CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 2024, VOL. 56, NO. 2, 155–183 https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2024.2340996 The Specter of Potential Foreigners: Revisiting the Postcolonial Citizenship Regimes of Myanmar and India Elizabeth L. Rhoads a a * and Ritanjan Das b * Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Department of History, Lund University, Sweden, Lund; Leiden Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands, Leiden b ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Revisiting the citizenship regimes of Myanmar and India through a comparative lens, this article argues that a specter of the “potential foreigner” is decisive in the adjudication of citizenship in both countries. Citizenship is conceptualized not only on the basis of who is a citizen, but a perennial suspicion towards those who may not be. We frame this argument in the context of increasingly restrictive atmospheres in both countries, epitomized by violence towards the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Citizenship Amendment Act in India. This paper employs an historical perspective, tracing the evolution of citizenship since the partitions of Burma and Pakistan from India. It interrogates the very notion of foreignness that is embedded in these discourses, through a detailed description of the religious, ethnic, racial, and administrative "other" etched in the legislative and socio-political fabric of both countries. In order to develop the idea of potential foreigner as a key element of national identity and citizenship policy, the paper examines crucial legislation over the last three-quarters of a century, and the consequences of linking narrowing definitions of ethno-national belonging to citizenship status. Received 13 November 2023 Accepted 5 April 2024 KEYWORDS potential foreigner; postcolonial citizenship; Myanmar; India; partition Introduction Contestation around the notion of citizenship has become one of the defining features of South Asian politics in the last few decades. The conventional understanding of citizenship as an institutionalized system of formal and informal norms defining access to membership of a sovereign nation-state is increasingly fraught with “self-imposed national blinders.”1 In fact, with steadily rising rates of global migration, religious and ethnic intolerance,2 and the concomitant rise in often acerbic forms of othering,3 the question of who is – or claims to be – a citizen has significant global resonance. In an effort to “strip away such national CONTACT Elizabeth L. Rhoads Elizabeth.rhoads@ace.lu.se Department of History, Lund University *Both authors equally contributed to the article. 1 FitzGerald 2012, 1726. 2 Jacobsen et al. 2016. 3 Schenk 2021. Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.