     Chapters in this book document these explicit and implicit forms of discrimination, and demonstrate how they may manifest in conjunction with one another. The multitude and complexity of such practices, such as in relation to legal documentation, identification, application processes, litigation and more, is a constant theme across the case studies, often made visible by in-depth examination of administrative documents or fieldwork. One prominent example in the region is India’s ‘correction’ of its National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) that has put at risk the citizenship of 1.9 million individuals living in the state of Assam.101 The publication of the NRC in August 2019, together with the process established whereby individuals left off the list can ‘appeal’ to the Foreigners Tribunals, could be seen as encapsulating all three ostensibly neutral criteria described by Jain. In Chapter 4, Ismatov reveals that notwithstanding ‘inclusive and gender-neutral laws’, statelessness in Central Asia has ‘primarily affected married women and children’.102 Further, Bhat’s groundbreaking chapter, Chapter 8, adds yet another dimension to Jain’s conceptualization of insidious nationality practices in revealing how the Indian state ‘has weakened citizenship of its nationals in profound ways without formally revoking citizenship status’. He argues that the Indian state has ‘irregularized citizenship of a large population through insidious legal processes. Precarious citizens facing irregularization may not formally lose their nationality, but they lose fundamental social and political goods because of their irregular, indeterminate status. Most of all, they lose any semblance of stability and security of citizenship status, which in turn severely harms their well-being’. As he observes, ‘[w]hile the Indian government and courts have sought to justify irregularization in the language of the rule of law, racialization and exceptionalism have permitted them to not apply ordinary legal standards to these citizenship policies. Irregularization – as opposed to formal revocation of citizenship – allows the Indian state to politically instrumentalize citizenship policies at the cost of citizenship security, without facing the obvious domestic and international repercussions that denationalization often invites’.103 Precarity is systematized as a tool of state oppression. See Chapter 8 in this book, Mohsin Alam Bhat’s chapter, ‘Doubtful Citizens: Irregularization and Precarious Citizenship in Contemporary India’. 102 Aziz Ismatov, ‘Hidden Statelessness Dimensions of State Succession in Central Asia: Transit to a Solution for Stateless Trans-Border Wives and Children’, Chapter 4. 103 Bhat in this volume. 101 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press