India and Statelessness: An Introduction effect the relevant rules. 15 In August 2021, Central Government ministers, amongst others, declared it to be vindicated, on account of the refugee crisis emerging out of Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover. 16 Its constitutional validity has been challenged in several petitions before the Supreme Court of India. DOCUMENTARY REQUIREMENTS AND THE DIFFERENTIAL EXPERIENCES OF CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS It is the marginalising experience of the ‘NRC–FT nexus’ in the Indian State of Assam, especially for women, that forms the focus of the article by Trisha Sabhapandit and Padmini Baruah. 17 Through careful empirical research into the NRC process and the orders passed by the FT, Sabhapandit and Baruah expose how these encounters play out in gendered terms for women, especially those belonging to other marginalised categories, who face several layers of indirect discrimination in their quest to establish their status as ‘genuine citizens’. Sabhapandit and Baruah argue that this gendered experience, of being deprived of citizenship status and made de facto stateless, is connected to the gendered experience of ‘differential citizenship’ itself, whereby the formal or theoretical ideal of ‘universal citizenship’ and its exercise is one which in practice marginalises women, and privileges men. This comes about through the operations of patriarchal social structures that differentially organise access to the public sphere, as well as to social welfare. To counter this discriminatory practice in the realm of citizenship (including in its deprivation), they adopt a ‘feminist standpoint’ in their article, one that brings to the fore the marginalisation faced by women in these purportedly neutral and objective formal legal exercises of citizenship determination through ethnographic descriptions of ‘women’s lived experiences’. A strong (American) legal realist sensibility informs the piece, especially when it comes to providing a critique of legalist formalism in terms of contrasting (legal) theory / (social) practice. Crucially, it is this realist critique of the formal legalist formulation of political and social citizenship that also informs their critique of the spread of processes that control the access, exercise and maintenance of citizenship through extraordinary and rigid formal demands for documentary proofs of identity, and how this furthers the marginalisation of women, as access to documentation is disproportionately more challenging for them. As they point out, in the case of the NRC–FT documentary exercises, these are documents that can prove the ‘lineage’ of a person, which establishes that they themselves are ‘genuine citizens’ through 15 16 17 Though, in the interim, the government has resorted to issuing notifications under the existing 2009 Rules to authorise several district authorities in five Indian states to process and approve citizenship applications specifically from members of non-Muslim minority groups from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: Citizenship Rules 2009, Vide GSR No 124(E) (India). See Deeptiman Tiwary, ‘CAA On Hold, Centre Opens Similar Citizenship Window in Five States’, The Indian Express (online, 29 May 2021) <https://indianexpress.com/article/india/caa-citizenship-act-non-muslim-immigrants7334955/>. ‘Afghanistan Crisis Shows Why CAA is Needed: Hardeep Singh Puri’, Times of India (online, 23 August, 2021) <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/afghanistan-crisis-shows-whycaa-is-needed-hardeep-singh-puri/articleshow/85549052.cms>. Trisha Sabhapandit and Padmini Baruah, ‘“Untrustworthy and Unbelievable”: Women and the Quest for Citizenship in Assam’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 235. 179