On the verge: Revocation and denial of citizenship in India M. Mohsin Alam Bhat & Aashish Yadav Introduction Citizenship has become one of the most definitive subjects of crisis in India since 2014. In December 2019, the Indian government passed the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (‘the CAA’). For the first time, India explicitly incorporated a religious test for citizenship despite asserting that it has a secular constitution. This was received with great disappointment, anguish and eventually anxiety, as thousands participated in unprecedented protests across the country. The protestors were worried that – conjoined with the proposed National Register of Indian Citizens (‘the NRIC’), which sought to enumerate all the citizens based on documentary evidence – the CAA would lead to mass disenfranchisement. These protests were first greeted by state disquiet, and then state repression. The worries have been particularly profound because of the news from India’s eastern state of Assam. From 2014 to 2019, the Indian Supreme Court supervised a citizen enumeration process called the National Register of Citizens (‘the NRC’) in the state, in the background of a long history of antiimmigrant sentiment. The final list of the NRC in August 2019 left out 1.9 million residents of the state. They now stand on the verge of statelessness, with only the right of appeal to the government instituted tribunals. By the time the CAA was passed, the stories from Assam – of arbitrary citizenship determination and the detention centres – were ubiquitous. The Indian state has publicly framed the NRC in Assam and the proposed NRIC across India the state as ordinary citizenship determination procedures. It has also described the CAA as a policy of purely granting citizenship to the persecuted minorities from the country’s neighbouring region. The official framing and justifications of the Assam NRC and CAA-NRIC tend to obscure the mechanisms and implications of these policies. This essay disputes these characterisations. It adopts a different set of vocabularies that we propose capture the full essence of the NRC, the NRIC and the CAA within the Indian citizenship regime. We argue that that these policies – appreciated in their larger historical trajectory and full practical context – amount to citizenship denial and threaten citizenship revocation. By revocation of citizenship, we mean an involuntary loss of citizenship whether automatic or non-automatic (including lapse, withdrawal, nullification) that is not initiated by the person or their legal representative.1 Revocation of citizenship is often interchangeably used with deprivation of citizenship in domestic law and international law. We refer to denial of citizenship as the non-attribution of citizenship status to a person or group who might otherwise be eligible under the previously existing regime. We place the NRC in Assam and the CAA-NRIC in their legal, historical and political context. We describe their antecedents and legal mechanics. We also give an account of the arguments that important social and political actors have made across the spectrum of opinion. We show that a series of citizenship denial policies led up to the enactment of the CAA in 2019. The CAA has partially – and discriminatorily – made certain religious groups immune from citizenship denial, aggravating the impact on excluded groups. We argue that the procedural arbitrariness and legally unspecified safeguards in Assam’s NRC threaten citizenship revocation. We also argue that the cumulative operation of the CAA and the proposed NRIC threatens mass citizenship revocation. We argue that NRC and CAA-NRIC are dangerous schemes of citizenship revocation that can impact not only certain undocumented migrants but also make Indian citizens extremely vulnerable to citizenship revocation.  1 Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University. GLOBALCIT (2020), Glossary on Citizenship and Electoral Rights. https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/67362/RSCAS_GLOBALCIT_Glossary_2020.pdf (consulted 24 July 2020). 25