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E. L. RHOADS AND R. DAS
issued after 1948 and before the 1982 Act came into effect, but these were not widely issued,
particularly as they were not required for citizens by birth. Lastly, records of residence and
records of entry into Myanmar can be used to prove residence in Myanmar prior to 1948.
But in practice, obtaining these documents is extremely difficult for many reasons, primarily the heavy bombing of Rangoon during the Second World War that destroyed many
private and government records. For some, such an impossible task led them to
abandon their citizenship applications altogether.
Conclusion
The “institutionalization of suspicion”170 and the precarious citizenship conditions
such suspicion causes171 have become increasingly recurrent themes in scholarship
on citizenship in the subcontinent. A growing body of scholarship explores the everyday vulnerabilities emanating from this suspicion, which Lucy Dubochet describes as
the “citizenship of extraordinary political obligation and minimal entitlement.”172
This scholarship resonates with the administrative-bureaucratic violence and rightsbased citizenship dilemmas we have discussed in this paper but focuses on everyday
precarity.
The specter of the potential foreigner goes beyond the temporal immediateness
inherent in such characterizations to provide a much deeper portrayal of the suspicion
embedded in the overlapping contours of legal, social, and political history that can be
traced back to partition and the colonial era. Despite differences in the evolution of citizenship policies in post-colonial Myanmar and India, in both states citizenship policies
are predicated upon a notion of foreignness that can be religious, ethnic, racial, or administrative. This suspicion is a legacy of the subcontinent’s two partitions and has become a
part of the socio-political fabric of both countries.
Analyzing the legislative evolution of the notion of protecting the nation from
potential foreigners in India and Myanmar reveals a critical analytical fulcrum
around which postcolonial citizenship has formed. The concept of nationhood presupposes a negative, or even antagonistic, "other."173 The power relations arising from citizenship claims and suspicions about non-citizen "others" constitute an arena over
which different interpretations from various positionalities have historically struggled
to gain hegemony. And yet, as the current state of affairs in Myanmar and India indicate, a restrictive interpretation of this construct threatens to gain legitimacy over all
other expressions of citizenship and national identity, one that has the specter of potential foreigners at its core.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Michael Edwards and the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of
Cambridge for organizing the “Axes of Difference in the Study of Burma/Myanmar” workshop in
170
Dubochet 2023, 110; see also Pathan and Jha 2022.
Lori 2017; Punathil 2022.
172
Dubochet 2023, 107.
173
Winichakul 1994.
171