In 2024 alone, more than 2,06,000 Indians walked into a consulate somewhere in the world, surrendered their Indian passport, signed a form and ceased to be Indian under the law. The previous year, the figure was over 2,16,000. In 2022, it was just over 2,25,000. The Ministry of External Affairs informed Parliament during the winter session of 2024 that over 20 lakh Indians voluntarily renounced their citizenship between 2011 and 2024 — roughly half of them after 2020.The Minister of State for External Affairs, Kirti Vardhan Singh, was asked in Rajya Sabha for the income or occupation profile of the renunciants. He said the ministry did not maintain that data. The reasons, he added, were “personal and known only to the individual”.The reasons are not, in fact, mysterious. India does not allow dual citizenship. When an Indian citizen voluntarily becomes the citizen of another country, Section 9 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, terminates her Indian citizenship automatically, without ceremony, without notice. To return to India, she will need a visa, like any foreigner, or she will need the consolation prize the state has, since 2005, offered in lieu of full citizenship: the Overseas Citizen of India card.In August 1949, the Constituent Assembly debated draft Article 5, which carried a proviso that one who voluntarily acquired the citizenship of a foreign state could not be a citizen of India. The Drafting Committee elevated the proviso to a general principle, and so it became Article 9 of the Constitution: a flat, prohibitive sentence that closed the door behind anyone who chose to leave. A single member rose to suggest that dual citizenship might be permitted on the basis of reciprocity. The proposal was rejected swiftly and without much debate. Partition was two years old.That this load-bearing wall has remained almost entirely undisturbed for seventy-six years is the puzzle. The Indian-origin population abroad is now 3.54 crore – the largest national diaspora in the world. In 2000, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government appointed a high-level committee under jurist L.M. Singhvi to study it. The Singhvi report, submitted in January 2002, was unequivocal: dual citizenship deserved consideration “in a positive and forward-looking spirit and without the conventional and stereotyped blinkers” that had so often clouded the question. The committee drafted the necessary amendments to the Citizenship Act. Vajpayee, in his Pravasi Bharatiya Divas address in 2003, declared the matter “resolved”.It was not. What followed was a piece of bureaucratic ventriloquism: the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003. Then followed the more important amendments of 2005, which inserted Section 7A into the principal Act, creating a category called the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI).The OCI is a card. The word “citizen” appears in its name. The thing the card describes is something else.What Section 7A creates, Section 7B governs and Section 7D withdraws – together, these sections form a small but intricate architecture of partial belonging.Section 7A confers the OCI on persons of Indian origin from any country other than Pakistan or Bangladesh. Section 7B specifies the rights granted: a multiple-entry, multipurpose, lifelong visa; exemption from registration as a foreigner under the Foreigners Act; “parity with non-resident Indians” in financial, economic and educational matters, with explicit exceptions.An OCI cardholder may not vote. They may not contest for membership of Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha, a state legislature or a panchayat body. They may not hold any constitutional office – President, Vice-President, judge of the Supreme Court of India or a high court. May not, ordinarily, hold government employment. May not buy agricultural land, plantation property, or a farmhouse.On March 4, 2021, the Ministry of Home Affairs added more conditions – an OCI cardholder must obtain a special permit to undertake research, journalism, missionary or tabligh work, mountaineering, or to enter any protected or restricted area for which an Indian citizen would not require one.In every other matter not specifically carved out, the 2021 notification explicitly said, the OCI cardholder is to be treated as a “foreign national”.Section 7D is the trapdoor. It permits the central government to cancel an OCI registration on a number of grounds, the most expansive of which was added by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. It is if the cardholder has violated “any law for the time being in force”, punishable with imprisonment of two years or more. This is breathtakingly broad. The amendment grants the executive an instrument of immense discretionary power against persons whose only available remedy is a constitutional writ in the Indian courts – courts they may not be able to enter the country to attend.The procedural safeguard in Section 7D is the requirement that the cardholder be given a “reasonable opportunity of being heard”. In practice, it has been honoured intermittently.Over the past decade, this architecture has revealed an instructive flaw. A card the state issues is a card the state can take back. Since 2014, the Indian government has revoked over a hundred OCI cards. In 2019, Aatish Taseer, the British-American writer, published a Time magazine cover story severely critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Within weeks, his OCI was revoked, ostensibly for failing to disclose his late father’s Pakistani nationality – a fact he had been writing about for two decades.In 2022 Ashok Swain, a Sweden-based academic, lost his card. Delhi High Court set aside the cancellation in 2025 for lack of evidence. Amrit Wilson, a writer in her seventies, lost hers in 2023 over social media posts on Kashmir and the farmers’ protest. Nitasha Kaul, a professor at Westminster, was turned away at Bengaluru airport in 2024. Her OCI was formally cancelled in 2025. Reuters journalist Raphael Satter is fighting his revocation in Delhi High Court. A real citizen cannot be exiled by a clerk. A holder of the OCI can be, and increasingly is.Also read: Modi Government Extending Its Repression of Activists to Diaspora Critics: Human Rights WatchIndia’s position is, by world standards, unusual. Roughly half the planet’s nations now permit dual citizenship in some form – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Ireland, Israel, the Philippines, Sri Lanka – even Pakistan. Germany joined the club in June 2024. The countries that don’t form an idiosyncratic minority: China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Austria, the Gulf monarchies – and India.The arguments against dual citizenship – divided loyalty, the security of institutions, the worry about hostile diasporas – are not nothing, but they grow weaker on examination. The 1930 Hague Convention’s master nationality rule has, for nearly a century, supplied a workable solution to the problem of conflicting allegiances. A state extending diplomatic protection does not exercise it against another state of which the person is also a national.The Singhvi committee also considered each of these objections in 2002 and found them, on balance, insufficient. India revokes OCI cards on security grounds, but it could continue to do so under a dual-citizenship regime. The United States has lived for a century with millions of dual nationals without collapsing under the weight of “foreign infiltration”.Citizen drainIndia is losing, at the rate of two lakh a year, the very people it ought to be working the hardest to keep – or at least to keep some claim on. Their children, who would have inherited Indian citizenship under any other reasonable system, will return, if at all, as tourists.Why is the Indian state afraid of dual citizenship? Perhaps the honest answer is that the state has, since 1949, preferred to be the sole one to answer the question ‘who is Indian?’. Citizenship is among the most powerful instruments any state possesses. It is the instrument by which the state decides who counts. A state that allows its citizenship to be shared has accepted, in a small but real way, that someone else gets a vote on the question.This is uncomfortable for governments. It is particularly uncomfortable for a government that is also engaged in a long argument – through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the proposed National Register of Citizens, the OCI revocations of dissident professors – about who among people physically present on its territory ought to have access to citizenship. These are not separate questions. They are the same question, asked at different volumes. Who counts as Indian? And who decides?Forty lakh OCI cardholders have accepted the lifelong visa that bears the misleading word “citizen.” There is, somewhere, a much larger number of Indians-by-affection who have never bothered to apply, who have made their peace with being foreigners in their own country, and who, when asked where they are from, will still unhesitatingly say: India.The Indian state has no good reason, in 2026, to disagree with them.Arjun Sheoran is an advocate practicing at the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Views are personal.