CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 159 leading hundreds of thousands of refugees to cross the border into Bangladesh, a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, and an investigation into the crime of deportation at the International Criminal Court. Following the 2021 coup, the question of citizenship returned to the forefront of Myanmar politics.34 The SAC pledged to repatriate Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh,35 and the National Unity Government (NUG) – a parallel civilian government formed following the coup by the legislators elected in the unimplemented 2020 elections – issued a “Rohingya Policy,” announcing they would revoke the 1982 Citizenship Law and move towards a system of jus soli citizenship.36 These overtures towards the Rohingya raised more questions than answers, as they came from the same military chief who had carried out the violence in 2017, and some NUG members who had previously been silent or even supportive of the military’s policies in Rakhine.37 Two years before the coup in Myanmar, and after three years of parliamentary scrutiny, India’s parliament, controlled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 11, 2019. This act incorporated religion into the Citizenship Act of 1955 for the first time, providing a pathway to citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians who had entered India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan prior to 2015, but did not extend the same eligibility to Muslims (such as Ahmadiyya from Pakistan or Rohingya from Myanmar).38 Though ostensibly designed as a benevolent pathway to citizenship for certain religious minorities, the amendment has been widely perceived to violate the secular spirit of the Indian Constitution, precipitating court challenges from political parties, MPs, religious organizations, NGOs, and even the state of Kerala.39 Some have gone as far as calling it a “stunt by the Hindu political right in India to attempt to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship rights.”40 The legislation met with significant opposition on counts of being both morally and legally indefensible, with several nonBJP controlled regional governments (West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi) refusing to implement it, and country-wide protests led by activists and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International India, which described the CAA as a “bigoted law that legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion.”41 The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) described the Act as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.”42 The BJP, however, as Anupama Roy has noted, has repeatedly couched the CAA in terms of righting previous wrongs stemming from partition in 1947 and lack of protection of minorities by Pakistan. The CAA is seen as providing a pathway for “specified religious communities to return ‘home’ in the fulfilment of a moral claim to obtain the legal protection of citizenship.”43 34 Rhoads 2023a. Westerman 2021; Andrews 2023. 36 Frontier 2021; NUG 2021. 37 Zarni 2021. In 2023 the NUG appointed U Aung Kyaw Moe, a Rohingya human rights activist, as a deputy minister in its Ministry of Human Rights. 38 BBC 2024. 39 Mandhani 2021. 40 Chandrachud, 2020: 138. 41 Amnesty International 2019. 42 OHCHR 2019. 43 Roy 2022. 35