JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 4797 The most direct engagement with this theoretical theme is by Sharma who argues that processes of securitisation – the preoccupation with national security ‘real, perceived, or manufactured’ – have affected the ‘character’ of citizenship in India. Read with other contributions, this ‘character’ refers to formal law, informal practice, and the ‘documentary culture’ (Berger and Garg) of citizenship. Sharma’s analysis shows how securitisation operates as a mechanism for the regulation and control of identities, effectively demarcating individuals and communities into categories of ‘secure’ and ‘unsecure’. Security concerns, particularly related to terrorism and immigration, play a pivotal role in this process and often lead to the exclusion of certain groups from full citizenship status. Complementing this, Bhat examines securitisation within the context of state-manufactured precarious citizenship, primarily in Assam. While the term ‘securitisation’ may not be explicitly used, the core theme emerges as the discretionary and biased treatment of individuals seeking to defend their citizenship status. The article reveals the intricate ways in which securitisation manifests itself in bureaucratic practices and documentary requirements. Bhat underscores how bureaucracy can, at times, securitise citizenship through the declaration of individuals as ‘foreigners’, often by suspending ordinary legal norms, and accentuate other exclusionary processes like racialisation. Although term ‘securitisation’ is not overtly employed, Shahid and Lee’s article shifts the focus to the concept of ‘Saffron Ethnocracy’ in India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and elucidated how the concept is clearly at play. This form of ethnocracy reflects the securitisation of public spheres and institutions in favour of the dominant religious and ethnic identities, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. Majoritarian religious groups influence state policies, and this securitisation leads to authoritarian-leaning governance, the marginalisation of minority communities, and the framing of citizenship laws based on religious identity. In essence, the dominant groups securitise their own religious and ethnic identities to shape state policies and reinforce their dominance. The influx of migrants also leads to the phenomenon of ‘nativism’ (Swain 1996) where there is an assertion by a group of its superior rights to land, employment, political power, and cultural dominance based on its indigenous status and historical claims. This sense of entitlement often leads indigenous people to form groups to safeguard their interests against the perceived threats posed by migrants. Several contributions show how the mobilisation of national security, and the securitised framing of blameworthiness of non-citizens and national minorities constitutes right-wing populist threats to citizenship. For instance, Tiwari et al. show how India reversed even the minimal protections of the Rohingya refugees by claiming that the community ‘pose[s] grave security challenges’ to Indians. In the case of the Rohingya in India, Tiwari et al. show how these processes of securitisation turned the community from having some rights (what they call ‘status non-citizen with personhood’) to being pariahs (what they call ‘a rapid depreciation of personhood’). Similarly, Bhat’s account of the Indian policies show how Indian institutions mobilised paranoias of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and ‘infiltration’ to expand burdensome and exclusionary regimes of documentary citizenship. Sharma notes that ‘the logic of securitization may lead to the emergence of competing narratives within the state’. She highlights how processes of securitisation become sites, pretexts, modalities for states to constitute ‘establishing the nature of political community’ and ‘determine who is included and who is excluded’. Sharma shows how this

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