POLAR Given the success of appeals, the MEA issued a legal memorandum in 2017, granting Tibetans born in India before 1987 the right to citizenship. However, it did so conditionally: if Tibetans took up Indian citizenship, they would have to leave their settlements and lose access to the benefits, institutes, and facilities of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).5 The policy used another dimension of citizenship—rights and entitlements—as a tool to reenforce the national orthodoxy. This introduced a con in the citizenship-on-offer—promising enfranchisement to India while sacrificing rights, identity, and community entitlements acquired as Tibetan refugees. By capturing the varied ways in which Tibetan refugees respond to the citizenship-on-offer, this article argues that refugees, who inhabit the margins of citizenship regimes, must contest the exclusionary policies that deny them rights and status on account of their identity. They do so to both mitigate their precarity and to preserve their identity against erasure. By disaggregating citizenship in different ways, second-generation Tibetans challenge the restrictions of India’s citizenship regime. Furthermore, their actions reveal the incompleteness of citizenship offered by nation-states like India, which promises more than it delivers. Under the present global order of nation-states, lacking citizenship restricts almost every aspect of life. Nevertheless, second-generation Tibetan refugees’ responses to India’s citizenship offer vary, across accepting it, aspiring for it, and rejecting it. These are complex decisions, including considerations of material survival, access to resources, national belonging, and ongoing claims to political sovereignty.6 This article considers responses of second-generation Tibetan refugees—born between January 1950 and July 1987—toward Indian citizenship. The Tibetan position best detailed in scholarship is the rejection of South Asian host-nation citizenship, marking commitment to Tibetan sovereignty (DeVoe, 1987; Goldstein, 1978; McGranahan, 2018; McConnell, 2011, 2013, 2016; McLagan, 1996; Roemer, 2008). Fewer studies have considered what the 2010 court case—and the subsequent law enforced by the Indian state—meant for Tibetans and what it revealed about the Indian state (Jayal, 2013; Lin, 2022). This article considers ethnographic evidence to contribute to both these conversations. In understanding the political position of refugees, this article also emphasizes what Diana Allan (2013, 21) has called the “local pragmatics—individual and communal—of survival, identity, and continuity,” wherein differing social positions of Tibetan refugees promote different responses to Indian citizenship. Their choices must simultaneously consider the political commitments and economic and existential conditions with which refugees contend. Regarding Indian citizenship, Tibetans articulate different ways of navigating their Tibetan national identity, as well as aspirations toward independence (rang btsan)7 or autonomy (dbu ma’i lam) of Tibet.8 In the cases described, Tibetan refugees demonstrate how even entirely opposite positions toward Indian citizenship—wholesale rejection or fighting to acquire it—can both be undergirded by political commitments. This essay is based on thirty months of fieldwork in India, between 2017 and 2023, focusing on Dharamsala (the Tibetan exile headquarters) and the Tibetan settlement in Bylakuppe. During my fieldwork, I interacted with a broad spectrum of individuals, including activists, bureaucrats, artists, journalists, and students. THE REFUGEE IN CITIZENSHIP REGIMES Following the World Wars, citizenship came to represent a changing world order (McGranahan, 2018, 335). While promising equal civil, political, and social rights through membership to a nation (Marshall, [1950] 1983), citizenship also became a site of state power (see also Foucault, 1997; Kauanui, 2017; Lazar, 2016). At the same time, it also became a site of resistance (Fraser, 2000; Holston, 2008; Scott, 2009), refusal (Alves, 2019; McGranahan, 2016a, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Weiss, 2016), and claims making (Alvarez et al., 1998; Bobick, 2017; Castle, 2008; Fraser, 2000; Rosaldo, 1994). By the 1990s, anthropologists began to study how new notions of “citizenship”—affected by globalization, transnational migration, and the spread of communication technologies—were challenging the premise of citizenship as bound to territory. This gave rise to new sociopolitical configurations, such as diasporas and transnational communities (Appadurai, 1996; Clifford, 1994; Friedman, 1994; Kearny, 1995; Ong, 1999; Verdery, 1998), which enabled forms of 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 178