POLAR live in Tibetan settlements. A Tibetan refugee’s stay in India requires RC renewal every five years (it was annual until 2012). This document exemplifies the state’s reluctance to formalize pathways to citizenship. Despite India providing Tibetan refugees with land and facilitating the establishment of educational, social, and political institutions, their legal status remained amorphously defined by the Foreigner’s Act of 1946. Not possessing or renewing an RC renders Tibetan refugees “illegal,” leaving them vulnerable to imprisonment and/or refoulement. Thus, the RC also enables state surveillance of the refugee population. The issuance of RCs on arrival persisted until 1979. In 1980, India restricted RC issuance to children of Tibetan refugees born in India, aimed at discouraging new arrivals. However, the Indian state overlooked surreptitious procurement of RCs by newly arriving Tibetan refugees (Kaufman, 2009; Tibetan Justice Center, 2015). The influx of Tibetans in the late 80s, following a series of uprisings in Tibet, prompted India to enforce stricter policies. By the early 1990s, the Indian state, alongside the Tibetan government-in-exile, advocated voluntary repatriation, making it almost impossible for newly arriving adult refugees to procure RCs. From 2004, RCs were no longer issued to new arrivals. They were replaced by “Special Entry Permits” (SEPs). SEP categories comprised students (permitted for the duration of study), pilgrims (for three to six months), and a general category (without fixed duration) which was rarely granted. Grounds for special entry did not include fear of persecution or threat to life, which characterizes refugee flight (see United Nations, 1951). Therefore, Tibetan refugees in India are divided into two groups: those possessing RCs and the undocumented. As Tarangini Sriraman (2018) points out, documentary regimes invite “deep immersion” of the state into marginal spaces, in this instance through frequent and compulsory interactions with the state. Before gradual digitization, starting in 2015, my interlocuters described the renewal process as not only time consuming but also degrading, characterized by day-long waits for bureaucrats, only to be told to return on a whim. This is a form of refugee “wait” in the Global South—one not premised on the hope of return or rehabilitation but experienced as a form of governmentality. This wait is compounded in the context of the Identity Certificate (IC), a travel document in lieu of a passport conferred to RC holders. The IC can take months and even years to be approved, frequently arriving long after dates of travel have passed. For displaced communities spread across nation-states, international travel is crucial for maintaining their transnational formation. Tibetans have lost scholarships, missed visiting family, and significant events like births and deaths. They find themselves repeatedly expending effort and financial resources traveling to the MEA office, Delhi, to procure an IC. During the process, they can face demands for bribes, often exceeding what they can afford. The IC extends the scope of discrimination from the national to the international scale, as it is often unrecognized at foreign ports of entry. Tibetan exile parliamentarian Tashi9 told me that he sought an Indian passport in part due to the humiliation he had experienced at ports of entry—notably, during his travel to Latvia for the 2019 World Parliament Convention “If I wish to travel outside, and represent Tibet, I wish to travel with some amount of dignity and I don’t want to be looked at as a criminal or a second-class citizen.” These constraints motivated some second-generation Tibetan refugees to seek Indian citizenship. However, the Indian citizenship framework, initially based on birthright, underwent its first major amendment in 1987—requiring that one parent be Indian. By 2004, the mandate extended to both parents. These changes sought to exclude refugees and migrants from citizenship. This was exacerbated by the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, particularly targeting religious minorities by requiring documents like birth certificates, which many Indians lack (Chatterjee & Raheja, 2020). These changes have made Indian citizenship available to only those Tibetans born in India before 1987, and subsequently, their offspring. Yet, until 2010, there was no legal record of eligible Tibetans actively seeking citizenship. Scholars read this refusal/rejection of Indian citizenship by eligible Tibetan exiles largely through three lenses: the desire to return to Tibet; an assertion of Tibetan sovereignty; and the coercion of the exile state, which wanted to retain a Tibetan citizenry for the legitimization of their movement (Choedon, 2018; DeVoe, de Voe, 1983; Hess, 2006; McConnell, 2016; McGranahan, 2018; Roemer, 2008). Jessica Falcone and Tsering Wangchuk (2008) and Pia Oberoi (2006) highlighted another angle—the issue of Indian officials repeatedly denying passports to Tibetans. These rejections remained out of the public record due to the absence of legal appeals. Along with the explanations above, the 15552934, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/plar.12580 by Test, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 180