The State and the Madheshi Dalit Women’s Access to Citizenship in Nepal

Abstract

The relationship between the state and Madheshi Dalit Womans (MDWs) with reference to the latter’s exercise of citizenship right has long been a contested issue in Nepal due to the latter’s alleged immigrant history and cultural and familial connection with the Dalits of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh of India. The MDWs who are at the lowest social order in Nepal because of their intersecting subordinate identities based on gender, caste, ethnic and class have been systematically excluded from the domain of Nepali citizenship during due course of hill-based national identity formation. Consequently, large number of the MDWs, their spouses and children have remained stateless or struggled hard to obtain citizenship owing to ethnic, caste, gender and class-based exclusion even after insertion of jus soli provisos for a brief period in the 2006 Citizenship Act. On this backdrop, this article, based on qualitative field study in the eastern Tarai, is an effort to explore the intricacies of the citizenshiplessness of the MDWs of Nepal’s eastern Tarai from their subjective experiences. The findings reveal a disappointing picture of citizenshiplessness of the MDW families by virtue of multiple forms of exclusion and also a sustained hierarchy within themselves based on access to different types of citizenship.