2021 STATELESSNESS AND THE CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT, 2019 199 Indian citizenship law has increasingly shrouded itself in jus sanguinis citizenship, which determines insiders and outsiders based on shared ethnic identity. However, jus sanguinis as enshrined in amendments to the 1955 Act, and most recently in the 2019 Act, has a powerful potential to exacerbate statelessness, or of preventing India from reducing the incidence of stateless within its territory. One such effect that has been felt immediately with the operation of the 2019 Act is fear among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees that they will continue to live as stateless persons in India indefinitely or face deportation, and beget their lack of citizenship to their future generations. Caught in a limbo between being insiders based on shared ethnicity with Tamil Nadu, but being outsiders through the lack of formal citizenship, Sri Lankan Tamils in Indian refugee camps have experienced a formidable extent of Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’. Their experience is a searing reminder of the continued importance of formal citizenship in accessing rights. Indian citizenship debates have been cognisant of the link between jus sanguinis, statelessness and a deterioration into an ethnonationalist state like Europen nations post World War II. Most prominently, Ajit Prasad Jain said before the Constituent Assembly that “citizenship constitutes the rock foundation of our constitution”. In light of the paramount importance of formal citizenship in ascertaining belongingness, security and rights, this paper has suggested for a forward-looking and inclusive citizenship law for India that is based on jus soli as opposed to jus sanguinis. Such an approach stands to benefit the stateless persons that India is currently housing, including Sri Lankan Tamils. To extinguish Sri Lankan Tamils’ lack of citizenship, this paper has put forth interim pathways to Indian citizenship under prevailing law, and attempted to cast a stronger obligation on courts to make sharper analyses of the shifts in citizenship law, particularly the requirement of documentation and the repercussions of the introduction of the category of illegal migrant. In the long-term, however, this paper strongly believes in the need for a structural overhaul of citizenship law towards jus soli, a simplified naturalisation process, and a rejection of the documentation-heavy determination of citizenship and rights like the NRC process.