Which of the following statement/s is/are correct regarding the citizenship of India ?
(A) India has single citizenship system.
(B) Citizenship Act was passed in 1955.
(C) Part 4 of the Indian Constit

Question

Which of the following statement/s is/are correct regarding the citizenship of India ?
(A) India has single citizenship system.
(B) Citizenship Act was passed in 1955.
(C) Part 4 of the Indian Constitution provides citizenship.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 'Only (A) & (B) Correct'. Only three statements are printed here, and two of them hold. Statement (A) is correct: India has a system of single citizenship. However federal the polity is in its distribution of legislative and executive power, every person is a citizen of India alone and there is no separate citizenship of Maharashtra or of any other State, so the rights that flow from citizenship are uniform across the country and a citizen carries them with him wherever he moves. The contrast usually drawn is with the United States, where a person is a citizen both of the union and of the State in which he resides, and where each may confer different rights. Statement (B) is correct too: the Citizenship Act was passed in 1955, under the authority given to Parliament by Article 11, and it governs the acquisition of citizenship by birth, by descent, by registration, by naturalisation and by the incorporation of territory, as well as its loss by renunciation, termination and deprivation. It has been amended several times, notably in 2003 to create the Overseas Citizen of India, in 2015 to merge the Person of Indian Origin card into that scheme, and in 2019. Statement (C) is the false one: citizenship is dealt with in Part II of the Constitution, in Articles 5 to 11, not in Part IV. Part IV contains the Directive Principles of State Policy, which are a different subject altogether — non-justiciable directions to the State in the making of laws. Since statements (A) and (B) are correct and (C) is not, option (3) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option accepts the true statement about single citizenship but pairs it with the false claim that Part IV provides for citizenship, while discarding the correct date of the Citizenship Act. Part IV is the Part containing the Directive Principles of State Policy; citizenship occupies Part II, Articles 5 to 11, which sits immediately after Part I on the Union and its territory and immediately before Part III on fundamental rights. The ordering is logical — territory, then who belongs to it, then what rights they hold — and a candidate who has fixed that sequence will not place citizenship in Part IV.  (b) Restricting the answer to the first statement discards the correct one about the Citizenship Act. The Act was indeed passed in 1955, five years after the Constitution came into force, and it remains the governing statute on the subject; Articles 5 to 11 dealt only with who was a citizen at the commencement of the Constitution and left everything thereafter to Parliament. This option attracts the over-cautious candidate who is certain about single citizenship, unsure about the year and unwilling to commit; but 1955 is one of the standard dates of Indian polity and can be held with confidence.  (d) Accepting all three requires accepting that Part IV of the Constitution provides for citizenship, which it does not. Part IV is the home of the Directive Principles; Part II, Articles 5 to 11, is where citizenship is dealt with, and Article 11 is the provision that empowers Parliament to regulate the subject by law — the authority under which the Citizenship Act of 1955 was enacted. A blanket acceptance is exactly what a question of this shape is built to punish, since two of its statements are true and easily verified while the third quietly changes a Part number.

Concept: Citizenship in the Indian constitutional scheme has two layers. The Constitution itself, in Part II covering Articles 5 to 11, settled only who was a citizen at its commencement: persons domiciled in India who were born here or had a parent born here or had been ordinarily resident for five years, together with special provisions for those who migrated from and to Pakistan and for persons of Indian origin residing abroad, plus a rule that a person who voluntarily acquires the citizenship of a foreign State ceases to be a citizen of India. Article 11 then hands the whole subject to Parliament, which enacted the Citizenship Act, 1955. That Act provides five modes of acquisition — birth, descent, registration, naturalisation and the incorporation of territory — and three modes of loss — renunciation by the citizen, termination on acquiring a foreign citizenship, and deprivation by order of the government. India follows single citizenship, so there is no citizenship of a State, and it does not permit dual citizenship: the Overseas Citizen of India card created in 2003 confers certain rights of entry, residence and work but is not citizenship, and its holder has no vote and no eligibility for public office. Successive amendments have changed the rules of acquisition by birth, tightening them in 1986 and again in 2003 by reference to the status of the parents. The subject is politically live, which makes it a standing source of examination questions.

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