Experimenting with Diasporic Incorporation: The Overseas Citizenship of India

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Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 17:34–53, 2011Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1353-7113 print / 1557-2986 onlineDOI: 10.1080/13537113.2011.550545

Experimenting with Diasporic Incorporation:The Overseas Citizenship of India

CONSTANTINO XAVIERJohns Hopkins University

In response to economic needs after the 1991 reforms, India insti-tuted a diaspora policy that extracted emigrants’ material wealth inexchange for cultural capital. Increasingly caught between mount-ing diasporic demands for the extension of dual citizenship anddomestic apprehensions hostile to such a provision, the Indian gov-ernment was forced to compromise by creating the Overseas Citi-zenship of India. This article argues that, beyond mere contingencyand dependence on the existing repertoire of national membership,this novel form of limited citizenship is also the result of a deliber-ate governmental strategy to assuage more activist segments of thediaspora.

An increasing number of states have recently adopted a range of “diasporapolicies.”1 As a government strategy, these policies have specific mechanismsthat empower states to reach out to populations abroad that are seen as beingculturally part of or historically related to the nation. While the specific natureand scope of these policies vary, they all aspire to inclusively demarcate anddesignate these extraterritorial populations, as well as to incorporate them ineconomic, cultural, and political terms. In a broad definition, Laurie Brandidentifies these processes as including

policies and practices of the home state in any arena—legal, political,economic, cultural, religious—that deliberately affect or target some as-pect of its expatriates’ lives. This should also be construed as policiespotentially affecting dual citizens, former nationals, and even those ofthe second or third generation who are not citizens, but remain of inter-est to the country of origin.2

Address correspondence to Constantino Xavier, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS SouthAsian Studies, 1740 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. E-mail: [email protected]

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The Overseas Citizenship of India 35

In his detailed study, Alan Gamlen observes that such policies are imple-mented fairly extensively in at least 15 countries, and to varying degreesin almost 60 others, spread across all continents and income strata.3 Fu-elling these efforts to redefine the nation and to reach out to current andformer citizens residing abroad is certainly the unprecedented global scaleof migration patterns that emerged over the last decades. The economicfactor, however, emerges as the central motive, reflecting states’ increas-ing need to compete for and diversify sources of foreign investment, con-sumer markets, and knowledge. Diasporas are now recognized by statesas an asset, playing not only a crucial role as “agents of change,” notablyby “injecting new ideas and resources that can catalyze progress in oth-erwise stagnant economies,” but also as facilitators, helping their home-land countries to breach the global economy.4 For developing countriesengaged in economic state-building, in particular, diaspora policies are in-creasingly adopted to “(re)incorporate emigrants” by “extracting material re-sources from them,” for example, through the inflow of remittances, whichfacilitate “structural insertion in the world economy.”5 This is further in-dicated by the fact that, as illustrated in the cases of China and Mexico,such policies tend to emerge in parallel to neoliberal economic adjustmentprocesses.6

This article proposes a closer evaluation of one particular case (India)and one specific dimension (citizenship or political membership) of thisnexus. In 2003, the Government of India instituted the Overseas Citizenshipof India (OCI) for a large part of its diaspora that holds foreign citizenships.By dissecting the origins and specific nature of the OCI and embedding itwithin the specific historical context of the Indian state-diaspora relationship,this article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of how states operatewith citizenship in a transnational context.

The article is organized in seven sections. The first section reviews thetheoretical debates about the changing nature of citizenship and argues forthe need to recast the role of the state in that process. The second sectionoffers a brief overview on the various segments of the Indian diaspora andthe historical development of India’s diaspora policy. Section three then pro-ceeds to interpret the emergence of the policy as the result of a symbiotic(albeit state-led) relationship between the government’s need for financialcapital and the diasporic quest for recognition from, and attachment to, thehomeland. The fourth section argues that this “economy,” in which financialand cultural capital are actively traded, led to an asymmetric incorporationof the noncitizen emigrants, which led its more activist segments to claimthe right to dual citizenship and formal political incorporation. In the faceof these demands and domestic opposition, sections five and six respec-tively analyze the motivations and motivations to the government’s decisionto opt for a compromise solution in the form of the OCI. Section sevenmakes the concluding argument that the ambiguous and innovative nature


36 C. Xavier

of the OCI reflects a deliberate governmental strategy to appease diasporicdemands.

CITIZENSHIP AND THE POLITICS OF EXTRATERRITORIALINCORPORATION

Scholars have explored different definitions of citizenship. Kymlicka andYoung proposed the notion of “multicultural citizenship” as a culturally dif-ferentiated citizenship.7 Murphy and Harty develop the concept of “post-sovereign citizenship” as a compromise with the demands of substate abo-riginal or secessionist groups8. Beaud has focused on the ways federal andstate citizenship overlap, coexist and interact.9 Bowden, He, and Hendersonand Ikeda have studied the nascent idea of “world citizenship,” in line withthe increasing body of law emanating from the supranational level.10 Froman historical point of view, Tilly recalls that early French postrevolutionarycitizenship was defined incrementally according to fiscal contributions, thusdistinguishing primary active from secondary passive citizens.11

This diverse research agenda tends to converge around the premise thatpresent definitions of citizenship are “notoriously conservative.”12 From theepistemological point of view, methodological tools to study the conceptare outdated, leading to an increasing “divergence of the theoretical formof membership and its substantive content.”13 The dominant idea of citizen-ship, emanating from legal understandings, as being intimately tied to theterritory and imagination of the nation-state emerges as “rather archaic” andis therefore increasingly “called into question.”14 Fox reminds us that since“something is going on across borders that requires new conceptual cate-gories,” there is, therefore, a fundamental need to engage in “rethinking andreconceptualization of citizenship practices and subjectivity.”15 This task hasbeen occupying a variety of scholars for several years now.

Our specific concern, however, is the possible role of the state itselfin fostering these dynamics of change, a lesser-explored research path. Byseeking to uncover the state’s complicity in the reconfiguration process ofcitizenship, this article follows a line of inquiry most notably developed byAihwa Ong and her observation that, as a result of the cultural logics or ef-fects of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement, states are forced torespond opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions, there-fore encouraging increasingly flexible forms of citizenship.16 In this per-spective, global forces are “engendering a body of law, self-generating andself-regulating, which originates through the legislative or deliberative activ-ity of national legislators and their executives,” and which, in turn, leads tothe seemingly paradoxical process by which “sovereign states often nurtureand guide the very transformations which appear to curtail or limit their ownpowers.”17



This theoretical premise is of particular importance to this study’s fo-cus on the Indian politics of extraterritorial incorporation, in that diasporapolicies offer a privileged terrain to observe the emergence of new formsof membership.18 According to Brand, the state-diaspora nexus thus offers aparticularly favorable context to understand “under what conditions a state[may] . . . assert, reassert or reconfigure the nature of its relationship with . . .those who are no longer citizens but may still identify culturally or sociallywith the original home country.”19 This is also a promising line of inquirybecause the highly modern and legal concept of a territorially based citizen-ship seems to be unable to satisfy both the increasingly flexible state and itstransnational population. States are often sympathetic to the idea of using theextension of citizenship as a tradeoff to guarantee access to their diasporas’economic and political value: Extending the nation to formally incorporatethose who once belonged to it (or their descendants) seems to be a fair priceto pay for their capital, investments, know-how, and political influence. Atthe same time, however, these states often face significant domestic oppo-sition to extending citizenship to people beyond its territorial control. Thisreluctance may be rooted in security considerations and the costs of consularprotection, the fear of diasporic intervention in domestic politics, the lackof monopoly of violence beyond the territorial borders, and also diplomaticcalculi that perceive citizenship extension as a hostile encroachment on thehost-states’ sovereignty.20

In order to overcome such a dilemma, states can therefore be expectedto have significant incentives to reconsider the utility of the traditional con-cept of citizenship as representing an indivisible and territorially demarcatedbundle of rights and to foster change by downgrading existing or experi-menting with new limited forms of extraterritorial membership. This is thepremise under consideration in our Indian case study.

INDIA AND THE DIASPORA ACROSS TIME

According to various estimates, the Indian diaspora today includes between20 and 25 million people, slightly more than 2 percent of India’s residentpopulation, but comparatively one of the largest diasporas in the contem-porary world.21 This community (generally referred to as Overseas Indians)includes two different populations: Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) whohold a foreign citizenship and Nonresident Indians (NRIs) who are Indiancitizens that reside outside India.

PIO populations can be divided into two distinct segments. The “olderdiaspora” includes the descendants of an estimated 27 million Indians whomigrated between 1840 and 1930, most of which as indentured laborersto British plantations in the Southern Hemisphere, including also around5 percent as free commercial migrants, also known as “passenger Indians.”22


38 C. Xavier

Today, these PIOs total more than ten million and are the majority or pre-dominant ethnic group in Mauritius, Guyana, and Fiji. A second segmentincludes all those who left India after independence (and their descendants),especially after the United States (1965), Canada, and the United Kingdom(both in 1968) liberalized their immigration policies. After adopting local cit-izenship, these migrants and their descendants rose to become one of themost politically influential and affluent sections of the diaspora.23

On the other hand, the NRI diaspora can also be divided into twosegments. The first includes temporary and low-skilled migrants in the MiddleEast; a flow that started with the “oil boom” there in the 1970s. Originatingpredominantly from South India, their total number in the six countries ofthe Gulf Cooperation Council rose from a few thousands in the 1960s tomore than four million today, making it the region with the largest numberof expatriate Indian citizens. The other NRI segment includes those engagedin the highly mobile and global information technology (IT) workforce. Thiscommunity expanded in the 1990s as a result of the developed countries’ newdemand for high-skilled knowledge workers. By 2000, close to 5 percent ofIndians with tertiary education chose to emigrate annually, and by 2003 Indiahad the third-largest highly skilled foreign-born workforce in the EuropeanUnion (EU).24 These outflows were complemented by the increasing numberof Indians pursuing higher education abroad.25

How did India relate to this immense community of Overseas Indians,including various different generations and socioeconomic classes of PIOsand NRIs spread across five continents? There are four distinct phases of thediaspora policy. In the first phase, during the freedom struggle and up toindependence in 1947, the Indian leadership associated itself intimately withthe diaspora, then composed mainly of indentured laborers in other Britishcolonies. Inspired by the Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle in South Africa, duringa visit to Malaya, in 1937, Nehru even underlined the symbiotic nature ofhomeland-diaspora relations: “The aim of the people of India is the achieve-ment of freedom and the future of Indians abroad depends on the future ofIndia.”26

With independence came a radical shift and the second phase. Caughtup abruptly within Realpolitik considerations, Nehru shifted from an inclusivejus sanguinis policy to an exclusive jus soli definition of the nation. Thisconstruction was reflected in the Constituent Assembly’s choice to explicitlyrefuse the right of dual citizenship. Nehru frequently urged Overseas Indiansto forget about India and to integrate as well and fast as possible: “Ourdefinite instructions to them [Indians in Africa] . . . are that they must alwaysput the interest of the indigenous populations first. We want to have novested interests at the expense of the population of those countries.”27

The third phase, from the 1970s to the 1990s, saw a progressive rap-prochement on the economic level, in tandem with India’s reforms andrecognition of the diaspora’s economic potential, especially in the Gulf, the



United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (USA). Following the oil boom,the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) tailored a set of economic and financialmechanisms to attract the inflow of NRI remittances from the Middle East,while in the 1980s Rajiv Gandhi’s reformist agenda courted the newer NRIdiaspora as a pillar for the “new liberal economy.” This relatively ad hoceconomic exploration of the diaspora finally reached its apex in the 1990s,after the beginning of the reforms period.

The final phase began after 2000, with the policy’s institutionalizationat various levels. This was indicated by the creation of a separate DiasporaDivision in the Ministry of External Affairs (2000), the appointment of aHigh Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora that produced an extensivereport and policy recommendations (2001), the organization of an annualconvention (Bharatiya Pravasi Divas, [PBD] since 2003), and finally by theinstitution of the Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA, in 2004) and ofthe new OCI scheme (in 2003).

THE TACIT ECONOMY: TRADING CULTURALFOR FINANCIAL CAPITAL

What drives the relationship between the Indian government and the Over-seas Indians? The above summary of the different phases of the policy sug-gests that New Delhi’s interest varied according to the relative value of thediaspora to national interests, be they political, as during the independencestruggle, or economic, as from the 1970s.

This would explain why the policy’s third phase started precisely as In-dia began to liberalize its economy and then accelerated in parallel to furtherreformist impetuses in the 1990s. New Delhi’s “rediscovery” also coincidedwith the emergence of the “newer” and more prosperous diaspora in theWestern countries, as well as with the beginning of the remittance influxfrom the Middle East. During the 1970s oil boom, for example, the RBI tai-lored a set of economic and financial mechanisms to attract specifically theinflow of foreign exchange deposits originating from that region.28 Duringthe brief reformist period under the leadership of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi(1984–1989), the focus changed to the small- and medium-scale Indian busi-nesses and highly skilled professionals who had prospered in North Americaand Europe and were thus targeted for their foreign exchange, investments,and expertise, all of which played a crucial role in setting the foundations ofIndia’s information technologies boom in the 1990s. When foreign investorsfled following the balance of payments crisis in 1990–1991, the govern-ment floated India Development Bonds (IDB) to tap NRI funds. From US$290 million in 1990–1991, NRI inflows surged to almost US$ two billion in1992–1993.29 And just a few weeks after the nuclear tests of May 1998—whichdrew international sanctions, turbulence in the financial markets, and decline


40 C. Xavier

in the Indian stock markets, the rupee exchange rate, and the sovereigncredit rating—the government appealed once again opportunistically to thediaspora, launching the Resurgent India Bond (RIB). Overseas Indians re-sponded en masse and contributed with US$ 4.2 billion. New Delhi repeatedthe formula for a third and last time in 2000, with the India MillenniumDeposit, which fetched another US$ 5.5 billion in foreign exchange.30

To achieve its economic objectives, the Indian government now did nothesitate to discriminate in favor of Overseas Indians. The most symbolicexample is the new NRI status in terms of economic rights, as created anddefined during the 1970s and subsequently extended in the 1990s by theMinistry of Commerce. Fiscal, investment, and banking benefits were notonly extended to NRIs but also to PIOs, often effectively putting citizens andnoncitizens (of Indian origin) at parity in terms of economic rights.31 Such agenerously inclusive definition of the NRI status served the Indian govern-ment’s objective to attract diasporic FDI into India, extending incentives alsoto a larger number of potential investors from the PIO segments that hadonly recently given up their Indian citizenship.32

On the diasporic side, what factors encouraged the NRIs and PIOs torespond to the government’s economic appeal, especially after the 1990s?Little doubt remains that, at least for some of the more entrepreneurial di-asporics, postreform India offered exciting opportunities as a high-growthmarket. Also, at least for more recent migrants, both NRIs and PIOs, attach-ment to family relatives and birthplaces, as well as the prospect of return,often served as added incentives to embrace New Delhi’s economic bondingmechanisms. However, a set of three different ideational and cultural mo-tives seem to have played a facilitating if not central role in this emergingstate-diaspora collaboration.

First, more recent generations of NRIs often experienced a profoundsense of debt due to the educational capital they had acquired in Indiaprior to emigration, which was exacerbated by a feeling of guilt for havingexcelled materially abroad, as well as by the moral obligation to “give back.”A large percentage of Overseas Indians who migrated during the more recentwaves were availed of an elite education at public institutions. Most of thesemigrants eventually remained abroad, adopted a foreign citizenship, andnow cling to the “myth of return,” perpetually seeking to trade off physicalreincorporation for long-distance economic collaboration, mostly in the formof massive philanthropic investments.33

Second, especially among the more recent generations of Indian immi-grants, there has been a shift towards greater public assertiveness of theircultural and religious differences. Unlike the first generations of migrants,focused on achieving economic success, younger generations of diasporicIndians now recognize their ethnicity “as a resource.”34 Multiculturalism inWestern societies encouraged many to shift from private invisibility to publicvisibility strategies, and from the self-perception of a precarious and defen-sive immigrant to one of a permanently settled and proactive diasporic.35



Dissatisfied with mere recognition, often emboldened by their successfulexperience with positive discrimination, increasingly institutionalized andaware of their distinctiveness, Overseas Indians both from the “older” andthe “newer” diaspora have therefore engaged in translating their visibility intoactive political capital, both in the “host country” and India. Das Gupta char-acterized this shift as one from “place-taking” to “space-making” politics.36

Homeland India’s vibrant diasporic appeal, as a cultural referent and a sourceof cultural capital and identity, offered a welcome boost to the agenda ofmore assertive diasporics.

Third, and perhaps most crucially, the narrative of a “Superpower India2020” in the making, most notably articulated by former Indian PresidentAbdul Kalam, played a vital role in attracting the attention of the diaspora.While in the mid-1990s the “India-hating NRI syndrome” and the OverseasIndians’ desire to dissociate from their subcontinental homeland were stilldominant, a decade later the scenario had changed completely and Indianow presented a cherished reference.37 The Overseas Indians’ readiness toreevaluate the negative image of India can be understood as an instrumentalappropriation of the positive aura now surrounding their homeland, so as toreshape their own self-perception and public image. Thus, in the midst offrequent experiences of racism and alienation, second-class citizenship andself-hatred, the diasporic Indian often needed a national identity to asserta label of which he could be proud of, and the Hindu nationalist narrativeof a “resurgent India” offered him just that.38 As a consequence, for manyOverseas Indians contributing to the economic growth and improvement ofIndia’s international image, this also emerged as an influential factor in theirself-identification process, as well as a depository for their own aspirations.

There is no doubt that, at least for some segments of the Indian di-aspora, this cultural and nationalist appeal of India seemed unattractive oreven detrimental to the priorities of integrating within their new host so-cieties. However, it was the most activist and organized segments of thediaspora, generally situated in the more affluent economies of Europe andNorth America, that played the determining role in shaping the new termsof engagement with India. Consequently, a tacit economy (or partnership)emerged in which cultural capital (from India) was traded for financial capi-tal (from the diaspora). By focusing on economic bonding mechanisms afterthe 1970s, the Indian government played a primary role in setting the termsof this economy, but, at the same time, this new relationship also satisfieddiasporic interests, both material and cultural.

THE DIASPORA STRIKES BACK: DEMANDING CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS

An analysis of official documentation, speeches, and parliamentary debateson the diaspora indicate that the government played a proactive role in foster-ing this economy, most notably by stimulating the feelings of indebtedness,


42 C. Xavier

patriotism, and belonging among the diaspora.39 Perceiving the diasporic asa “‘displaced’ global actor endowed with substantial economic prosperity,”Indian government officials believed that Overseas Indians could “be drawninto India through the ‘powerful’ cultural attachment that ‘sons of the soil’are believed as well as expected to retain for their ‘motherland.”’40 In prac-tice, this approach was institutionalized through the policy, leading to effortsdirected at attracting material investment from the diaspora with the help ofa plethora of “appeals to nationalism, to ideals of national development . . .,to primordial sentiments of Indianness and belonging, and to the immigrants’residual guilt at having left poverty and underdevelopment behind them.”41

This strategy included the construction of a strictly demarcated, and rel-atively inclusive community, defined as the monolithic “Indian Diaspora,”as well as attempts “to reterritorialize identities of those settled abroad byputting ‘place’ (India) back in the perception [they] have about themselves.”42

The annual official diaspora convention in India (PBD) played a particularlyimportant role by producing a “spectacular display of nationalism that in-corporates diasporic subjects within a global vision of India.”43 The conse-quent observation that India “actively utilizes deeply cultural discourses ofbelonging to wrest investment from its Diaspora” does not require furtherclarification, given that government officials themselves often candidly ac-knowledge it.44 In the word of New Delhi’s former “ambassador-at-large” forthe diaspora:

The NRIs have great love for India, they feel pain and the ecstasy onthe events back home. . . . So the government’s task is to ensure that themann [heart, mind] is with India and when the mann is there, the dhan[money] will follow.45

The strategy did, however, backfire. Discontent with an asymmetric and adhoc incorporation strategy, in which its role was restricted to contributingmaterially to India’s development, an increasing segment of the noncitizendiaspora (the PIOs) started to reclaim political incorporation, for example, bydemanding a constitutional amendment to allow for dual citizenship. PIOsthus started to denounce what they perceived to be an asymmetric incor-poration policy that effectively integrated them economically and culturallybut, at the same time, also denied them access to formal rights as legitimatemembers of the Indian polity. The most poignant critique came from LordBikhu Parekh, a distinguished PIO and member of the United Kingdom’sHouse of Lords, who imaginatively described the Overseas Indian “to [mat-ter to] the mother country only as a cow that can be milked matters to itsowner.”46 PIOs also started to denounce the policy’s preference for “thosewho hold Dollars, Pounds, Rials and all those things,” an office-bearer ofGOPIO (the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin) thus notingthat “if India is to play her role as a Mother, she must protect her childrenwherever they are.”47 Similar demands started to emerge in the political,



religious, and cultural spheres, as PIOs started to lobby, to petition, and topressure the Indian government, military, and legal authorities to protect anddefend their interests and rights abroad.48

Naturally, these demands for further incorporation are far from being acoherent trend among PIOs worldwide, some being actually uninterested in acloser attachment to their ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, the honeymoonhad reached an end, and the tone was set by more articulate and prosper-ous segments of the diaspora—precisely those on which the government’seconomic policy objectives depended the most.

THE CONSTRAINED STATE: DOMESTIC OBSTACLESAND APPREHENSIONS

What options did the Indian government face? One possibility would be toamend its constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955, in order to providePIOs with the voluntary option to keep or reacquire their Indian citizenshipwhile keeping their foreign one. At a wider level, by doing so, it would besimply following the trend set by several other states that recently adoptedsuch constitutional changes.49 Instead, constrained by a variety of domesticlegal and security considerations, the government ignored such claims andkept its single-citizenship provisions intact. Why so?

The first obstacle resided in India’s divergent legislative trend on citizen-ship, progressively hardening acquisition provisions. While the rules of the1950s were based on the inclusive principle of jus soli, every person born inIndia being automatically entitled to Indian citizenship, the 1986 amendmentto the Citizenship Act incorporated the requirement that one of the parentshad to be an Indian citizen, and the 2003 amendment then further excludedfrom citizenship all those who had a parent who is an illegal migrant at thetime of his or her birth.50

Second, the issue remained hostage to narrow calculations about pos-sible “security implications,” according to the 2002 report of the HighLevel Committee on the Indian Diaspora.51 Echoing Benedict Anderson’sdenunciation of long-distance and noncitizen political participation as be-ing “inevitably non-responsible,” and perhaps also reflecting the country’sextremely volatile regional security context, Indians remained fundamen-tally opposed to any effort directed at unsettling the territorial basis ofcitizenship.52 Nehru’s radical postindependence shift towards the territorialdefinition of the postcolonial nation plays a fundamental role in this persist-ing Indian mistrust of the diasporic as an “abnormal condition.” This is alsoreflected in the passionate importance accorded to the issue of “loyalty,” theOverseas Indians’ multiple identities, and the flexible situation fundamentallyclashing with the imagined mono-loyalty of the “proper” territorially fixedIndian.


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So strongly rooted were these apprehensions, that they even limited therights of NRIs, who are full citizens of India but automatically disenfranchisedfrom voting and election rights unless an “ordinarily resident” in their homeconstituency. Observing that the “right to vote as demanded by the nonresi-dent Indians is their legitimate right,” the government tried to correct this byintroducing the Representation of People (Amendment) Bill, 2006 in Parlia-ment so as to allow NRIs to cast their vote, at least if physically present in thehome constituency at the time of polls.53 However, during the parliamentaryexamination of the bill, committee members stressed eventual “extreme situ-ations,” because this could have “far reaching consequences and may createsome problems for a conservative society like India,” and that “there is astrong feeling from certain sections saying that if you allow a person, who isall along living in a foreign country and coming here only at the time of elec-tion to vote, may create some disturbance in the environment of elections.”54

A further example is found in the public reactions to the bill, which repeat-edly invoke security and cultural concerns against the extension of votingrights to NRIs, including the following statements: “they don’t pay taxes inIndia”; the danger of “instability” provoked by their “foreign funds”; they“cannot understand the needs of the people of his constituency”; they could“jeopardize the security and sovereignty of the country and [this] may resultin catastrophe.”55 This intense hostility against the possibility of extendingvoting rights even to Indian citizens who just happen to reside outside Indiais further reinforced by the negative memory of separatist insurgencies, suchas the Khalistan movement in Punjab during the 1980s, that were supportedand financed by radical sectors of the diaspora.

With rising voices from the diaspora denouncing this asymmetric andad hoc incorporation strategy and demanding extension of dual citizen-ship and other associated civic and political rights, the government faceda dilemma. How to sustain the state-diaspora economy and keep PIOsengaged in India’s development without extending the dual citizenshipprovision?

THE MIDDLE WAY: EXPERIMENTING WITH ASYMMETRICINCORPORATION

Induced to respond to diasporic demands for political incorporation and,at the same time, constrained by domestic apprehensions, the government’sfirst move was to announce an “upgraded PIO Scheme.” This attemptedto respond to the “diasporic fixation” with citizenship as identified in thefindings of a MOIA survey, in which 72 percent of the PIO respondentsdescribed dual citizenship as an “important” or “very important” issue.56 Thiswas also recognized by the High Level Committee, which in its report notesthat it would represent “an affirmation of their Indian nationality and identity”



and would play the “important role” of serving as “a badge of belonging”:“They feel unhappy when they have to apply for their Indian visas ‘to go totheir own country.”’57

Thus, with much fanfare, the Prime Minister publicly announced, in2003, that the government “decided to accept the high-level recommendationto permit dual citizenship for the people of Indian Origin living in certaincountries.”58 Following a bill introduced in parliament, the Citizenship Act of1955 was amended just in time for PM Vajpayee to unambiguously announce,during the 2004 PBD, the OCI as a “dual citizenship.”59 Had the governmentgiven in to diasporic demands and overcome the domestic obstacles?

On the one hand, there were strong reasons to consider the OCI as ona par with ordinary Indian citizenship. In its statement of object and rea-sons, the 2003 Bill notes that, following the committee’s recommendation,“the Central Government has accordingly decided to make provisions for thegrant of dual citizenship.”60 Also, the fact that OCI provisions were formallyadded, by a legislative amendment, to the Citizenship Act of 1955, and placedon a par with formal citizenship acquisition processes by birth, descent, reg-istration, naturalization, or incorporation of territory further strengthens thisperception. The specific Section 9 of the 2003 amendment, which includes aclause guaranteeing that any citizen of India who voluntarily acquires a for-eign citizenship “shall not cease to be a citizen of India, if within six monthsthereof he makes an application for registration as an overseas citizen ofIndia,” also seems to indicate that dual-citizenship provisions have effec-tively been enforced.61 Finally, the possibility of the OCI as a full-fledgedIndian citizenship also seems to be indicated by the provision that only PIOswho are citizens of countries that “permit dual citizenship in some form orthe other” are eligible to apply.62

Yet, on the other hand, and despite all these indications, it is clear thatthe OCI does not qualify as a regular citizenship because the constitutionalprovisions that explicitly ban Indian citizens from holding more than onenationality remain in force (for example, Article 9) and are, in legal terms,hierarchically superior to provisions contained in the Citizenship Act. OCIsare indeed eligible to apply for Indian citizenship, but they can do so onlyafter being registered for five years and after surrendering their foreigncitizenship once their request is granted.63 From this perspective, the OCI isnot a citizenship but, at most, another type of possible naturalization. Thosewishing to retain their foreign citizenship are therefore not entitled to applyfor and to obtain a “normal Indian passport,” which, as the Ministry of HomeAffairs underlines, is “given only to Indian citizens.”64 In practice, the OCIis therefore nothing but “a registration certificate in the form of a booklet”and “a multiple entry, multi-purpose life long ‘U’-visa sticker on the foreignpassport of the applicant.”65

The fact that the OCI is not equivalent to Indian citizenship is alsoreflected in its limited set of rights. While granting its holder parity with


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Indian citizens in almost every regard, it nevertheless denies an OCI access toany formal political participation and rights, bans him or her from registeringas a voter and stipulates his or her ineligibility for the posts of president,vice president, judge of the Supreme Court and High Courts, as well asfor any other representative post in federal and state legislative bodies. AnOverseas Citizen of India is also denied the right to equality of opportunityin matters of public employment and, except in cases specified by the centralgovernment, is barred from being appointed to public services and posts inconnection with the affairs of the union or of any state.

Unlike Indian citizens, an OCI is also banned from travelling to the“security sensitive” restricted border areas without the relevant permission,which further attests to his or her condition as an ordinary foreign citizenunder Indian public law.66 In the same regard, on the ground of differentmotives, the OCI registration may simply be “cancelled” by an order of thegovernment and its holder “deported,” contrasting with the much more com-plex process regulating the deprivation of citizenship for Indian citizens.67

Finally, other states, such as the United States, also underline that the OCI hasbeen “mischaracterized as ‘dual nationality’ or ‘dual citizenship’ while beingonly a ‘special visa,”’ describing it as being “similar to a U.S. ‘green card.”’68

While at the international level there is no scope for doubt, at the domes-tic level the amended act has opened up considerable space for ambiguity,as various government departments and ministries, as well as the judicialsystem, are in striking disagreement about the OCI’s actual legal status.69

Often referred to as a “variant of Indian citizenship” or an “overseascitizen card,” we are nevertheless in a position to conclude that the OCIdoes not represent a citizenship; though it does not represent a travel visaeither, nor a conventional residence permit given to foreign citizens.70 Yet,it remains unclear why the Indian state chose to name and legally instituteit as a “citizenship.” Does this procedure reflect a contingent dependencyon the existing conceptual language and legal framework, or does it, to thecontrary, reflect a strategy to explore the concept’s appeal to the diaspora?

BEYOND CONTINGENCY: STRATEGIC EXPLORATIONAND REINVENTION OF CITIZENSHIP

A detailed analysis of official documentation suggests that both contingentand strategic forces played an influential role in shaping the sui generisnature of the OCI. On the one hand, the whole debate about extendingcitizenship to PIOs remained tied, from the beginning to an extremely un-clear and conceptually ambiguous context, reflecting a mix of poor legalunderstanding of various central concepts at stake in the debate, as well asa lack of interinstitutional information exchange; as noted in previous sec-tions, the Ministry of Commerce definition of an NRI diverges significantly



from the ones adopted by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs and othergovernmental bodies.

Adding to this, the terms PIO, NRI, OCI, and Overseas Indian, as wellas citizenship and nationality, were repeatedly used interchangeably. TheHigh Level Committee itself is largely responsible for this, mixing up sev-eral distinct terms and inventing a supposed legal difference between the“primary” and “secondary nationality” of PIOs.71 Its unambiguous referenceto and recommendation of “dual citizenship” therefore laid the ground forthe ensuing conceptual cacophony, leading even the Foreign Secretary topredict, in 2004, his ministry’s role in the following terms: “if a US citizenapplies to us for an Indian Passport, and if he falls under this category [dualcitizenship], we will render the Passport service to him.”72 This statement bya high-ranking official in 2004, well into the legislative process that createdthe OCI, suggests that the Indian government may have actually consideredextending full-fledged Indian citizenship to certain PIOs. This would alsosuggest that New Delhi may have been actually predisposed towards exe-cuting the necessary legislative amendments, as well as ignoring domesticapprehensions. In this scenario, the congratulatory public announcements ofdual citizenship made by government officials in 2002 and 2003, includingthe one by the Prime Minister himself, may have been the result of a well-intentioned precipitation and were then scaled down by the contingenciesof the more apprehensive, pragmatic, and informed inputs of the ministriesof External and Home Affairs, Law and Justice, who were all consulted.

Yet, on the other hand, and perhaps more interestingly, governmentalaction also suggests a deliberate and strategic effort to explore the diasporicfixation with formal incorporation and citizenship. Thus, while the High LevelCommittee explicitly recommended “dual citizenship,” at the same time itwas very clear that, as early as 2001, it favored (or by that meant) only alimited incorporation of PIOs, short of any kind of full-fledged citizenship:

The Committee would like to make it clear that those to whom dualcitizenship is [will be] granted shall not, as a rule, be entitled to beinducted in the civil services of the States or the Union. They shall alsonot be entitled to be inducted in any sensitive organisation or in armedand paramilitary forces. . . . We are of the view that it is not practicable toextend to those who acquire dual nationality or citizenship the electoralrights and the right to contest elections to elective bodies in India.73

By emphatically distinguishing nationality from citizenship, and by expand-ing on the PIO Scheme experiment, which it, at a certain point, described incontradictory terms as “providing for ‘dual nationality’ to an extent withoutdual citizenship,” as “a passport of nationality or national origin,” and as“a cluster of rights and privileges, which are not conferred on foreign citi-zens,” the government therefore seems to have deliberately fed into the legal


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ambiguity surrounding the OCI status.74 This strategy becomes even morevisible if we take into consideration that, even one year after the OCI Schemehad been discussed in Parliament and implemented, and its noncitizenshipnature repeatedly underlined, MOIA officials kept on mentioning the pos-sibility of handing over “passports” to Overseas Indians and references to“dual citizenship” persisted in parliamentary committee reports.75

Three additional instances indicate that the ambiguity surrounding theOCI’s process of institution was not an accidental, but rather a strategic ap-propriation of the prevailing repertoire on national membership, as well asa deliberate exploration of the Overseas Indian diasporic aspiration towardsformal incorporation. First, under the earlier 2003 Scheme, PIOs could onlyregister as OCIs if they agreed to deliver an “oath of allegiance,” sworn inbefore the local Indian consular staff, promising solemnly to “bear true faithand allegiance to the Constitution of India.”76 Second, while announcing therevised scheme in 2005, government releases emphatically repeated that “the[OCI] registration certificate will look like a passport” and “is printed like anIndian passport in a different colour.”77 Both these examples reflect govern-mental efforts in aligning the OCI as closely as possible with full-fledgedIndian citizenship and in blurring their substantial differences. Third, by lim-iting eligibility to the post-1947 diaspora, the OCI effectively excludes almosthalf of the Indian diaspora, in particular all those who descend from the olderindentured labor emigration waves and generally have fewer economic assetsand are thus of less value to India’s growth strategy. This profiling is reflectedin the geographical distribution of the current OCI holders, a majority (83percent) residing in high-income member countries of the EU or the OECD.78

CONCLUSION

By implementing economic bonding mechanisms and making use of culturaland nationalist appeals, in particular targeting the resourceful segments ofthe diaspora in North America and Europe, the Indian government was ableto opportunistically reap vital economic support after 1991. The Indian state-diaspora nexus thus emerged as a tacit economy in which New Delhi tradedcultural and symbolic capital for diasporic financial and material capital.

However, this collaboration did not prove sustainable in the long run,as more activist segments of the noncitizen diaspora (the PIOs) started todenounce this asymmetrical, strictly economic and cultural membership, anddemanded formal political incorporation in the form of a dual citizenshipprovision. Such increasingly assertive claims clashed, however, with security,legal, and cultural apprehensions at the domestic level, which were funda-mentally opposed to granting dual citizenship rights to people of Indian ori-gin. The analysis offered in this article focused on the particular modalitiesthrough which the Indian state responded to this dilemma, caught betweenconflicting diasporic demands and domestic apprehensions.



The findings suggest that the hybrid solution adopted, in the form ofthe OCI granting a limited set of nonpolitical rights, resulted from both con-tingent and strategic motivations driving the state bureaucracy. The latter,while reflecting a deliberate effort to frame the OCI as a citizenship in orderto assuage the more activist segments of the diaspora, offers a particularlyrelevant finding, in that they highlight the fundamental collaborationist roleof state structures in reworking predominant notions of citizenship as an in-divisible and territorially demarcated bundle of rights. As a productive result,the specific form of the OCI was therefore shaped both by contingent anddeliberate motivations. While reflecting the state’s persistent dependence onexisting legal traditions, repertoires, and forms, the OCI experiment thus alsouncovers the state’s capacity to respond to and to shape transnational forces.In a maximalist perspective that seeks to underline the state’s agency, onecould thus define the OCI experiment “as a tactic of transnational governancethat reworks the political, economic and cultural aspects of membership.”79

There is thus also an inherently productive dimension to state-managedtransnationalism. This does not mean that there is a radical shift, and arupture with existing concepts, such as citizenship as in the Indian case,nor that state structures are omnipotent in determining such outcomes. Thespecific term “management” reflects this, in that it implies a gradual andcontingent process, in constant dialectic with other actors and forces, both atthe domestic and transnational levels. In fact, the state and other interveningactors such as diasporic activists are fundamentally constrained because theycontinue to draw upon and, therefore, remain bounded by the power of theexisting conceptual languages and signifiers, such as that of citizenship.

Returning to our initial proposition of state-led transnationalism as “in-stitutionalized national policies and programs that attempt to expand thescope of a national state’s political, economic, social, and moral regulationto include emigrants and their descendants outside the national territory,” theIndian case study suggests that the state-diaspora (or state-transnationalism)nexus is far from being a sterile zero-sum game.80 Instead, by “legitimat-ing and implementing growing transnationalization,” most notably by re-configuring borders “along social rather than geographic lines,” Margheri-tis notes that states are also “implicitly contributing towards giving a newmeaning to” and thus redefining “the notions of state, citizenship, identity,and related institutions and practices.”81 As witnessed in the Indian case,far from being predetermined, these experiments lead to rather surprisingoutcomes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research is based on my 2008 MPhil dissertation, “India’s Dias-pora Policy and the Politics of Extra-Territorial Incorporation,” preparedas an ICCR scholar under the supervision of Professor Varun Sahni at


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Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. I would like to thank the twoanonymous reviewers for several corrections and suggestions.

NOTES

1. For an overview, see Alan Gamlen, “Diaspora Engagement Policies: What Are They and WhatKind Of States Use Them?” Working paper no. 32 (Oxford: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, 2006).

2. Laurie A. Brand, “States and their Expatriates: Explaining the Development of Tunisian andMoroccan Emigration-Related Institutions,” Working paper no. 52 (San Diego: Center for ComparativeImmigration Studies, 2002), 3–4.

3. Gamlen, “Diaspora Engagement Policies,” 23.4. Brett Johnson and Santiago Sedaca, Diasporas, Emigres and Development: Economic Linkages

and Programmatic Responses (Washington, DC: Carana Corporation, 2004), 63.5. Kim Barry, “Home and Away: The Construction of Citizenship in an Emigration Context,”

Working Paper no. 06–13 (New York: New York University School of Law, Public Law & Legal Theoryresearch paper series, 2006), 28; Jose Itzigsohn, “Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship: TheInstitutions of Immigrants’ Political Transnationalism,” International Migration Review 34(4): 1143 (2000).

6. For the Chinese case, see Cong Cao, China’s Efforts at Turning “Brain Drain” into “BrainGain” (Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2004). For the Mexican case, see Rachel Sherman,“From State Introversion to State Extension in Mexico: Modes of Emigrant Incorporation, 1900–1997,”Theory and Society 28(6): 835–878 (1999).

7. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, “Policy and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of UniversalCitizenship,” Ethics 99(2): 250–274 (1989).

8. Michael Murphy and Siobhan Harty, “Post-Sovereign Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 7(2):181–197 (2003).

9. Olivier Beaud, “The Question of Nationality within a Federation: A Neglected Issue in Na-tionality Law,” in Randall Hansen and Patrick Weil, eds., Dual Nationality, Social Rights and FederalCitizenship in the US and Europe: The Reinvention of Citizenship (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002),314–330.

10. Brett Bowden, “The Perils of Global Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 7(3): 349–362 (2003);Baogang He, “World Citizenship and Transnational Activism,” in Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin, eds.,Transnational Activism in Asia (London: Routledge, 2004), 78–93; Hazel Henderson and Daisaku Ikeda,Planetary Citizenship (Santa Monica, CA: Middleway, 2004).

11. Charles Tilly, “Where do Rights Come From?” in Theda Skocpol, George Ross, Tony Smith,and Judith Eisenberg Vichniac, eds., Democracy, Revolution and History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1998), 55–72.

12. Murphy and Harty, “Post-Sovereign Citizenship,” 194.13. Gamlen, “Diaspora Engagement Policies,” 12.14. Thomas Faist, “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of

Citizenship and Culture,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(2): 218 (2000); Aihwa Ong, “(Re)Articulations ofCitizenship,” Political Science & Politics 38:697 (2005).

15. Jonathan Fox, “Unpacking ‘Transnational Citizenship,”’ Annual Review of Political Science8:173 (2005) (emphasis in original); Daiva Stasiulis and Darryl Ross, “Security, Flexible Sovereignty, andthe Perils of Multiple Citizenship,” Citizenship Studies 3(10): 329–348 (2006).

16. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1999).

17. Seyla Benhabib, “Borders, Boundaries, and Citizenship,” Political Science & Politics 38:676(2005).

18. I owe the term “extra-territorial incorporation” in this context to Varun Sahni, “India’s ForeignPolicy: Key Drivers,” South African Journal for International Affairs 14(2): 21–36 (2007).

19. Brand, “States and their Expatriates,” 4.20. For a detailed overview of such apprehensions, see Gamlen, “Diaspora Engagement

Policies,” 12.



21. According to estimates by the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Report of the HighLevel Committee on the Indian Diaspora (New Delhi: Indian Council for World Affairs, 2002); StephenCastles, “Comparing the Experience of Five Major Emigration Countries,” Working Paper no. 7 (Oxford:International Migration Institute, 2007), 8.

22. Claude Markovits, “Indian Merchant Networks outside India in the Nineteenth and TwentiethCenturies: A Preliminary Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 33(4): 883–911 (1999).

23. For political influence, see Jason A. Kirk, “Indian-Americans and the U.S.-India Nuclear Agree-ment: Consolidation of an Ethnic Lobby?” Foreign Policy Analysis 4(3): 275–300 (2008). For the Indiandiaspora’s comparative economic standing, see Abhishek Pandey, Alok Aggarwal, Richard Devane, andYevgeny Kuznetsov, India’s Transformation to Knowledge-Based Economy–Evolving Role of the IndianDiaspora (New Delhi: Evalueserve, 2004).

24. Migration Policy Institute, Remittances Profile: India (Washington, DC: MPI Data Hub, 2007);Louka T. Katseli, Robert E. B. Lucas, and Theodora Xenogiani, “Effects of Migration on Sending Countries:What do We Know?” Working Paper no. 250 (Turin: OECD Development Centre, 2006).

25. In 2004, Indians accounted for 4 percent of all foreign students in the member countries ofthe Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and 14 percent of all foreignstudents in the United States. See Binod Khadria, “Conceptualising the Typologies of Indian Diaspora inInternational Economic Relations: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,’ or a ‘Great Off-White Hope’ of the NewCentury?” Working Paper no. 19 (Singapore: National University of Singapore, ISAS, 2007).

26. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Address to the Indians in Malaya,” Ipoh, 29 May 1937, in S. Gopal, ed.,Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 8 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1976).

27. Quoted in Ajay Dubey, “Indian Diaspora in Africa,” in Sarva Daman Singh and Mahavir Singh,eds., Indians Abroad (Kolkata: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, 2003), 157.

28. As a result, while in 1970–1971 only 2 percent of the remittances originated from the Gulfcountries, this share rose to 33 percent in 1974–1975 and to 75 percent in 1980–1981. See Binod Khadria,“Contemporary Indian Immigration to the United States–Is the Brain Drain Over?” Revue Europeenne desMigrations Internationales 7(1): 65 (1991).

29. Shefali Rekhi, “Forging a Bond,” India Today, New Delhi, 3 Aug. 1998, 59–62.30. Anupam Chander, “Diaspora Bonds,” New York University Law Review 76(4): 1005–1099

(2001).31. James P. Gordon and Poonam Gupta, “Non-Resident Deposits in India: In Search of Return?”

Economic and Political Weekly 39(37): 4166 (2004).32. According to official RBI figures, NRI FDI inflows averaged just US$ 71 million a year between

1998–1999 and 2000–2001. See Mihir A. Desai, Devesh Kapur, and John McHale, “The Fiscal Impact ofHigh Skilled Emigration: Flows of Indians to the U.S.,” Journal of Development Economics 88:24 (2009).

33. Devesh Kapur, Ajay Mehta, and R. Moon Dutt, “Indian Diasporic Philanthropy,” in PeterGeithner et al., eds., Diaspora Philanthropy and Equitable Development: Perspectives on China and India(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2004), 117–213.

34. Prema Kurien, “Multiculturalism and ‘American’ Religion: The Case of Hindu Indian Americans,”Social Forces 85(2): 723–742 (2006).

35. For this shift, see Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America andEngland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 7–10.

36. Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South AsianPolitics (London: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.

37. Shashi Tharoor, India–From Midnight to the Millennium (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000),155.

38. On the specific role of Hindu nationalism as a facilitating factor in the state-diaspora relation-ship, see Ingrid Therwath, “Working for India or Against Islam? Islamophobia in Indian American Lobbies,”South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (Fall 2007). http://samaj.revues.org/document105.html(accessed 11 June 2008).

39. I have elsewhere provided a detailed discourse analysis of such metaphors, images, and othersymbolic devices used by government officials between 2003 and 2008. Constantino Xavier, “India’s Dias-pora Policy and the Politics of Extra-Territorial Incorporation” (Unpublished MPhil dissertation, JawaharlalNehru University, 2008), 98–111.

40. Sanjay Chaturvedi, “Diaspora in India’s Geopolitical Visions: Linkages, Categories and Contes-tations,” in Robert Wirsing and Rouben Azizian, eds., Ethnic Diasporas & Great Power Strategies in Asia(New Delhi: India Research Press, 2007), 93.


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41. Johanna Lessinger, “Indian Immigrants in the United States: The Emergence of a TransnationalPopulation,” in Bhikhu Parekh et al., eds., Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora (London:Routledge, 2003), 176.

42. Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff and Ellen Bal, “‘Eternal Call of the Ganga’: Reconnecting with Peopleof Indian Origin in Surinam,” Economic and Political Weekly 38(38): 4009 (2003).

43. Bakirathi Mani and Latha Varadarajan, “‘The Largest Gathering of the Global Indian Family’:Neoliberalism, Nationalism, and Diaspora at Pravasi Bharatiya Divas,” Diaspora 14(1): 70 (2005).

44. Margaret Walton-Roberts, “Globalization, National Autonomy and Non-Resident Indians,” Con-temporary South Asia, 13(1): 60 (2004).

45. E. Jayakrishnan, “Dawn of a Global Indian Network,” Interview with Ambassador Agnihotri forSify.com (2003). www.bkagnihotri.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=27(accessed 11 June 2008).

46. Bhikhu Parekh, “Why the Diaspora Needs India,” 8 Jan. 2003. http://ia.rediff.com/news/2003/jan/08spec1.htm (accessed 19 Dec. 2007).

47. Dhundev Bauhadoor, Speech at Plenary Session with the Minister of External Affairs (NewDelhi: First Pravasi Bhartiya Divas, 9 Jan. 2003), 55 (my emphasis). http://indiandiaspora.nic.in/ch3.pdf(accessed 11 June 2008).

48. Such cases include religious and cultural PIO agendas of Sikhs and the “turban controversy”in Europe, Hindus and the “textbook controversy” in North America, labor and other minority rights inMalaysia, Fiji, the Gulf countries, as well as demands for greater consular protection in conflict zones ofAfrica and the Middle East, etc.

49. Barry, “Home and Away,” 49–50.50. Valerian Rodrigues, “Citizenship and the Indian Constitution,” in Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut

Reifeld, eds., Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship, Dialogues and Perceptions (New Delhi: SagePublications, 2005), 215.

51. High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Report of the High Level Committee, 526–532.52. Benedict Anderson, “The New World Disorder,” New Left Review 193:13 (1992).53. Rajya Sabha Secretariat, “The Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill,

2006,” (Bill no. 15 of 2006) (my emphasis). www.prsindia.org/docs/bills/1179467379/1179467379representation of people amendment bill 2006.pdf (accessed 12 Dec. 2007).

54. Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice, Sixteenth Report: TheRepresentation of the People (Amendment) Act (New Delhi: Rajya Sabha Secretariat, 2006), 19–20 (myemphasis).

55. Ibid., 5–6.56. Sridhar Bhagavatula and Geeta Verma, The Expectations of Indian Diaspora and their Linkages

with the Home Country, Unpublished survey and report (New Delhi: Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs,2006), 77.

57. High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Report of the High Level Committee, 359, 526.58. A. B. Vajpayee, “Speech at Inaugural Session,” First Pravasi Bhartiya Divas (Jan. 2003).

http://indiandiaspora.nic.in/ch2.pdf (accessed 11 June 2008), 22 (my emphasis).59. For details on the eligibility conditions and rights associated with the OCI, see Min-

istry of Home Affairs, “Overseas Citizenship of India–Frequently Asked Questions” (Dec. 2007).http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/FAQs-28.12.07.pdf (accessed 25 June 2008).

60. Rajya Sabha Secretariat, “The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2003,” (Aug. 2003) (my emphasis).http://rajyasabha.gov.in/legislative/amendbills/XXXIX 2003.pdf (accessed 12 Dec. 2007).

61. Ibid. (my emphasis).62. Ministry of Home Affairs, “Extract from the Citizenship Rules, 1956,” section 25A.

http://mha.nic.in/pdfs/1956.pdf (accessed 25 March 2007).63. Rajya Sabha Secretariat, “The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2005,” (Bill no. 75 of 2005), 4.

http://rajyasabha.nic.in/bills-ls-rs/2005/LXXV-C 2005.pdf (accessed 12 Dec. 2007).64. Ministry of Home Affairs, “Overseas Citizenship of India,” 8 (my emphasis).65. Ibid., 5.66. Ministry of Home Affairs, “Extract from the Citizenship Rules, 1956,” 6.67. Article 7D of the Citizenship Act determines that an OCI may be “cancelled” if its holder “has

shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards the Constitution of India as by lawestablished,” further indicating the treatment of the OCI as a full citizen.



68. U.S. Department of State, “Travel Advisory.” http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis pa tw/cis/cis 1139.html (accessed 25 March 2007); U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, “Dual Nationality.”http://newdelhi.usembassy.gov/acsdualnation.html (accessed 25 March 2007).

69. An interesting case is that of foreign investment in the aviation sector, in which the CivilAviation Ministry refuses to treat the OCI as an NRI. See Sumati Nagrath, “Unequal Citizens,” BusinessWorld, 14 March 2008. www.businessworld.in/content/view/4011/4119 (accessed 13 June 2008).

70. Anupama Roy, “Overseas Indian Citizen: A New ‘Setubandhan’?” Economic & Political Weekly41(15): 1423 (2006).

71. High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Report of the High Level Committee, 526–533.72. Standing Committee on External Affairs, Second Report: Ministry of the Non-Resident Indian

Affairs–Demands for Grants 2004–2005 (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 2004), 25.73. High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, Report of the High Level Committee, 528, 530.74. Ibid., 363, 511–513.75. Standing Committee on External Affairs, Fourth Report: Ministry Of Overseas Indian

Affairs–Action Taken on the Recommendations Contained in the Second Report (New Delhi: Lok SabhaSecretariat, 2005), 11; Standing Committee on External Affairs, Sixth Report: Ministry Of Overseas IndianAffairs–Demands for Grants (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 2005), 25.

76. Included in Schedule 4 of the 2003 amendment, the “Oath of Allegiance” was, with theexception of the last four words, the same as the compulsory one delivered by all those applying for afull-fledged Indian citizenship. See Rajya Sabha Secretariat, “Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2003.”

77. Press Information Bureau of India, “Salient Points of Citizenship (Amendment) Ordinance,2005,” Press release, 29 June 2005. http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=9929 (accessed 11 June2008); Press Information Bureau of India, “Scope of Overseas Citizenship of India Scheme Extended,”Press release, 2 Dec. 2005. http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=9929 (accessed 11 June 2008).

78. Author’s own calculations based on the official global country data provided by the Ministryof Overseas Indian Affairs, New Delhi, in June 2008.

79. Jen Dickinson and Adrian J. Bailey, “(Re)membering Diaspora: Uneven Geographies of IndianDual Citizenship,” Political Geography 26(7): 761 (2007).

80. Luin Goldring, “The Mexican State and Transmigrant Organizations: Negotiating the Boundariesof Membership and Participation,” Latin American Research Review 37:64 (2002).

81. Ana Margheritis, “State-Led Transnationalism and Migration: Reaching Out to the ArgentineCommunity in Spain,” Global Networks 7(1): 89 (2007).

Constantino Xavier is a Portuguese Fulbright-sponsored PhD candidate in SouthAsian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins Uni-versity, in Washington, DC. He has an MA (2006) and MPhil (2008) in InternationalPolitics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.


Experimenting with Diasporic Incorporation: The Overseas Citizenship of India

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