4792 M. A. BHAT AND R. SHAHID Racialising citizenship The special issue also maps how the attrition of citizenship status in the region, both visible and in stealth, has happened through processes of racialisation. For us, racialisation refers particularly to those political practices that produce and others social groups as distinct, isolated and stigmatised (Hochman 2019). The articles in this issue highlight the evolving racialisation of citizenship and its entanglement with the wider political system. Previously, Gunasingham (2019) explored the escalation of extremist Buddhist movements in the context of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and intermittent conflicts between Buddhist radicals and Muslim minorities in Sri Lanka to highlight how the intertwined relationship between the state and Buddhist clergy have legitimised hostility, discrimination and violence against Muslim minorities. In this special issue, Shahid and Lee and Berger and Garg show how the violence in each of these Buddhist-majority countries should be seen through the processes of incremental racialisation with the most violent results in the latter. In many ways, the situation in India, particularly Assam, reflects similar patterns as Myanmar, making India and Myanmar an apt comparison. Previously, Roy (2010) and Jayal (2013), in particular, have shown how ethnic exclusion is immanent in India’s citizenship regime. In India, this has resulted in the diminution of an inclusive jus soli regime to an exclusivist regime increasingly based on religious classifications. These developments reflect an erosion of what one of the contributions calls ‘liberal citizenship’ (Berger & Garg), which is inclusive, non-discriminatory, and stable citizenship status. This has happened because of ‘the exclusionary effects’ that ‘emerge from the contestation of liberal citizenship regimes’ by political actors motivated by their ‘ethnonationalist imaginaries’ (Berger & Garg). This is not to say that citizenship regimes in the region were previously inclusive. Jayal (2013) analysed how the legal differentiation between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ in post-1947 partition India was institutionalised, effectively masking the religious connotations embedded within these terms. In essence, Hindus were often labelled as ‘refugees’ while Muslims were termed ‘migrants’. This distinction led to divergent routes to citizenship for the two groups, with each category facing its unique set of challenges and opportunities. Natrajan (2021) recently points out that the mere existence of Muslims and Dalits (erstwhile ‘lower caste Untouchable’ communities) within the envisioned Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) is identified as a challenge for the defining principles of this concept to come to fruition. The presence of Muslims, in particular, within the geographical and social domains of Hindutva (Hindu supremacist nationalism) is highlighted as a contradiction to the ideal of a racially pure Hindu state. Other scholars studying India’s citizenship practices have also previously made an explicit connection with the notion of racialisation (Bhat 2023). There are several important themes related to racialisation that this special issue contributes to. The first relates to the political geographies of racialisation. For instance, providing the granular political history of Assam, Gogoi and Sen show how exclusionary citizenship – what they describe as the shift in India from jus soli to jus sanguinis – emerged in India. Their major contribution is to show how several political registers, narratives and interests, sometimes aligned and sometimes conflicting, constitute exclusion and attrition of citizenship. They pay particular attention to how localised ethnic politics