4804 M. A. BHAT AND R. SHAHID growing nationwide market, either independently or in alliance with foreign capitalists. This movement, aligned with the interests of the well-educated professional middle classes which was epitomised by the Indian National Congress from 1885 to 1917. In contrast, ‘little nationalisms’ emerged among regional middle classes, who, fearing competition from other regions and pan-Indian elite, advocated for the exclusive control of their regional markets. Gogoi and Sen situate Assam’s citizenship politics within this history of nationalists, which are sometimes competing and at other times overlapping in their exclusivism. Highlighting both the dramatic and creeping attrition of minority citizenship status in the context of regime identity is illuminating. It shows how wider political patterns of racialisation and ethnicisation are constitutive of citizenship attrition. In the case of India and Myanmar in particular, hyper/ultra-nationalism, Islamophobia and majoritarianism have been the ideological features producing racialisation. This is connected with how the public sphere is instrumentalised and transformed. In India, just like in Myanmar, it has been through dangerous hate speech especially through social media. The country studies in the special issue also provide the best illustration of how citizenship status is a deeply political issue of constitutional identity, even if it may often be incorporated, operationalised and even dismantled through banal bureaucratic modes. As Shahid and Lee note, ethnocratic politics is compellingly related to the politics of statelessness: ‘Saffron Ethnocracy reaches its logical policy conclusion with the total, genocidal, exclusion of Muslims’. Sometimes the wider patterns of democratic attrition weaken citizenship status; at other times, the attrition of citizenship status runs in a parallel manner as a symptom of democratic decline; and sometimes the weakening of citizenship status is what drives the erosion of democracy. Conclusion The main aim of this special issue was to make a case for collectively studying the undermining of citizenship status, democracy and the rule of law in contemporary global politics, with a focus on India. This introduction highlighted several crosscutting themes in the contributions to reflect on how these three notions are interlocked in mutual attrition. It also sought to show how a historically grounded and contextual analysis of this issue – with its focus on South and Southeast Asia – is well placed to explore this interlocking, while illuminating wider global concerns. By weaving together expertise from law, political science, sociology and interdisciplinary humanities, the contributions shed light on the complex mechanisms through which citizenship is constructed, contested and reimagined amidst ongoing political turmoil and societal shifts. Specifically, this introduction showed how right-wing, populist and authoritarian politics today target minorities by making their citizenship status vulnerable. The form this targeting takes is not through bare denationalisation reminiscent of the early twentieth century but through complex and insidious legal routes. The contributions develop this theme by a nuanced analysis of bureaucratic and juridical procedures that may retain the appearance of legality but, in essence, use it as facade. These tactics obscure these violations, making it difficult to identify and rectify the attrition of citizenship status.