Citizenship: Single and Dual

In one line

India has a single citizenship for the whole country, the United States has federal and State citizenship, and Switzerland has communal, cantonal and federal citizenship at once.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: single citizenship means that a federation confers one status of membership, so that a person is a citizen of the country and not separately of a unit; dual citizenship in the federal sense means that a person is a citizen both of the federation and of the unit in which he resides, with rights attaching to each.

India: articles 5 to 11

Articles 5 to 8 determine who was a citizen at the commencement: a person domiciled in the territory of India who was born there, or either of whose parents was born there, or who had been ordinarily resident for not less than five years; migrants from and to Pakistan; and persons of Indian origin residing outside India.

Article 9 provides that a person who has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of a foreign State shall not be a citizen. Article 10 continues citizenship subject to any law of Parliament. Article 11 gives Parliament power to make any provision with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship, under which the Citizenship Act 1955 was enacted.

There is no State citizenship. A person from Kerala living in Assam is an Indian citizen with the same rights as anybody else, subject to article 16(3), which permits Parliament to prescribe a residence requirement for certain State employments, and to article 15's prohibition of discrimination on the ground of place of birth. That is the point of single citizenship: it forbids the units from creating their own membership.

The United States: the Fourteenth Amendment

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Two citizenships in one sentence. Federal citizenship follows birth or naturalisation; State citizenship follows residence and changes when a person moves. Article IV section 2 gives the citizens of each State the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States, which prevents a State from discriminating against citizens of others.

Switzerland: articles 37 to 40

Article 37 provides that any person who is a citizen of a commune and of the canton to which that commune belongs is a Swiss citizen, and that no person may be privileged or disadvantaged because of their citizenship of a commune or a canton.

That is the inverse of the American arrangement. In the United States federal citizenship is primary and State citizenship follows residence. In Switzerland communal citizenship is primary and federal citizenship follows from it, which is why naturalisation in Switzerland is decided at communal level.