D.P. Joshi v. State of Madhya Pradesh

It is the cleanest Indian statement of what domicile is for, and it disposes of the two confusions students carry into the module — domicile with citizenship, and domicile of origin with place of birth.

A capitation fee was remitted for those having a Madhya Bharat domicile. The question was whether that discriminated on the ground of place of birth under Art. 15(1).

It did not. Citizenship and domicile represent two different conceptions: citizenship goes to political status, domicile to civil rights. A concession keyed to domicile is therefore not a concession keyed to place of birth.

Step one — two statuses, given at birth. The Court quoted Udny: the law of England and of almost all civilised countries ascribes to each individual at his birth two distinct legal statuses or conditions.

Step two — the operative distinction. Political status may depend on different laws in different countries, whereas civil status is governed universally by one single principle, namely that of domicile, which is the criterion established by law for determining civil status.

Step three — dispose of the birth argument. The domicile of origin, though received at birth, need not be the country in which the infant is born, nor the country where his parents are residing, nor the country to which his father belongs by race or allegiance, nor the country of the infant's nationality. Arden M.R. in Somerville v. Somerville put the same point in the usual way: he spoke of the domicile of origin rather than of birth.

It opens: Distinguish domicile from citizenship — and it is the first case to cite on the head.

Show the distinction doing constitutional work in the other direction too. In Rashid Hasan Roomi v. Union of India domicile carried a citizenship question under Art. 5: the State argued that a child's domicile changes automatically with the father's, so that a son left behind in India when his father migrated in 1948 was a foreigner. Tripathi J. held the argument, though ingenious, to be based on a fallacy, and the petitioner was set at liberty.

Use the civil-status point to explain the module. Because domicile is the universal criterion of civil status, it is the connecting factor for capacity to marry, for legitimacy, for the recognition of an adoption and for matrimonial jurisdiction in the classical rule. Where the interest is the protection of a child rather than status, the law switches to ordinary residence — s. 9(1) of the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890, Re P and Marggarate Pulparampil.

It does not decide anything about the acquisition of a domicile of choice, which is Kedar Pandey; nor does it hold that a domicile-based classification can never be discriminatory on some other ground.