of the nation in 1947, India adopted a progressive conception of citizenship. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In a book sure to be controversial, Niraja Jayal considers how the civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also paradoxically undermined by the its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to an inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today has become the case study that no global discussion of democracy and citizenship can afford to ignore.