Keywords

While disposing off a writ petition filed by Assam Public Works, Assam Sanmilit Mahasangha and others, the Supreme Court of India – India’s apex court - ordered that an updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) for the Indian state of Assam be published as per the provisions of the memorandum of understanding that brought an end to the six-year long Assam movement in 1985. It may be noted that the movement keyed to the threefold demand for detection, disenfranchisement and deportation of foreigners, is considered, by all accounts, as one of India’s most popular protests since the civil disobedience movement led by Gandhi in 1942. The Court order set off the massive preparations for updating the NRC under the direct supervision of the Court. More than 50,000 government employees were inducted into the process. Over Rs1600 croresFootnote 1 of public money had been spent. The entire state administration was reported to have come to a standstill. The final NRC released on 31 August 2019 left out the names of as many as 1906,657 persons.

Almost in quick succession, the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2016 was passed in Parliament in December 2019. The Act - known as Citizenship Amendment Act or CAA – and the NRC are closely interconnected in the sense that the latter aimed at re-citizenizing immigrants belonging to certain minority groups and communities on the basis of their religion otherwise decitizenized by the NRC and are facing deportation. The count of ‘minority’ refugees as per the CAA remains restricted to the six communities of the Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Parsis and Buddhists who migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan before 31 December 2014. The absence of Muslims – India’s largest minority – in the list should not escape our notice. The Act seeks to remove the tag of ‘immigrants’ from six religious minorities and provides for their regularization as Indian citizens if they can prove that they (a) have been citizens of the three specified countries prior to their immigration; (b) have migrated to India on or before that date and (c) were forced to migrate from their respective countries for fear of persecution. Their identification as nationals of these countries, as refugees rather than simple migrants, and as minorities being the victims of persecution is essential for their regularization as citizens of India.

What bearing does the striking off of over 1.9 million persons from the NRC have for the evolution of the regimes of citizenship and migration in India? What does this twin process of exclusion and inclusion mean for India’s nationhood? How is the inside of the nation filled with civilizational contents? What is the nature of these contents that go into the making of contemporary citizenship regimes in India?Footnote 2 Do both these trends of de- and re-citizenization signal any paradigm shift in the construction of citizenship in India? On the one hand, State policies are now redirected from exercising ever-stricter border control to cleansing the body politic of those who have already crossed the borders - the ‘infiltrators’- and have been living here. The border is no longer considered as the reliable container of our nation. On the other hand, India is imagined as the ‘natural’ homeland of certain groups and communities so much so that persons belonging to these groups and communities but presently living in other countries have a right to migrate to and settle in India should they face persecution there. The explanation provided by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for exclusion of the Muslims is simple: The members of this community should be treated - not as refugees, but as ‘infiltrators’ – since their migration to India from any of these Islamic or Muslim-majority States is not induced by persecution of any kind – an essential qualification for claiming one’s refugee status as per the international law. Rao, for instance, explains the rationale in greater detail:

Even though Hindus make up a billion of the population, there is no Hindu State in the world. India is the only country with Hindu majority (except smaller Nepal) and the only homeland for adherents of Indic religions (except Buddhists). It goes without saying that it has civilisational responsibility towards adherents to Indic religions. It’s an unfortunate reality that Hindus (which includes Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs as per Explanation – II of article 25) suffer religious persecution in some countries. They naturally look up to India for succour and refuge as they (except Buddhists) have nowhere to go (Rao, 2019:11).

India – Rao reminds us – does not harbour any ‘civilisational responsibility’ whatsoever towards the persecuted minorities of ‘non-Indic’ religions. Christians, Shias, Ahmedias and such other minorities – nevertheless persecuted in the neighbouring countries – as per this line of argument – have the option of seeking refuge and citizenship in any of the Christian or Christian-majority and Islamic countries of the world. Only Hindus have nowhere to go. Nepal has ceased to be a Hindu Kingdom now. BJP in its Election Manifesto (2014) promised: “India shall remain a natural home for persecuted Hindus and they will be welcome to seek refuge here.”

Implicit in this twin move of de- and re-citizenization through NRC and CAA respectively, nation and civilization seem to occupy the same discursive space. While the nation(-state)Footnote 3 is invested with what is described as ‘civilizational responsibility’ in order to be filled with it, civilization correspondingly needs a nation within which it is to be contained and at whose behest the ‘responsibilities’ are to be discharged. Civilization cannot sustain itself unless the nation performs its ‘responsibilities’ towards the civilization.Footnote 4 Nation, in short, is both the living embodiment and the supreme agent of civilization. Let us call a nation that is summoned to perform its civilizational responsibilities, a ‘civilizational nation’.

1 Civilizational Nation

In a paper published in 2011 (Das, 2011: 39–65), I pointed to the travails and roadblocks in India’s search for autonomous nationhood, that is to say, a nationhood that would no longer be bound by its ‘civilizational responsibilities’. Strange but true, India finds it extremely difficult to come to terms with the reality of autonomous nations and states of the post-War world. In the same paper, I tried to identify at least three moments in this long, arduous and unending journey towards autonomous nationhood. These moments, I wrote, are to be taken less as chronological stages of history and more as determinate configurations of forces much in the same sense in which Hegel had used the term in his writings. First, India began her journey post the Independence by defining civilization as a continuum of nation(-states) spreading from West Asia to South East Asia. It makes hardly any difference for a nation if a citizen actually resides in it or in any other nation-state as long as these nation-states are organized within the same civilizational continuum. The second moment is marked by the idea of slowly settling her within the nation even when she is in a religious or ethnic minority there and ensuring her safety and security. Thirdly, the reality of the nation is better recognized insofar as the nations within a civilization are redefined as ‘neighbours’ and not simply as a continuum of substitutable nations and states. In the same paper, I also showed how almost persistent attempts at filling up the inside of the nation with civilizational contents even in the period preceding BJP’s ascension to power at the Centre in 2014 produced only grotesque results. This paper however restricts itself to the period following BJP’s coming to power in 2014.

By all accounts, the coming to power of BJP in 2014 is accompanied by India’s powerful claim to civilizational nationhood. The claim is backed stoutly by its legitimating ideology of Hindutva. The point is not so much that such a claim has never been made before. In a paper published in 2012 – 2 years before BJP came to power, Blarel informs us that Indian diplomats are seen to be increasingly clutching on to civilizational tropes and metaphors and invoking the ‘familiar’ nature of India’s culture “since the last decade” (Blarel, 2012:29). But, the power (‘muscular nature’) that is invested in the making of this claim is of course unprecedented and signifies “a departure” (Ganguly, 2015:10; Vaishnav, 2020). Thus, the shift that is now taking place, according to Macaes is “arguably deeper and more radical” (Macaes, 2020).

By contrast, Amitav Acharya in a recently published paper warns: “...[C]ivilization ...is closely tied to the regime party of the day and therefore should not be taken for granted as a permanent phenomenon’ (Acharya, 2020:144). While summing up a forum of essays Gupta et al. argue that Prime Minister Modi’s ‘foreign policy engagements’ are driven more by his ‘pragmatist’ concerns than by the civilizational imperatives (Gupta et al., 2019:6). In a certain variation of the theme, it is argued that the ‘ideas get formed and acquire traction only under certain conditions’ (Sagar, 2014:255) as much as the exercise of freedom ‘entails bricolage, that is, improvising with influential and institutionalised ideas rather than without them’ (Chatterjee Miller & Estrada, n.d.:5).

In simple terms, the debate on India’s foreign policy and relations seems to have been shuttling between the twin extremes of viewing them essentially as an extension of what is otherwise taken as the ideas and values of Hindu civilization and looking for the leeway that the State extracts while conducting foreign policy and relations without being necessarily constrained by the civilizational imperatives. Viewed thus, the debate is defined in mutually exclusive terms and has hit a stalemate. This paper proposes to break free from the stalemate by way of turning the focus away from how the Hindutva understanding of civilization is governed by the foreign policy imperatives or whether at all, to an understanding of how Hindutva keeps open a variety of alternatives that allows the foreign policy elite what Savarkar calls ‘the mastery over history’ as cited in the epigraph – perhaps the relative freedom of conducting India’s foreign policy and relations. The paper in that sense intends to mark a transition from viewing Hindutva as a closed ideology without allowing any freedom of action in the international affairs to an open one accounting for a range of alternatives and options that may be combined and reassembled in a variety of ways and exercised while lending legitimacy to particular regimes of citizenship and migration. Mastery over history is to be taken not as violent closure of historical options – as is commonly understood, but as keeping each of them open so that it does not constrict one’s freedom of action. The mastery over history lies not in appropriating and ‘monopolising’ history but in finding out if it could provide ‘anything other than the object of textual interpretation’, with its autonomy and ‘featureless plasticity’ (Iser, 1993:ix–xi ff). Savarkar and others had to do it with great effort ‘beyond the power’ of existing interpretations, beyond its given shapes and features. What Iser tells about literature and Literary Anthropology is also true of history in this context:

It [literature] even incorporates into itself the inauthenticity of all the human patterning it features, since it is the only way it can give presence to what otherwise would remain unavailable… If literature reveals that human plasticity is propelled by the drive to gain shape without even imprisoning itself in any of the shapes obtained, clearly it can bring to light a good deal of anthropological makeup (Iser, 1993:xi).

Translated into our context, it first of all implies that history must be restored to its state of plasticity and featurelessness in a way that can obviate the burden of the dominant shapes and features. By the same token, mastery over history also calls for making available all those shapes and features that were hitherto discarded as ‘inauthentic’. Hindutva – more than being a history of closure – is also the history of possibilities, the art of narrating it in a way that keeps open these possibilities.

This paper seeks to understand the complicated nature of the relation of ‘nation’ to ‘civilization’ and vice versa in order to understand the recent shift in the regimes of citizenship and migration as marked by the NRC and CAA mentioned above and most importantly the implications that these relations have for the evolution of official citizenship and migration regime/s in India since the 2010s.

2 Nation’s Civilizational Base

While nation, according to the Hindutva thinking, cannot be empty and vacuous, it requires a determinate body of people with its distinct civilization as its base to grow and flourish in the comity of nations. The interior of the nation will have to be filled with civilization.

2.1 Land and Its People

It is the civilization that hyphenates land to its people. According to Savarkar, the term ‘Hindutva’ is understood to ‘denote all religions of the Hindus under one ancient banner representing a common race and a common civilization’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:95). Significantly the term embraces all ‘those who inhabit the land they adore, the land of whose forefathers is also the land of their Gods and Angels, of seers and Prophets: the scenes of whose history are also the sources of their mythology’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:123). Golwalkar described the land as ‘one natural unit’. As he puts it:

[W]e find that this great country of ours, extending in the north form the Himalayas-with all its branches spreading north, south, east and west, and with the territories included in those great branches-right up to the Southern ocean inclusive of all the islands, is one great natural unit... This society has been living here for thousands of years. This society has been known, especially in modern times, as the Hindu Society (Golwalkar, 1939:108).

How does he propose to establish the link between the ‘land’ and the ‘people’ inhabiting it? First of all, this land is their ‘birth-place, the Matribhu [motherland] and the Pitribhu [fatherland] (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:98). Secondly, they are tied to this land by ‘the blood of the ancient Sindhus [the Indus] and the race that sprang from them in [their] veins’. They, in short, are the ‘descendants of Hindu parents and are of their seed’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:98). The bond of blood is so strong that it is they who ‘shed their blood in defence of the land’s sanctity and integrity (Golwalkar, 1939:108).

The land constitutes a natural unit as much as it is to be treated as ‘a complete whole’. Anyone who has successfully established one’s link with the land one inhabits through the bond of blood can hardly agree to ‘bargain’ it away, let alone ‘mutilate’ and partition it, as was done in 1947. For Golwalkar, the land of the civilization is indivisible:

[H]ave we never heard of children cutting up their mother saying that she is their common property? What depths of depravity! Motherland has verily become an object of bargaining ... The tearing away of the limbs of our mother and the gory blood-bath of millions and millions of our kith and kin is the price that we have paid for that ignoble attitude. Even today the tragedy of Partition has not come to a close. Kashmir has been partitioned. And now it appears Nagaland is well on the way (Golwalkar, 1939 87).

While land as ‘a natural unit’ is elevated into the Hindu territory through the bond of blood, the people inhabiting the land are called upon to successfully preserve its sanctity and integrity. Hindutva’s territorialisation implies this double bonding of blood – the blood of the ancestors of this land that flows into our veins and corpuscles and the blood that must flow out and be shed for its preservation and protection.

2.2 The World Outside

How is the outside world viewed by the philosophers of Hindutva? The world outside, according to them, exists in two concentric circles: while the innermost circle may be defined as the present-day India albeit enclosed by her ‘artificial’ boundaries thanks to the Partition and reorganization of States in the region, the immediate outer circle called ‘Mahabharat’ or ‘Greater India’ points to its civilizational expanse. India must strive for expanding herself beyond her present-day territorial confines to encompass the entire civilizational land expanse. It is the unification of land with civilization that transforms the former into a territory. The outermost circle encompassing the entire earth constitutes her world of mutual exchanges and transactions that will only help enrich her as much as the others.

Savarkar makes a distinction between what he designates as ‘a conceivable expansion of our Hindu people’ and ‘enrichment of the people that inhabit the earth from Pole to Pole’. While expansion involves ‘labour in founding a Greater India, a Mahabharat’, and most significantly no farther, the Hindus ‘wherever they live’ have the abiding obligation of ‘contributing to the best of their capacities all that is best in their civilization to the upbuilding of Humanity’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:206). On the one hand, India, according to him, will not have any colonizing mission beyond its ‘conceivable expansion’, beyond ‘Mahabharat’ – mainly though not exclusively – limited to the neighbouring countries of the Indian subcontinent. The people living in these expanded territories are in essence Hindus and they will therefore be recognized as citizens of Hindustan insofar as they are an organic part of Hindutva and are linked to the land through the bond of blood without having to migrate to the present-day territorial confines of India. “[T]he essentials of Hindutva”, Savarkar reminds us, are “also ideal essentials of nationality” (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:124). Hence, they are ab initio the citizens of Hindustan.

On the other hand, while ‘the first essential of Hindutva is not that a man must not reside in lands outside India’, a Hindu is urged to ‘enrich the people that inhabit the earth with their virtues and let them in return enrich their own country and race by imbibing all that is healthy and true wherever found’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:106). Enrichment, Savarkar tells us, does not imply ‘turning the land [being enriched] into part of Hindustan’ (Maratha/Savarkar, 1923:106). The distinction between expansion and enrichment thus coincides with the one between a potential citizen of Hindustan living in the territory of expansion and a Hindu cultural messenger spreading across the teachings of Hindutva in the rest of the world. The cultural messengers are quintessentially the citizens of Hindustan fanning out to the outside world beyond the expanded area without however any colonial intent of expansion. Thus Hindutva thinking, according to Basrur, hardly speaks of any ‘expansionist perspective’ (Basrur, 2019:8).

2.3 The Unassimilable Other

Territorializiation of Hindutva, according to Savarkar, is possible only through ‘assimilation’ of a host of faiths, groups and communities into one Hindu stream of consciousness. Golwalkar echoes the same point: “Even to this day, the basic life-pattern of many of those people is Hindu. They bear Hindu names. We find so many Hindu faces all over there, proud of their Hindu heritage, even though many of them are now Muslims by religion” (Golwalkar, 2017: 18).

Hindutva thinking distinguishes Hindutva from other Semitic and proselytizing religions insofar as it does not have any ‘single institution at the head of a command structure or a single holy book of doctrinal orders were the very antithesis of Hindu thought’ (Madhok, 2005:6). In simple terms, despite the tolerant nature, there is a limit to how much Hindutva would be able to include within its fold. As Golwalkar cautions against sections of ‘Mohammedan or Christian countrymen’ who, according to him, do not qualify as ‘Hindus’:

It is our misfortune that this all-embracing aspect of our dharma has been lost sight of today.... in the case of some of our Mohammedan or Christian countrymen who had originally been forcibly converted to Non-Hindu religion and who consequently have inherited, along with Hindus, a common Father-land and greater part of the wealth of common culture – language, law, customs. Folklore and history – are not and cannot be recognized as Hindus. For, though Hindusthan to them is Pitribhu as to any other Hindu yet it is not to them a Punyabhu [Holyland] too. Their Holyland is far off in Arabia and Palestine. Their mythology and godmen, ideas and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their names and their outlook smack of foreign origin. Their love is divided (Golwalkar, 2017: 100).

How can one ‘who is intolerant of other faiths’ qualify as a Hindu? Golwalkar has the answer:

He cannot be a Hindu at all who is intolerant of other faiths. But the question before us now is, what is the attitude of those people who have been converted to Islam or Christianity? They are born in this land, no doubt. But are they true to their salt? (Golwalkar, 2017:110-11).

He blames the creation of Pakistan on our leaders’ ineptitude, the Hindus themselves who lack the ‘race-spirit’ (Golwalkar, 1939:48) and ‘the Muslim desire of domination’ (Golwalkar, 1939: 149), notwithstanding that the death-knell of their Kingdoms was sounded across the globe. The followers of the Semitic religions, according to this line of argument, are not the natural citizens of Hindustan unless proven otherwise through assimilation. They must offer the proof of their assimilation. Civilizational citizenship is predicated on the thick distinction between the already assimilated and the yet unassimilated – but potentially assimilable - on the one hand and the obstinate and the permanently unassimilable on the other.

Hindutva thinking defines the world in binary terms: One is either a Hindu or one is not. Hindutva thinking, in its classical form, thus rules out any category of minorities who want to be recognized as an entity separate from the Hindus with a claim to some form of autonomy whether from within India or without. The concept is held as preposterous on two counts: For one thing, the creation of special provisions in the Constitution has only ‘hardened’ their resolve towards separatism thereby ‘turning them into a dreadful source of disruption of our body-politic’ (Golwalkar, 1939:133). Any assertion of their status as a minority could only be a threat to the sanctity and integrity of the nation. On the other hand, emboldened by their instance, many fringe groups earlier recognized as Hindu are now ‘vying between themselves’ for these loaves and fishes of these special provisions by declaring them as ‘non-Hindus’ (Golwalkar, 1939:97). The concept of citizenship, unlike what the multiculturalists would have us believe, does not account for any graded definition of citizenship. Either one is assimilated or one is not. The binary between them squares with that between a citizen and a non-citizen. A nation cannot contain the minorities within itself. A nation that contains them is a contradiction in terms and is destined to destroy itself.

3 Nationalizing Civilization

While civilization constitutes the base of a nation and draws from it, much of today’s tragedy – according to the philosophers of Hindutva – lies in the Hindus’ inability to organize their great civilization into a nation. As Golwalkar reminds us:

To our mind, that is the genesis of the present day ignorance of true Nationality. The same ignorance, the same lack of the National sentiment of the right sort, is the root of our troubles. All through the centuries, since the Moslems first tread upon this land, it is this want of National Consciousness, which has been the cause of our ills (Golwalkar, 1939:125–6).

It is the civilization that thinks through the nation. What happens to the civilization when the nation abdicates its ‘civilizational responsibilities’? Who is to be blamed for this? In a spirit of self-criticism, he observes:

So we say that it is no use cursing the external aggressors as being responsible for our degeneration and destruction. After all it is in the nature of predatory nations to overrun, plunder and destroy other weaker countries. If a serpent bites a person, that is not its fault. That is in its very nature. The fault lies with the person who does not exercise caution and protect himself against the possible attack. Unfortunately, during the last one thousand years of our history, even after repeated experiences of disgraces and disasters, we failed to learn the basic lesson that we alone are responsible for our downfall and unless we eradicate that fatal weakness from ourselves we cannot hope to survive as a nation (Golwalkar, 1939:171).

How do we nationalize the Hindu civilization? How is a civilization of thousands of years to be contained within a modern nation? Nations in history are much younger than the Hindu civilization. By all accounts, their emergence in Europe is not more than 400 years old. While it is important for the Hindus to brush off ignorance and ‘the ashes of self-forgetfulness’, it is also important to inculcate within them what Golwalkar calls ‘a bitter sense of wrong invoking a power of undying resistance especially in India that had under the opiates of Universalism and Non-violence, lost the faculty even of resisting sin and crime and aggression’. All that we share with our ‘foes’ and is common with them only weakens us and we need to ‘cut off even a semblance of a common worship – a common church, which required her to clasp the hand of those as her co-religionists who had been the very hand that had strangled her as a nation’ (Golwalkar, 1939: 22).

3.1 Assimilation/Liberation

It appears that the unassimilated others who also do not have the will to assimilate into the Hindu civilization are trapped as it were within a land that does not belong to them. Insofar as the link of the people with their land is inextricably established through the bond of blood, the contours of the land they inhabit are both given and unalterable even if it exists only in imagination. Partition and the consequent reorganization of international borders are thus rendered ‘artificial’ and are considered to be in need of being done away with and corrected. As Golwalkar observes:

The first and most cruel blow to the professions of ‘One country, One Nation’ was dealt by the acceptance of the unhappy partition of our mother - Bharatabhoomi. It meant an acknowledgement that the Muslims formed a distinct and antagonistic national community, which had been tied down to live in this land with the Hindu Nation and which won for itself a distinct state by vivisection of the country in which they had originally come as invader and where they had been trying to settle down as conquerors (Golwalkar, 1939:178).

What options are we left with? One option is to force them to assimilate, if they refuse to. If they do not assimilate they must be forced to do so much in the same way as Rousseau would have the people preferring to stay back in the state of nature join the civil or political society and become free. While ‘reunification with Bharat’ is the only answer to right the historical wrong of Partition, forcing them to assimilate into ‘the single, democratic and unified Bharat’, according to Golwalkar, is the only way to ‘liberate’ them.

Emigrants have to get themselves naturally assimilated in the principal mass of population, the National Race, by adopting its culture and language and sharing in its aspirations, by losing all consciousness of their separate existence, forgetting their foreign origin (Golwalkar, 1939:103–4).

Assimilation, in other words, is not a matter of choice, but a necessity for them if they were to live within Hindutva’s civilizational land expanse. One should not miss the point that assimilation must be preceded by a complete erasure of their past separate existence and fullest deculturation that does not leave any residue of their past separate identity.

3.2 Deferred War of Civilizations

The other option is to take lessons from history and prepare for the inevitable war with them. Invoking Huntington’s famous essay on ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Balraj Madhok argues:

. . . the Muslim problem has once again become the biggest threat to peace, unity and security of our country. It is unfortunate that in spite of this long bitter experience the political leaders, historians and opinion makers of Hindu India have failed to learn the lessons of history and educate the people about the real character of Islam and its fundamentals. As a result India may have to face a new and may be still bloodier civilisational conflict with Islam along with the rest of the world in the days to come (Madhok, 2005:5).

The anxiety shared by the philosophers of Hindutva is that we need to learn lessons from history before we are overtaken by it. Remember Savarkar who advises us to learn from history in order to exercise mastery over it. History does not allow us to exercise mastery over it on its own. One has to do it by restoring to history its plasticity and featurelessness. A war at home, according to Madhok, has the potential of aligning the existing nations and states along civilizational fault lines and involving many others.

4 Citizenship Regimes

Unlike most others who prefer to view Hindutva as a closed philosophy, this chapter traces the elements of openness and plasticity within it that allow the political elite albeit relative freedom of making policies and putting in place regimes of migration by combining and reassembling them in a variety of ways. Our task in the chapter was to prise open the possibilities that the Hindutva thinking offers to the policy making elite and sets in motion different regimes of citizenship and migration.

As one carefully sifts through the pages of Hindutva writings, one can identify the elements that may be put together and reassembled in a variety of ways to bring a variety of regimes of citizenship and migration into existence in India. First of all, we have a relatively small cluster of citizens who by virtue of their bond of blood with the Hindu civilization and living within the present territory of India are the real custodians of citizenship. Citizenship, unlike the commonplace Western Theories, is more a duty than a right in this line of thinking. For, it implies that one feels at one with the civilization and defends it, if necessary, with blood and ‘cutting off even the semblance of commonness with the foes’. The citizen’s relation to the civilization-nation-state continuum is by no means contractual. It is affective.

Secondly, we may refer to those who do not live within the present territory of India but are tied to the wider land of the immediate outer circle that represents the Hindu civilization through their bond of blood. They are the potential citizens of India compelled to live in a foreign country thanks to the ‘artificial’ Partition of the land. While ‘reunification’ of this land and restoring it as ‘a complete whole’ is the only way to their entitlement to citizenship in India, India has the twofold obligation of protecting their interests in their respective countries and letting them migrate to the partitioned and ‘truncated’ India pending the reunification of their land.

Thirdly, while the first two clusters may be called citizenship by blood and will double up as cultural messengers of Hindutva to the outside world, we may refer to another cluster of citizens who are not tied to the land by their bond of blood but whose entitlement is contingent on their successful fulfilment of the obligation of ‘assimilation’ and coupled with it the complete erasure of their separate and distinctive identity. If they do not assimilate on their own volition, they must be forced to do so. In short, their citizenship entitlement will have to be earned by their unconditional assimilation into the Hindu civilization. This is the new category of citizenship by assimilation that the philosophers of Hindutva have introduced to the vocabulary of citizenship.

Fourthly, there will be a remainder of people who are neither tied to the land and its civilization through their bond of blood nor through complete assimilation. They must be offered a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ option in the sense that they will have to be forced to assimilate, if necessary, by risking a war involving the respective civilizational allies. They will be stripped of their citizenship status and rendered stateless insofar as they are left here and have nowhere to go.

Any particular regime of citizenship and migration under the current political dispensation involves a variation in the assemblage of the above elements. But the policy making elite is not entirely free to effect the variations in the way it likes. The freedom it enjoys is limited by ‘the high costs that any conflict imposes by strategic and economic interdependence in the world’ (Basrur, 2017:14) and by the alternative understanding of civilizational values propounded by ‘other intellectuals and civil society actors’ (Hall, 2019:12). Thus to cite an instance, even the idea of Mahabharat has drawn what Basrur calls, ‘little interest from contemporary votaries of Hindutva’. In December 2015, when Ram Madhav, the general secretary of BJP, made public reference to it, his colleagues in the Party took no time ‘to downplay it’. (Basrur, 2017:8). Pending the accomplishment of Mahabharat, the persecuted minorities of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan have a right to migrate to and settle in present-day India. India will be the natural sanctuary of the persecuted minorities in these neighbouring countries. While NRC threatens to take away citizenship from certain sections of the people living in India, CAA offers the mechanism of regularizing some of them as citizens. Once the final goal of Mahabharat is accomplished, they will feel safe and will not be subjected to persecution as they are now and will not have to migrate to India in order to become Indian citizens. The limited scope of this paper does not allow us to delve into the technologies of combination and re-assemblage of the elements mentioned above and how these elements are governmentalized into regimes of citizenship and migration and with what effects. Hindutva, as I argue in this paper, is not a closed philosophy.