2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as India’s responsibility. Conversely, it ring fences both Muslims and Muslim majority nations in the Indian subcontinent as both uniquely foreign and difficult to integrate in present-day India. Indeed, by only confining itself to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, the CAA ignores ‘problematic’ communities like the mainly (but not exclusively) Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar and both Hindu and Muslim Tamil citizens in Sri Lanka. Rather than being seen as part of the ‘rise’ of the Hindu right, I use archival and constituent assembly sources to argue that this harks back to the polyphonous and complex process(es) of making and unmaking citizens and nationals that followed British India’s Partition, and the different ways in which they operated on the eastern and western frontiers of India. On the western border, only a few people can now take advantage of the CAA. Afghanistan’s total Hindu and Sikh population is less than 1,500 people; most Hindus and Sikhs have left since 1979. The vast majority of non-Muslims moved out of what was then West Pakistan within the first year of Independence. As of 2017, Hindus and Sikhs comprise 1.85% of Pakistan’s population, chiefly concentrated in Southern Punjab and Sindh. 8 The Sikh population of Pakistan is even smaller — only about 40,000 Sikhs live in Pakistan; in fact they did not even constitute a separate group in the 2017 census. 9 Most sources suggest that the annual migration of Pakistani Hindus to India is only a few thousand, 10 though this has significantly increased in the last few years. 11 These comparatively small numbers belie their immense symbolic importance in political discourse, especially when articulated in terms of the ‘responsibility’ of the Government of India for hapless minorities. 12 Like much else about India’s Partition, the eastern flank suggests a different, and more complicated, story. Wary of their experiences on the western border, both India and Pakistan resisted a complete population transfer on the eastern flank. This allowed Hindus and Muslims to migrate into India through the ‘halfopen’ border in the East. As I will show, both the provincial (East Bengal, West Bengal and Assam) and central governments had differing approaches to this migration, subject to their own exigencies. As the politics around the National Register of Citizens in Assam shows, the question there is both ethnic and religious. For the Central Government, however, there is no contradiction seen between expediting citizenship to subcontinental minorities and simultaneously taking a hard-line on Muslim migrants from Bangladesh. Rather, these are viewed as part of the same project. 8 9 10 11 12 ‘Pakistan: Population by Religion as per the 2017 Census’, Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (Web Page) <https://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files//tables/POPULATION%20BY%20RELIGION. pdf>. Yudhvir Rana, ‘Sikhs Included in Pakistan’s Census: Lawyer Says One Down, Many to Go’, Times of India (online, 13 May 2014) <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/amritsar/sikhs-included-in-pakistans-censuslawyer-says-one-down-many-to-go/articleshow/57967860.cms>. Irfan Haider, ‘5000 Hindus Migrating to India Every Year, NA Told’, Dawn (online, 13 May 2014) <https://www.dawn.com/news/1105830>. Anushree Fadnavis, ‘Living on the Edge:, Pakistani Hindus Still Feel Safer in India’, Reuters (online, 16 June 2020) <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-refugee-day-indiacitizenship/living-on-the-edge-pakistani-hindus-still-feel-safer-in-india-idUSKBN23N3IL>. Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History (Harvard University Press 2013) 85. 210