Acknowledgements 6 This report would not have been possible without the support of numerous individuals and institutions. We were fortunate to receive support from several esteemed institutions. Funding for field research and data collection was provided through Seed Funding from the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (Melbourne Law School). We are especially grateful to Michelle Foster, Jeff Redding, Christoph Sperfeldt, Adil Hasan Khan, and other colleagues at Melbourne Law School for their constant support and encouragement. The Queen Mary Impact Fund supported the editorial and publication process. We extend our sincere thanks to our colleagues at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, including David White, Ruth Fletcher, Catherine Norman, Isabella D’Adamo, and Mujahid Aziz, for their assistance and encouragement throughout this project. We are especially grateful to the National Law School of India University and its academic leadership for providing the institutional space to finalise the report, particularly through the Immigration Clinic. Special thanks goes to DAKSH, especially to Leah Verghese and her team, for collecting Gauhati High Court cases and generously sharing them with us so that we could prepare the database on which our major findings are based. They embody academic solidarity and a true community of support. The report benefited greatly from thoughtful feedback and constructive reviews from scholars in the field. We are particularly thankful to Douglas McDonald-Norman, Arun K. Thiruvengadam, and Alok Prasanna. We also received enriching feedback and valuable discussions with Talha Abdul Rahman, Saurabh Bhattacharjee, Kunal Ambasta, Pritam Baruah, Abhishek Saha, Harsh Mander, Abdul Kalam Azad, and Aman Wadud. Extremely able research assistance was provided at crucial stages by Atreyo Banerjee. We are especially thankful to Neve Gordon and Tarunabh Khaitan for reading the report and generously sharing their endorsement. This report would not have taken shape without the organisational and institutional support of Darshana Mitra and Anup Surendranath, co-founders of the Parichay Legal Aid Clinic. The clinic, born as a labour of love, engaged law students from across India and provided a platform through which the experience of the citizenship trial in Assam could be carefully documented and critically examined. It enabled the rigorous and grounded legal critique that forms the backbone of this report. This report draws deeply from the learnings shared by the courageous lawyers of Assam who have defended individuals before the Foreigners Tribunals and beyond, often under extraordinarily difficult conditions and with extremely limited resources. Their work—undertaken within a system that is structurally unsympathetic—has been a source of insight, strength, and ethical clarity for this project. Some of these learnings appear in the interviews cited in the report; much more is embedded throughout the analysis, which has been shaped by their lived experiences and critical perspectives. We have kept the identities of these lawyers anonymous, both to protect their security and as a matter of ethics, but we want to express our deepest admiration and gratitude for their work. Over the years, numerous students and researchers have contributed to this project. Their names are listed in the authorship and contributor sections. Our deepest thanks go to them—for providing the oxygen and engine for this endeavour, for inspiring us to create a report that can make an impact, serve as a pedagogic tool in classrooms and beyond, and reflect serious, responsible academic and legal work.