The story of ‘We, the moving people’

Citizenship is tied to a person’s residency in a delimited territory. A citizen is ordinarily expected to be residing in a particular location. The migration of people across borders — international or within a country — dislocates this presumed overlap between citizenship and territory, causing a conceptual drift. Neither governments nor political parties are fully equipped to deal with this, and what we see around the world is public angst that is being harnessed for mobilisation against recent immigrants, mass deportations and efforts to clean up voter lists.

In India, the Election Commission of India (ECI) is undertaking a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. Pushing back against challenges to the move, the ECI told the Supreme Court of India: “Rapid urbanisation and frequent migration of population from one place to another on account of education, livelihood and other reasons have become a regular trend. Some electors obtain registration in one place and then shift their residence and register themselves at another place without getting their names deleted from the electoral roll of the initial place of residence. This has led to an increased possibility of repeated entries in the electoral roll. Thus, the ECI came to the conclusion that the situation warrants the conduct of a pan-India SIR beginning with the State of Bihar.”