by the election of two Indian candidates to the House of Commons, Dadabhai Naoroji and Mancherjee Bhownaggree. Demands for an equal imperial citizenship with the same status and rights as European British subjects were a primary motivator for Indian civil rights movements throughout the Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While the imperial government had recognised these claims as legitimate prior to the First World War, it was nervous at the prospect of these movements becoming revolutionary in nature and decided to forcefully suppress local unrest rather than politically address Indian concerns. As it became apparent that equality within the British Empire would not be possible, the focus of post-war Indian political movements turned towards independence. Post-independence policies Partition and transition British India was partitioned into two independent Dominions on 15 August 1947, the Union of India and Federation of Pakistan. India transitionally retained the British sovereign as its head of state until its continued membership in the Commonwealth of Nations as a republic was agreed upon at the 1949 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference. Indians continued to be British subjects until independent India enacted its own nationality legislation. Subjects of the princely states, who were previously considered British protected persons, became British subjects of India when their states acceded to India. British subject status was reformed under the British Nationality Act 1948. The Act abandoned the common nationality used across the Empire and redefined British subject to mean any citizen of a Commonwealth country. A Commonwealth citizen was defined in this Act to have the same meaning. British subject/Commonwealth citizen status co-existed with the citizenship of each Commonwealth country. Because India had not enacted citizenship regulations by the time the 1948 Act took effect, Indians (and citizens of all other Dominions without citizenship laws) were provisionally classed as "British subjects without citizenship". Republic and a national citizenship The citizenship provisions of the Constitution of India came into force on 26 November 1949, in advance of the document's full effective date and the country's conversion into a republic on 26 January 1950. The partition resulted in large-scale population movements across the new borders separating India and Pakistan. In this context, the Constituent Assembly limited the scope of the Constitution's citizenship provisions for the immediate purpose of determining citizenship of these migrants. The Citizenship Act later enacted by Parliament in 1955 provides a full framework detailing citizenship requirements after