CCI215 | Citizenship and Immigration Law in India

Who is a citizen? To be a citizen is to be included as a member of a political community, and to be granted the corresponding rights and privileges that accrue to the membership. The laws of citizenship in a country determine who gets to formally be a member of a political community and receive the benefits of such membership, and conversely, shape the nature of the polity itself. Access to formal citizenship status also marks out groups such as migrants and refugees, who may occupy the territory of the polity but do not have access to the same rights as formal citizens. While citizenship may not necessarily correspond to nation-states (for example, citizenship in the European Union exists in addition to national citizenship), nation-states use access to formal citizenship rights as means to determine what the nation-state looks like. For example, recent debates around birthright citizenship in the United States reflect anxieties about immigration and its impact on what it means to be American, and debates around the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 in India reveal underlying concerns about creating hierarchies of access to citizenship rights for different communities. For postcolonial nations such as India, citizenship laws have become a lever for determining what the nation and its inhabitants look like.

Citizens are exempt from immigration law- as members of the political community, they have the right to unconditional access to the territory. Nevertheless, immigration law operates on distinguishing citizens from non-citizens- and the process of such determination may bring citizens within the ambit of immigration laws’ application.

The Citizenship and Immigration Law Elective is designed to be the first part of a two-part Citizenship and Statelessness Clinic, that will focus on developing student’s skills in citizenship and immigration litigation. In this course, we will focus on building a foundational understanding of citizenship and immigration law that is informed by current debates. The Supreme Court of India is poised to decide upon multiple questions that relate to citizenship and immigration law in India. The new Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 and allied rules also significantly alter the landscape of immigration law in India, and they will be studied in detail in this course. Students in this course will be expected to develop legal briefs and case notes on topics that relate to pending litigation on citizenship law in India.

Students opting for the Citizenship and Immigration Law Elective will be expected and encouraged to continue on to the Citizenship and Statelessness Clinic in the third trimester, in which they will work directly with lawyers practising before the Supreme Court of India and the Gauhati High Court in individual cases of persons at risk of statelessness. This elective is a prerequisite for enrolment in the Clinic in the third trimester.

An understanding of evidence law and civil and criminal trial procedure is a prerequisite for this course, and for this reason the course is open to students in their 3rd, 4th and 5th years, as well as LLM students and 2nd and 3rd year year students in the 3 year LLB course.

A combination of the Socratic method and lecture-based classes will be followed in this course.