CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 163 Designing postcolonial citizenship in Myanmar and India According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of 2021 more than half of the global population of stateless persons were in Southeast Asia, with Myanmar accounting for the largest number.71 The stateless within and outside of Myanmar’s borders are a result of multiple waves of migration, emigration, legislative changes, and armed conflicts, many precipitated by political ruptures like the 2021 coup. In 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya were displaced to Bangladesh, joining an estimated 300,000 Rohingya already displaced there. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya had previously crossed the border during immigration raids in 1992 and 1978, after which most were repatriated in the following years via bilateral agreements between the Bangladesh and Myanmar governments.72 Understanding how Myanmar came to hold the distinction of the largest statelessness caseload in the region and the home state of the largest stateless population in the world (the Rohingya)73 requires a deep-dive into Myanmar’s citizenship regime, migration history, and its colonial incorporation into and subsequent partition from British India. Parsing citizens from foreigners at independence: taingyintha and “statutory citizens” The circular nature of migration between British India and Burma, with millions of people circulating between the ports of Calcutta, the Coromandel coast, and Rangoon to work in Burma’s rice mills and rice fields and on sugar plantations and docks, greatly impacted early discussions on citizenship even before Burma’s partition from India.74 From 1901 onwards, Indians made up over fifty percent of Rangoon’s population.75 Whether Indians were temporary or permanent residents, and what rights they should be afforded, were continuous points of contention in negotiations between the governments of India and Burma both before and after independence.76 The postcolonial Burmese government did not automatically grant citizenship to all those resident in Burma at independence, even if they had been born there. Postcolonial Burmese citizenship was framed to include South Asians who had made Burma their permanent home, while excluding those seen as economic migrants or sojourners on Burmese soil. Burma’s 1947 Constitution, finalized shortly before independence in 1948, allowed for anyone who had resided in the country for either at least eight years in the decade leading up to independence or the decade prior to the Japanese occupation which began in 1942 to “elect” or choose Burmese citizenship if they were born in a 71 UNHCR, 2021. McConnachie, 2021. However, these were not the first immigration raids to result in an influx of refugees crossing the Bangladesh border. In the late 1950s, immigration raids targeting Muslims led to at least ten thousand people fleeing across the border to what was then East Pakistan. At that time the 1951 Refugee Convention only applied to people who had been displaced due to the war in Europe, and UNHCR did not have any involvement. This displacement was treated as a bilateral issue and is generally left out of the historiography of Rohingya displacement. 73 ISI 2020. 74 While these are the routes that the vast majority of migrants took, this is not to suggest that people from the subcontinent only entered Burma by sea or from these ports alone. For more on Indian labor migration in colonial Burma, see Amrith 2013; Jaiswal, 2014. 75 Lowis 1902. 76 IOR 1941; 1947; 1948. 72