Finally, chapter 11 considers “differentiated” citizenship. This model would incorporate people into the political life of the city as members of their cultural subgroups rather than as individuals. Differentiated citizenship thus enables historically marginalized groups to assert collective rights that have often been denied them under the individualistic liberal model. These groups would have the ability to exercise control over places with which they share deep cultural, economic and political ties. Differentiated citizenship thus attempts to steer between republican and postmodern citizenship. It calls for recognition of normative subgroups in society, but in a manner that will incorporate those subgroups into political life, rather than enabling them to withdraw from political life. Differentiated citizenship rejects both the republican insistence upon a homogenous political community that rigidly polices its borders as well as the postmodern refusal to draw boundary lines at all. Ultimately, differentiated citizenship is problematic because it reinforces the marginalization of the groups it wishes to empower by legitimizing the status quo of racially identified places.

Chapter 6 explores issues connected with citizenship and belonging during the late 1940s and 1950s, and in particular focuses on the differentiated realities involved for particular marginalized groups – religious minorities, and economically disadvantaged peoples such as Dalits, tribal communities and haris (share-cropper peasants) – who were excluded, in a range of ways, from the ‘mainstream’ benefits of what being a citizen came to mean in both UP and Sindh during the early post-Independence years. Not only were certain communities excluded from typical frameworks of citizenship rights in postcolonial India and Pakistan but also the latter were sometimes established to marginalize them deliberately, requiring them to seek out alternative methods for lobbying government

As Chapter 5 explores in relation to both UP and Sindh, and in India and Pakistan more widely, the status of women as new citizens was keenly contested, and women’s movements on both sides of the border in the first decade following Independence were caught up in the search for ways of balancing universal notions of citizenship alongside female mobilization. Women’s organizations in the late 1940s and early 1950s in both places engaged with the idea of group rights, in the main, through juggling liberal universal notions of citizenship on the one hand and movements for grassroots feminist mobilization on the other. Likewise, this was also a question of scales of mobilization: the often difficult relationship between local movements and regional, national or international ones, was also part and parcel of the challenges faced by women more generally, not least around problems of political representation.