In 1941 Orson Welles made a film that became a classic.
CK1: Rosebud (music)
Citizen Kane.
In 2026 we seem to be in the middle of another film, rather more dystopian. We can call it Citizen Kaun.
Kaun in Hindi means Who? Citizen Who?
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
West Bengal just went to the polls with several million voters struck off the electoral rolls, banished to some kind of limbo land. The Special Intensive Revision or 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 percent of the electorate.It has become a hot-button election issue though once the election is over the issue will probably recede from our consciousness and media attention.
But we will be no nearer a consensus on how to determine what citizenship really means.
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 USA 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 birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens, arguing that this was a way to end birthright citizenship for those whose parents were in the USA illegally, an order that’s being challenged in court.
Neither the right to birthright citizenship, nor the clamour for its removal is rooted in particularly noble ideals. In an 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 United States 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.”
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.”
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.
Citizenship even now becomes all about trying to identify the other, the people not like us, the ones with divided loyalties. For example, the infamous 1960 Norman Tebbit test from the United Kingdom 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. He proposed a new test on BBC
NT1: One test I would use is to ask them on which side their fathers or grandfathers or whatever fought in the Second World War, and you'll find that the poles and the Czechs and the Slovaks were all on the right side. And so that's a that's a pretty good test, isn't it? Um, perhaps we even managed to teach them to play cricket gradually over the years.
But long after that cricket match is over, and this particular election in West Bengal is lost or won, the question it’s stirred up will remain with us Citizen Kaun?
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW
CK2: I am Charles Foster Kane