In 1941, Orson Welles made a film that became a classic—Citizen Kane. In 2026 we seem to be in the middle of another film, rather more dystopian. We can call it “Citizen Kaun”.
West Bengal just went to the polls with hundreds of thousands of voters struck off the electoral rolls, banished to some kind of limbo land. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process was meant to clean up the voter list. In the process over 8 million voters were struck off the list, more than 10% of the electorate. The missing included the likes of 88-year-old Suprabuddha Sen and his wife Deepa. Sen’s grandfather was Nandalal Bose who illustrated the original manuscript of India’s Constitution. He submitted his matriculation certificate, passport, employment records and pension payment order, but to no avail. The tribunals looking into the appeals against exclusion managed to clear all of 139 names before the first phase of elections in the state. Sen was not one of them.
West Bengal is not alone in the SIR controversy. Around 20.5 million were removed from Uttar Pradesh’s rolls and 7.4 million from Tamil Nadu’s. But in West Bengal, a hard-fought battle between the ruling Trinamool Congress and the BJP has turned SIR into a hot button election issue. Trinamool alleges the Central government is using the Electoral Commission to prune the list to its advantage. There have been record turnouts. The BJP says it’s proof of an anti-incumbency wave. Trinamool says it’s proof that people have understood every vote matters. Many fear that if they do not vote they might find their names struck off the rolls next time.
Either way once the election is over, the issue will recede from our consciousness and media attention. Suprabuddha Sen’s story will not make the news anymore. But we will be no nearer a consensus on how to determine what citizenship really means.
For me, the quintessential citizen was always R. K. Laxman’s “Common Man”, the original aam aadmi before it became a party. The bald head, the wispy hair, the plaid jacket over a dhoti —he was not really dressed like anyone I knew. Yet he became the stand-in for the common citizen, bemused and silent, but nobody’s fool, bearing quiet witness to the ups and downs of our time and its hypocrisies. In fact, as the SIR upheavals rocked West Bengal and Central forces rolled into the state to ensure “free and fair” elections, the most prescient commentary came from a 1971 cartoon by Laxman proving the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In the background is a snaking procession of tanks and armoured trucks with soldiers. In the foreground Indira Gandhi airily tells the Common Man, “No, there is no threat to the nation, my dear man. This is just to ensure fair elections in Bengal.” The Common Man, as ever, remains inscrutable.
But this isn’t just about West Bengal. The fight to define citizenship and draw the borders around it have gathered a lot of steam in recent years all over the world. That is why Donald Trump in the US decided to make history by attending a Supreme Court hearing about his plan to dismantle the idea of birthright citizenship, something established by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. In 2025, Trump issued an executive order instructing the federal government to deny jus soli birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens, arguing that this was a way to end birth right citizenship for those whose parents were in the US illegally, an order that’s being challenged in court. Trump claimed only the US offers such a right. In reality about three dozen countries do though it’s also true that many others have over the years done away with it or at least tightened their policies. The UK, for instance, passed a law in 1981 to replace birthright citizenship. France did the same in 1993.
Neither the right to birthright citizenship nor the clamour for its removal is rooted in particularly noble ideals. In a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton University, says a key reason for birthright citizenship in the first place was the Europeans thought of places like the Americas as the “new world”, which is to say “largely empty and in need of people.” Now the US considers itself a developed country and it wants to control who becomes a citizen. That’s why Trump reposted a message from a conservative radio host who attacked birthright citizenship as a way for a baby to become “an instant citizen” and then “bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet.”
Unsurprisingly, India has reacted angrily to the post calling it in “uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”, especially coming from a man who has also called India “a great country with a very good friend of mine at the top.” It was indeed uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste but it will resonate with Trump’s base.
All around the world, every country tightening its citizenship and immigration laws has its own idea, spoken or unspoken, of what might be the “hellhole” they do not want immigrants from. For one country it might be India and China. For another it might be the tracts of Myanmar and Bangladesh where the Rohingyas have their refugee camps. Citizenship, at its core, is always about the effort to define “people like us.” In fact, the hellhole bit of Trump’s repost got the most attention. The subsequent part of the same post got less notice. In it, the radio host complains “there’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today.” Unlike, he says, European Americans and their ancestors. Basically, people like him.
That’s the real reason why in the early history of the United States, many states only allowed white male property owners the right to vote. People just like the Founding Fathers. Even the ancient Greeks, often regarded as the founders of democracy, developed the idea of citizenship as a way to separate themselves from slaves and foreigners. And ever since then there has been an ongoing debate about whether citizenship is about rights and protections vs duties and obligations. Aristotle said there was no one definition.
And just like with the ancient Greeks, citizenship even now becomes all about trying to identify the other, the people not like us, the ones with divided loyal ties. For example, the infamous 1960 Norman Tebbit test from the UK where the British Conservative politician came up with the idea of the “cricket test” as he wondered which side the country’s British Asian population would cheer for in a cricket match—the one they came from or the one they lived in.
In 2018, Tebbit said his cricket test was immaterial because the UK cricket team was now filled with British Asians anyway. But the test lives on in other ways.
In the Bengal election, Trinamool tried to present the BJP as the outsiders who did not understand the culture of Bengal. BJP political candidates hit the campaign trail carrying fish to show their Bengali-ness while Trinamool candidates warned that if the BJP came to power they would shut fish markets. The Prime Minister made a campaign stop to sample local jhal muri and the chief minister invited him to have fish curry that she would cook herself. All that caused much merriment and many memes. But jokes aside, it was really a rerun of the same old story—of trying to show who belonged and who did not, who were “people like us” and who were not, a fish test of loyalty instead of a cricket test.
But long after the hurly burly is done, and this particular battle is lost or won, the question it’s stirred up will remain with us, stuck in our throat like an errant fishbone. Citizen kaun?
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.
Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.