While the traditional understanding of citizenship and belonging in the Indian context has changed in recent decades, a panel discussion organized in the context of the 2023 Democracy Week analysed some of the issues related to such contestations in India. The panel also marked the launch of the books by Gorky Chakraborty, Associate Professor at Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), entitled “Citizenship in Contemporary Times: The Indian Context” (Routledge, 2023) and “Negotiating Borders and Borderlands: The Indian Experience” (Orient Blackswan, 2023).

Graziella Moraes Silva, Co-Director, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, opened the event by noting that it opened the 2023 edition of Democracy Week and that democracy is “as much a process as it is a goal.” Valérie Vulliez Boget, Deputy Secretary General in charge of political rights at the Geneva Chancellery of State, noted that democracy and citizenship can have a complex relationship and welcomed the opportunity to discover how these interact in the Indian context. Moderator Christine Lutringer, Executive Director and Senior Researcher, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, explained that the Democracy Week programme also tackled exploring democratic practices at the transnational level.

In his keynote presentation, Gorky Chakraborty said that the origins of the Indian notion of peoplehood helped explain citizenship and belonging in the Indian context. The Indian process of decolonisation, he explained, was marked by a traumatic process of separation through partition. This, in turn, had ripple effects on how citizenship is understood in India. He contrasted the European and Southeast Asian contexts, noting that in the former, creating the “Other” emerged from negotiating state territoriality and migration. In Southeast Asia, the process is not based on territorial epistemology; instead, the Other is generated within the bounds of the territory.

Lipin Ram, Postdoctoral Researcher, Bremen University, highlighted two contributions of the books, including the idea of the “outsider within” and the notion that the Northeast region of India is an exemplary case to understand the transformations of the citizenship regime in India. Tripurdaman Singh, SNSF Ambizione Researcher, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, offered some comments, noting, among others, that the imposition of colonial conceptions of territory, space, and borders completely ruptured the pre-colonial world that had defined Southeast Asia, and the international dimension of Indian citizenship as part of the post-war international order.