Last month, some maternity wards in the United States reportedly had a string of odd requests from Indian couples who were expecting babies. The expectant mothers wanted to have cesarean sections to ensure that their babies were born prematurely.

Their requests had been triggered by US President Donald Trump’s announcement that “birthright citizenship” would be terminated on February 20. This provision, introduced under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, grants citizenship to all persons born in the United States. But Trump said that children born to parents who are on temporary visas or who are undocumented would not automatically become citizens.

Some Indians, it seems, were hoping to C-section their way around this.

Trump’s order has since been put on hold by two federal judges. But for expectant parents in the categories he mentioned, birthright citizenship allows them a direct shot at citizenship – through a child born in America.

Already, the US has started deporting undocumented Indians. On February 6, a US military plane landed in Amritsar with 104 undocumented Indian migrants in shackles. Many of them arrived in the US having paid significant sums of money to agents, often taking risky routes.

Ironically, despite the precarious immigration status of approximately 725,00 members of the community, many Indians in the US participated in enthusiastic rallies to express their support for India’s pernicious Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019.

Both Trump’s order and the Citizenship Amendment Act aim to alter the nature of citizenship. In the US, Trump aims to switch the basis of American citizenship from jus soli (birth) to jus sanguinis (descent or nationality of the parents). In India, the Citizenship Amendment Act weaves discrimination against Muslims into citizenship law.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act offers a fast track to Indian citizenship for all persecuted minorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – except if they are Muslim. By discriminating against Muslims, the act undermines India’s constitutional commitment to the basic principle of secularism.

The Citizenship Amendment Act defines an “illegal migrant” as someone who enters India without valid papers or stays in the country beyond the duration of their visa. It states that such a person cannot register for citizenship or become a citizen by naturalisation or staying continuously in India.

In 2003, an amendment to the Citizenship Act also mandated the creation of a National Register of Citizens to identify non-citizens and ensure that they were deported. In Assam, a National Register of Citizens was first compiled in 1951. When an updated version of the register was published in 2019, it left over 1.9 million people potentially stateless.

Operating in parallel to the National Register of Citizens in Assam are the quasi-judicial tribunals tasked with declaring citizens as foreign nationals. The process the tribunals follow to make such determinations rests on an idea of belonging that is entirely dependent on the biases of the majority community and on ethnic targeting.

Many Indians – Bengali-speaking Muslims, in particular – have been sent to detention centres or live with social boycotts and shame after being marked as foreigners by tribunals. From 2014, scores have died by suicide as a result of this process, unable to bear the trauma of being stripped of their citizenship and dignity.

An Assam government circular to the border police last year demonstrated how religious distinctions and exceptions have found way into Indian citizenship practice. The memo asked the police not to directly refer cases to Foreigners Tribunals cases of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis or Christians who had entered India without the necessary documents before the end of 2014.

Instead of prosecuting them, the police were told to advise these people to apply for citizenship on the Citizenship Amendment Act portal.

Conditional citizenship

India’s Bengali Muslims fit into the category that Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami identifies in the US as “conditional citizens” – those whose “rights are expendable” and who are “policed and punished more harshly”, who are “not guaranteed the same electoral representation” and who are more likely to be “expatriated or denaturalised”.

The conditionality of such citizens, Lalami notes, is “at least partly determined by the colour of their skin, the nature of their creed, their gender identity, or their national origin”.

She writes about Trump’s proclamation in 2017 during his first stint in office that banned all nationals of Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen from entering the US – essentially codifying the conditional citizenship of American Muslims from these countries into law. That ban affected not just people from these countries wanting to visit the US but also hurt many Americans

“A Yemeni-American in New York can no longer bring a relative to the city for medical treatment, but a Portuguese-American can,” Lalami observed. “...An Iranian-American in Los Angeles can no longer sponsor his mother for a visa, but a German-American can.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has already sued the Trump administration after his proclamation to end birthright citizenship. The unconstitutional order will put newborns in harm’s way by denying them healthcare and nutrition, the organisation said.

It echoes a cruelty that India has witnessed in Assam and led to the creation of what the ACLU calls a permanent subclass of people who are being denied of their full rights.

Such a subclass can be found in India too. In Assam, approximately 1.2 lakh people have been categorised as “D voters or “Doubtful voters” and their voting rights have been taken away because they lack proper documents. Even if their names are eventually cleared, the stigma remains.

Another category of people in Assam living in limbo are those whose names have been left out of the National Register of Citizens but have not yet been served a notice to challenge that decision.

Finally, there are “Declared Foreign Nationals” whose Aadhar identities have been frozen. This prevents them from accessing basic benefits, essentially committing them to a form of digital incarceration.

In the US, the American Civil Liberties Union has contended that Trump’s order will “stigmatise and send a message of exclusion” to many “who will have their citizenship questioned because of their race or who their parents are”.

It is not difficult to see the cruelty of Indian citizenship practices in Assam playing out in that statement.

Suraj Gogoi teaches at IIM Kozhikode. Arijit Sen is an independent journalist.