When the Citizenship Amendment Bill was being debated in Parliament, members belonging to the AIADMK lent their support to the Centre. They echoed the government’s stance that the bill was not against minorities. The Tamil Nadu chief minister said that his government would urge the Centre to give dual citizenship to Sri Lankan refugees. This is impractical.
New Delhi has made it clear that no Indian citizen can hold the citizenship of any other country. When they acquire the citizenship of any foreign nation, they are required to surrender their Indian citizenship. Answering a question posed by Karti Chidambaram in the Lok Sabha on 9 February 2021, the Union minister of state for home affairs provided details of Indians who gave up their Indian passport and took up citizenship of foreign countries. Between 2015 and 2019, they numbered 6,76,074. The reverse is also true. The minuscule number of foreigners who have become Indian citizens had to surrender the citizenship of their native country.
The Constitution of India provides for the acquisition of Indian citizenship in five ways: 1) birth; 2) descent; 3) registration; 4) naturalisation; and 5) incorporation of new territory. In 1955, the Indian Citizenship Act was enacted for its acquisition and termination. Indian citizenship was also conferred by bilateral agreements, for example, the India-Sri Lanka Agreements of 1964 and 1974 under which 6,00,000 people of Indian origin, plus their natural increase, were to be conferred citizenship here, whereas Sri Lanka would confer citizenship on 3,75,000 stateless persons plus their natural increase.
An important point should be highlighted. In the Constituent Assembly, both Dr Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru emphatically maintained that the Constitution would not provide for dual citizenship. Equally important, India has had to face problems posed by displaced persons from Pakistan and, in later years, refugees from Tibet, East Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Burma (Rohingyas). Though New Delhi had not ratified the UNHCR Convention on the Refugees nor had it enacted a national refugee law, its treatment of refugees, barring solitary exceptions, had been exemplary.
After the tragic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the then TN government wanted to deport Sri Lankan refugees. This arbitrary action was severely criticised by international human rights organisations. New Delhi came out of embarrassment only when the then prime minister Narasimha Rao permitted the UNHCR to open an office in Chennai to certify the “voluntariness” of repatriation. This arrangement is working very smoothly.
Why is New Delhi opposed to the concept of dual citizenship? Citizenship implies loyalty to the country; dual citizenship implies dual loyalty. In crises, it may place the dual citizens in a vulnerable position. Suppose India and Sri Lanka agree to introduce dual citizenship on a reciprocal basis, the loyalty of Sri Lankan Tamils would always be suspect. The Sinhalese ruling elite does not view the Tamils as a minority, but as an integral part of 70 million Tamils in Tamil Nadu. This perception has given rise to the “minority complex of the majority community”, which has led to many acts of discrimination and anti-Tamil riots. It should be added that the “Overseas Indian Citizenship” that New Delhi introduced a few years ago is not citizenship, because the OICs have no right to vote.
Instead of demanding dual citizenship, the Government of Tamil Nadu and major political parties should request New Delhi to confer Indian citizenship on refugees who want to remain here. The majority of refugees have been living in Tamil Nadu since the early 1990s and they fulfil the residential qualifications required for citizenship under naturalisation.
There are two major obstacles in their way. The first is the circular issued by the Central government in 1983 that Sri Lankan refugees are not entitled to Indian citizenship. Tamil Nadu should demand that this circular should be immediately withdrawn. Second, since the refugees came to Tamil Nadu without travel documents, they are treated as illegal immigrants. Tamil Nadu should demand that they should be treated on par with the refugees who came from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh under the Citizenship Amendment Act.
It must be highlighted that in the landmark judgment delivered on 17 June 2019, Justice G R Swaminathan of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court had instructed the Government of India to consider the applications by the refugees for conferment of Indian citizenship immediately.
According to the home ministry, refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan were subjected to religious persecution, whereas Sri Lankan Tamils came to India due to ethnic discrimination. This distinction is shallow. Ethnicity includes religion too and the Hindus have been subjected to religious persecution. According to devout Hindus, nearly 200 temples have been desecrated since independence and a Hindu priest was burnt alive in Lanka’s Northern Province. Tamil Nadu should unanimously request New Delhi not to single out Tamils, most of them Hindus, for discrimination.
I have been interacting with refugees on several occasions. Most of them want to acquire Indian citizenship. The Tamil refugees are willing to surrender their Sri Lankan citizenship once a favourable decision is taken. As far as the 29,500 Indian-origin Tamils are concerned, almost all of them are stateless; what is more, the decision to confer citizenship on them was taken by Colombo only in 2003, long after they sought asylum in India. And with power concentrated in the hands of the Rajapaksa brothers, prospects of ethnic reconciliation are very bleak.
V Suryanarayan
Senior Professor (Retd), Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras
(The author was the Founding Director of the Centre in the University of Madras)
(suryageeth@gmail.com)