4 - New Constitutions, New Citizens

Summary

Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the concept of ‘citizen rights’ that were encapsulated within India and Pakistan’s post-Independence constitutions chimed with what many ordinary Indians and Pakistanis at the time believed were their rights as ‘citizens’ to be. When deciding upon citizenship rights, both governments faced the common challenge of having to negotiate dissonance between the agenda that they set from above and the way in which this agenda was interpreted and implemented from below. Rather than assuming that the two countries in constitutional terms moved – inexorably – in separate directions, it draws attention to similarities as well as differences between the processes at work in the decade following Independence, and thus to the degree of interconnectedness that operated despite the upheavals of 1947 in places such as UP and Sindh. In this context, it points to a range of quotidian readings of constitutional rights that emerged alongside more formal expressions of citizenship entitlement in the late 1940s and 1950s.