Distinguishing Between Persons and Citizens: Rights and Inclusion

Walk into any government office in India and you will quickly learn that not everyone standing in line has the same set of rights. A foreign tourist, a permanent resident, and a citizen may all share the same human dignity, yet the state treats them very differently. This gap between being a “person” and being a “citizen” sits at the heart of political theory. It shapes who gets to vote, who can hold office, who receives welfare, and ultimately who counts as a full member of society. Understanding this distinction helps explain both the promise of universal human rights and the stubborn reality of exclusion.

What does it mean to be a person? 🔗

At the most basic level, a person is simply a human being. Personhood is tied to existence itself, not to any document, passport, or government recognition. From this status flow rights described as universal: the right to life, liberty, dignity, and security. These belong to a human being regardless of where they were born or which flag flies over them.

This idea is captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Its very first article states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. The Declaration also makes clear that everyone is entitled to these rights without distinction of race, sex, language, religion, or national origin. In short, personhood stands for the universal, while citizenship, as scholars note, is ultimately more exclusionary in nature.

In the Indian Constitution, this distinction is written into the text itself. Some fundamental rights are guaranteed to “any person,” while others are reserved only for “citizens.” For example, the right to equality before the law under Article 14 and the protection of life and personal liberty under Article 21 extend to every person on Indian soil, including foreigners. This reflects the philosophical idea that certain protections attach to our shared humanity, not to membership in a particular nation.

What is citizenship? 🔗

Citizenship is a legal status that binds an individual to a specific nation-state. It is not automatic for everyone present in a country. Instead, it confers a defined bundle of rights and obligations that non-citizens generally do not enjoy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes citizenship as having three dimensions: a legal status defined by civil, political, and social rights; an identity as a political agent who participates in institutions; and a form of membership in a political community.

In India, citizenship unlocks rights that residence alone cannot. Only citizens can vote in general elections, contest for public office, and access certain government jobs. Certain fundamental rights are also citizen-specific. The freedom of speech and expression and the right to move freely throughout the territory of the country under Article 19, for instance, are guaranteed only to citizens, as laid out in the Constitution. The detailed rules of who qualifies are governed by the Citizenship Act of 1955, which sets out acquisition by birth, descent, registration, and naturalisation.

The civil, political, and social layers of citizenship 🔗

The British sociologist T.H. Marshall offered one of the most influential frameworks for understanding what citizenship contains. In his 1949 lecture “Citizenship and Social Class,” he argued that citizenship rights developed in three stages. Marshall traced civil rights to the eighteenth century, political rights to the nineteenth, and social rights to the twentieth.

Civil rights cover individual freedoms such as liberty of the person, free speech, the right to own property, and the right to justice. Political rights centre on the ability to participate in power, mainly through voting and standing for election. Social rights, the latest to emerge, include the right to economic welfare and security and the ability to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards of the society. Marshall believed that as these rights spread to everyone, the old hierarchies of class would gradually lose their grip. His model remains a useful lens, even though, as later critics pointed out, his account was largely drawn from the experience of the white, able-bodied working man.

The historical exclusivity of citizenship 🔗

Citizenship has rarely been generous. For most of recorded history, it was a privilege guarded by a narrow elite. The word “civil” itself comes from the Latin jus civis, the right of the citizen, a concept rooted in ancient Rome where only some inhabitants held legal standing. In ancient Athens, often praised as the cradle of democracy, citizenship excluded women, enslaved people, and foreign residents, leaving a small minority of free men to govern.

This pattern of exclusion is not an accident of the past. One influential analysis argues that the history of citizenship has been an unhappy one, where the denial of rights and resources to some groups by others has been typical rather than exceptional. No historically significant form of citizenship, the argument goes, has been entirely free of this kind of exclusion. Even modern democracies began with sharp limits. India’s own freedom movement was, in large part, a demand by colonial subjects to be recognised as rights-bearing citizens rather than ruled-over persons.

Expanding citizenship through social movements 🔗

If citizenship started as a closed club, it has been pried open largely through struggle. Rights were not simply handed down by benevolent rulers; they were claimed, fought for, and won by movements representing those left outside. This is why many theorists see citizenship as a dynamic process rather than a fixed status.

The sociologist Thomas Janoski draws a useful distinction here between substantive and formal citizenship. Substantive citizenship refers to the ways stigmatised groups gain rights and recognition, while formal citizenship concerns how outsiders become naturalised members. One of the key ways individual rights are realised, this view holds, is through collective social movements and social struggles.

The Indian experience of expanding rights 🔗

India offers vivid examples of this expansion. At independence, the Constitution made a radical choice by granting universal adult franchise immediately, giving the vote to all adults regardless of wealth, literacy, caste, or gender. This was remarkable because many older democracies had taken more than a century to reach the same point.

The struggle did not end there. The framework of reservations in education, employment, and legislatures was designed to bring Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and later Other Backward Classes into substantive citizenship, not just formal membership. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s insistence on social and economic democracy reflected exactly Marshall’s worry that political rights mean little without social rights. More recently, the Supreme Court’s recognition of a third gender in the NALSA judgment and the reading down of provisions that criminalised same-sex relations show how the boundaries of who counts as a full citizen continue to be renegotiated.

Categories of citizens excluded from full rights 🔗

Even when people hold formal citizenship on paper, many do not enjoy its rights in practice. This is the idea of the second-class citizen, someone who is systematically discriminated against despite their nominal legal status, facing limited civil rights and reduced socioeconomic opportunity. Sociologists studying citizenship have identified several recurring categories of people who fall into this gap between formal status and lived reality.

Stigmatised citizens 🔗

Stigmatised citizens are those whose social identity carries a mark of disgrace that limits their full participation. Research on people with mental health conditions found that stigmatisation was a major barrier to citizenship, restricting access to services, housing, and employment, and leaving people feeling like “second class citizens” on a different level from the rest of society. In the Indian context, caste-based discrimination, the stigma faced by people living with HIV, and prejudice against sexual minorities all create stigmatised citizens whose legal equality is undermined by social reality.

Impaired citizens 🔗

Impaired citizens are persons with disabilities who are kept from full membership by physical and attitudinal barriers. As work on disability and citizenship observes, it is hard to believe that disabled people are, in some cases, still excluded from participating as full citizens. Inaccessible public transport, buildings, and information mean that a wheelchair user or a visually impaired person may hold every legal right yet be practically shut out of public life. India’s Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2016 was an attempt to convert formal rights into substantive inclusion, though implementation gaps remain significant.

Potential citizens 🔗

Potential citizens are those on a pathway toward full membership but not yet there. This category includes children, who hold rights in a developing form, and long-term residents or applicants awaiting naturalisation. Migrants and refugees often live in this in-between zone, subject to a government’s authority and contributing to its economy, yet denied the political voice that full citizens enjoy. Debates around documentation, registers, and statelessness in India highlight how anxious and precarious this status of “potential” membership can feel.

Quasi-citizens 🔗

Quasi-citizens occupy a partial or hybrid status, holding some rights of membership while being denied others. The term appears in studies of emigrants who retain ties to a homeland that grants them a form of quasi-citizenship short of full standing. India’s Overseas Citizen of India scheme is a clear example: card-holders enjoy several privileges such as visa-free travel and the right to work, but they cannot vote, contest elections, or hold constitutional offices. They are members in part, but not in full.

The challenges of achieving equal inclusion 🔗

These categories reveal that citizenship is not a single line dividing insiders from outsiders. It is a spectrum, with full members at one end and various degrees of partial membership stretching toward exclusion. A modern critique notes a trend across many states to create multiple classes of citizenship, where some citizens access the full complement of rights while the rights of many others remain restricted.

The core challenge is the gap between formal and lived citizenship. As one body of research puts it, citizenship confined to its formal legal dimension fails to capture how it is actually experienced, contested, and claimed by those excluded from real participation. Closing this gap requires more than passing laws. It demands social attitudes that respect difference, infrastructure that includes rather than excludes, and active movements that keep pushing the boundaries of membership outward. The goal of comprehensive social membership for all individuals remains a work in progress, in India as everywhere else.

What do you think? Should the most basic rights, such as the right to vote in local elections, depend on formal citizenship status, or should long-term residents who contribute to a community also have a political voice? And in your own surroundings, which group of “second-class citizens” do you think faces the widest gap between their rights on paper and their rights in practice?

References

1. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights
2. https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/8/1/9/682631
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/citizenship/
4. https://www.mha.gov.in/en/commoncontent/acquisition-and-termination-of-indian-citizenship
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-Marshall
6. https://gsdrc.org/topic-guides/social-exclusion/causes/exclusion-based-on-social-status-or-identity/
7. https://citizens.collaborative.yale.edu/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/publicationpdfs/collective_citizenship.pdf
8. https://main.sci.gov.in/judgments
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-class_citizen
10. https://www.nationalelfservice.net/populations-and-settings/community-settings/barriers-citizenship-mental-health/
11. https://www.elgaronline.com/display/book/9781800880467/ch25.xml
12. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701957/
13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21565503.2017.1420618
14. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1558541/xml