174 E. L. RHOADS AND R. DAS state that can facilitate eventual claims to citizenship.156 In Myanmar, however, as citizenship is squarely based on ancestry, such practices or other forms of recognition are far less likely to lead to administrative citizenship.157 Conversely, beyond legislative debates, everyday administrative functions are a powerful state tool. In both India and Myanmar, there are numerous accounts of people deprived of citizenship through irregular, discriminatory bureaucratic practices, sometimes resulting from abuse of authority despite existing legal procedures, other times intrinsic to the procedures themselves.158 These practices are a form of administrative or bureaucratic violence, the intent being to “use … all possible administrative means to de-legitimize the claims to citizenship by anybody feeling some sense of entitlement.”159 As early as 1948, to deal with returning Muslims who sought to reclaim their properties, the Indian government established a permit system called the “Influx from Pakistan (Control) Ordinance.” In practice, the permit system proved impossible to enforce, ultimately devolving to haphazard surveillance by petty functionaries such as railway guards and ticket collectors alongside a flourishing trade of counterfeit permits.160 The permit system was eventually withdrawn, but the question of citizenship in the context of the massive exchange of people across India’s post-partition borders continues to plague the process of administrative citizenship. Administrative violence was one of the obvious outcomes, especially when combined with xenophobia, racism, and nativism. In the decades following partition, judges were faced with the unenviable task of deciding upon the evidentiary value of passports, and subsequently, other identity documents like electoral and ration cards. As the question of immigration has become more politicized and controversial, the worth of these documents has become commensurately less in official quarters, even as they constitute key resources for their holders.161 The NRC is a particular example of the Indian state’s effort to implement administrative citizenship and the resulting administrative-bureaucratic violence. The NRC was originally designed only for Assam during the first census of independent India in 1951, and proposals to update it have been intermittently revived in subsequent years.162 In a 2003 amendment to the 1955 Citizenship Act, a new clause (14A) titled “Issue of National Identity Cards” was added. This clause states that the central government “may compulsorily register every citizen of India and issue national identity card to him” [sic] and “may maintain a National Register of Indian Citizens.”163 In 2009, an NGO called Assam Public Works petitioned the Supreme Court to order that the names of undocumented migrants be removed from the voter list, and that the NRC be updated. In 2014, the Supreme Court directed the central government and the state 156 Lund 2020. Mosaic Myanmar 2023. Rhoads 2023b; Mosaic Myanmar 2023. 159 Beaugrand 2011, 234–36; see also Graeber 2012. Arraiza et. al describe this primarily as the deprivation of individual rights by arbitrarily denying official documentation, which eventually leads to the “consideration of groups of inhabitants who are, or arguably descend from, migrants (often regardless of how many generations) as foreigners” (2020, 198). As mentioned earlier, the Indian Foreigners Act (1946) and the Burmese Foreigners Act (1864) derive from the same nineteenth century British Indian legislation, both placing the burden of proof on the individual and not the state, thereby leading to significant arbitrary discrimination. 160 Zamindar 2007; Chatterji 2012. 161 Chhotray and McConnell 2018. 162 Jayal 2019. 163 The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2003. 157 158