How does democratic politics construct citizenship? (2023, 10 Marks)
For T. H. Marshall (Citizenship and Social Class, 1950), citizenship is a status held by full members of a community, equal in rights and duties. It is not a natural fact that democracy merely records but an artefact that democratic politics produces and keeps revising across four dimensions: status, rights, participation and identity.
Status: drawing the boundary
- Constitutions and citizenship laws define who belongs and how membership is acquired or lost, a boundary settled through struggle over property, race, gender, religion and migration.
- Niraja Gopal Jayal (Citizenship and Its Discontents, 2013) traces India’s drift from birth-based (jus soli) towards descent-based (jus sanguinis) membership. The 2019 citizenship amendment, the Assam NRC, the Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment upholding Section 6A, and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls (Bihar in 2025, twelve states and UTs from November 2025) keep the boundary politically contested.
Rights: claims become entitlements
- Marshall’s sequence ran from civil rights (18th century) to political (19th) to social (20th), each won with the help of the last.
- Democratic politics converts demands into law: India’s movements turned information (2005), work (2005), forest rights (2006) and food (2013) into justiciable rights.
- Feminists note that the sequence traces the male worker’s path; post-colonial states reversed it, granting universal franchise before secure civil and social rights.
Participation: citizens are made by acting
- Universal franchise treats every adult as exactly equal. Mukulika Banerjee (Why India Votes?, 2014) finds that Indian voters treat voting as an assertion of dignity and equal standing.
- Carole Pateman, following John Stuart Mill, argues that participation is educative: it builds civic capacity rather than presupposing it. Engin F. Isin’s “acts of citizenship” goes further: people constitute themselves as citizens by claiming rights they do not yet hold.
- Elections, scrutiny, impeachment and, in some systems, recall make the status real through accountability.
Identity and difference
- Civic education and shared membership foster belonging.
- Iris Marion Young and Will Kymlicka argue that identical treatment of unequal groups entrenches inequality, so differentiated citizenship (reservation, language rights, autonomy) completes equal citizenship; critics fear it freezes the categories it remedies.
- Partha Chatterjee’s political society adds that many of the post-colonial poor reach the state as populations negotiating claims, not as rights-bearing citizens.
Conclusion
Citizenship is constructed continuously. Democratic politics extends it to new groups and dismantles old exclusions, yet it can also narrow it by redrawing the boundary. Its quality depends on who wins the continuing argument over whom the democratic community is for.