Pre-publication draft September 2023 have legitimized these state actions in the language of the law, through subtle and insidious tactics that bracket them outside ordinary legal standards. The courts, through tactics such as the non-application of legal norms and judicial evasion, have allowed irregularization to persist, undermining the stability and security of citizenship status. The penultimate section shares two vignettes to illustrate the legal and material costs of irregularization. These vignettes illuminate the central feature of the condition of precariousness: a profound sense of dislocation and confusion that precarious citizens feel because of the complexities of the legal process and Kafkaesque bureaucracies. The last section shows that the harm of these processes is not the formal loss of citizenship status, but loss of fundamental citizenship goods including the stability and security of citizenship status. It is these implications of India’s citizenship policies that I identify as citizenship irregularization. Making ‘Stateless Citizens’ Rising Racialization India’s citizenship law was born during an unprecedented refugee crisis. The division of the British colonial territory on the lines of religion in 1947 — India’s partition — cost millions of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh lives. India’s policymakers had to reckon with the migration of communities displaced by this ferocious sectarian violence. As members of India’s Muslim minority were fleeing to Pakistan, millions of Hindus and Sikhs were also entering India to escape sectarian violence. The Indian Constitution, and later parliamentary legislation on citizenship in 1955, adopted a seemingly inclusive formula by incorporating jus soli as the basis of citizenship. Persons born in India irrespective of their parentage were Indian citizens.16 The policymakers also incorporated citizenship for refugees who were entering into the country from its western (Pakistan) and eastern (erstwhile East Pakistan or present Bangladesh) borders.17 But the citizenship regime also pulled in a different direction. The partition cast a long shadow on how the citizenship regime was implemented on the ground. Muslims, who wished to return after being forced to flee to Pakistan in the wake of the partition violence, found it next to impossible to establish their legal qualifications to remain Indian citizens.18 Laws enabled the state to exercise extraordinary powers, in the name of security, to displace populations and take over their properties.19 The scholars of partition and citizenship in India 16 17 18 19 See Constitution of India, art 5, which provides that at the commencement of the Indian Constitution in 1950, persons who has their domicile in the territory of India and, among other grounds, were born in the territory of India, shall be citizens of India). See also Citizenship Act, 1955, Act No 57 of 1955, s 3. The Indian Citizenship Act originally providing in 1955 that a person born in India shall be a ‘citizen of India by birth’, but subsequently amended in 1986 to provide that a person shall be a citizen of India if ‘both of his parents are citizens of India’ or ‘one of whose parents is a citizen of India and the other is not an illegal migrant at the time of his birth’. See Constitution of India, art 6, providing procedures for deeming persons migrating from Pakistan — which in 1950 included the present Bangladesh — as Indian citizens. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia UP 2007). Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents (Harvard University Press 2013) 60–75. See also Manav Kapur, ‘India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Rev 208, 224–27, reviewing the policy debates on regulating Muslim immigration in Assam after partition, and noting that 5 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014