Endorsements 5 “In this meticulous study of the Foreign Tribunals operating in Assam, Mohsin Alam Bhat, Arushi Gupta and Shardul Gopujkar reveal how an exclusionary politics informed by India’s colonial legacy has been mobilised to deny citizenship from hundreds of thousands of residents who were born and grew up in the state. Exposing the tribunal’s fundamental disregard of basic legal procedures and the rulings of India’s Supreme Court as well as the unapologetic support the tribunal has received over the years from the Gauhati High Court, Unmaking Citizens lays bare how those who have been appointed to guard the law have instead instrumentalised legal proceedings to systematically undermine forms of identity, belonging and protection, and to deny the residents of their own state ‘the right to have rights’. Unmaking Citizens is a must read to anyone interested in how the state uses the law to deprive people of citizenship.” Neve Gordon, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, and a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences. “One of the most populous states in the world’s largest democracy has been undertaking a citizenship verification exercise of mind-boggling proportions. This report painstakingly documents how all residents of the state of Assam in Eastern India have effectively been deemed to be foreign nationals, saddled with the burden to prove their citizenship through documentary evidence of ancestral residence predating 1971. As of January 2025, 165,992 people have been declared foreigners, with over 85,000 cases still pending. A resident can be declared a foreigner if they fail to show up for a hearing, even if the notice of the hearing was sent to their previous address and they never received it. Or, if their official documents have minor discrepancies because of transliterating their names into English. Or if they changed their names, as Indian women often do after marriage. The un-appealable determination of their status is made by executive tribunals manned by inadequately trained ‘judges’ on fixed-term government contracts, which are often not renewed if they find insufficient ‘foreigners’. The High Court exercises its discretion to review the tribunal’s findings in a vanishingly small number of cases. A large number of those who fail to prove their Indian citizenship are poor or female Muslims. They can be detained for years or ‘pushed back’ over the border into Bangladesh, a country they may have never set foot upon previously. Future generations of Indians will be ashamed, appalled, and enraged by this systematic cruelty being perpetrated in the name of their security and safety.” Tarunabh Khaitan, Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the London School of Economics Law School, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School