CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 169 passed through blood rather than conversion,119 adding foreign ethnicities to the CSCs of religious minorities ensures categorization of such cardholders and their descendants as non-taingyintha and subject to citizenship scrutiny as potential foreigners.120 The Muslim Other as the potential foreigner in India Much has already been written about the “muscular majoritarianism” of the BJP government in India.121 Not only has it sponsored legislation like the CAA to try to align citizenship rules with its Hindu-right political agenda, it has reignited debates over older legislation such as the National Registrar of Citizens (NRC).122 The NRC, which was mandated by a 2003 amendment to the 1955 Citizenship Act, is supposed to register all legal citizens. Although no administration has ever seriously attempted a countrywide implementation of the NRC, the introduction of the CAA and its links to the NRC – to identify and grant citizenship to immigrants of all religious faiths other than Islam – has led to renewed anxieties among poor Muslims that the CAA is a step towards rendering stateless those with less than pristine documents.123 The combination of the NRC and the CAA has created a discriminatory system that violates the secular spirit of the Indian Constitution, demonstrating how religious antagonism works through the guise of ethnicity, nationalism, and security. Sajaudeen Chapparban has called such discursive framings “cartographies of hatred”: … unwanted citizens – the religious minorities – are projected as “outsiders” or “illegals” and perceived as not just “others” but the obvious other … The idea of “legal” migrants is confined to Hindus and “illegal” migrants are deliberately referred to Muslims” [sic].124 Nevertheless, amidst such strong and evolving critiques of the Modi administration’s overt attempts to politicize citizenship via an a priori juxtaposition of legality and religious discrimination, scholars and critics have not fully recognized the historically racialized nature of Indian citizenship. In fact, this historical capital has provided a shroud of legitimacy and urgency around the CAA-NRC issues, swaying a significant section of public opinion in their favor.125 Over the last decade, a modest but critical body of scholarship has contextualized the constitutional modalities of Indian citizenship during the colonial period, along with the postcolonial demographic and political shifts that have given rise to Hindu majoritarian politics. The crux of this scholarship is to recast the history of citizenship from an individual relationship with the state into a multi-layered relationship, mediated by communities as well as social and political agencies. Niraja Gopal Jayal has traced this transformations in the substantive character of Indian citizenship since 1949 as legal status, a bundle of rights and entitlements, and as a form of identity.126 119 Ikeya 2020; Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2019. Rhoads et al. Forthcoming. 121 Chandrachud 2020, 2. 122 Jayal 2019; Jaffrelot 2017. 123 Pathak 2024. 124 Chapparban 2020, 53. 125 Times of India 2020, The Hindu 2021. 126 Jayal 2013, 2016, 2019 120