INDIA AND STATELESSNESS: AN INTRODUCTION ADIL HASAN KHAN * TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction........................................................................................................... 176 Background ........................................................................................................... 177 Documentary Requirements and the Differential Experiences of Citizenship and Statelessness ................................................................................................... 179 The Securitisation of Citizenship: Or How the State of Exception is Not Exceptional ........................................................................................................... 180 Normative Horizons? ............................................................................................ 184 INTRODUCTION It is an immense pleasure to be guest editing this wonderful symposium on citizenship and statelessness in India. The collection is comprised of three fulllength articles (by Trisha Sabhapandit and Padmini Baruah, Manav Kapur and Andrea Marilyn Pragashini Immanuel) and one shorter commentary piece (by Aakash Chandran). The contributing articles emerged out of a collaborative project between Melbourne Law School (Asian Law Centre and Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness), Oxford University’s Bonavero Institute of Human Rights and the Jindal Global Law School (titled ‘Citizenship and Statelessness in India’), which facilitated a series of eight virtual workshops during the second half of 2020 to offer different scholars an opportunity to develop and share their research on this vitally important site for the study of statelessness and citizenship. 1 This collection reflects the growing trend in this ever-maturing field to move beyond its initial confinement to legal approaches and towards a vibrant critical interdisciplinary orientation. Thus, we have a truly interdisciplinary collection that variously draws upon methods and concepts from the disciplines of anthropology, history and philosophy. This is, no doubt, a testament to the Citizenship & Statelessness Review’s commitment to encouraging interdisciplinary scholarship in this field. But it also points to the complex and multifaceted character of the emerging problem of statelessness and citizenship in India, one which demands such multifaceted scholarship in response. The magnitude of this growing crisis can be gauged by the description provided by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues of its manifestation in the case of the Indian State of Assam as the ‘biggest exercise in statelessness since the Second World War’, 2 coupled with his description, provided shortly after the aforementioned quote, of * 1 2 Dr Adil Hasan Khan, Senior Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, The University of Melbourne. This initiative was led by Professor Farrah Ahmad, Professor Michelle Foster, Professor Jeff Redding, Dr Christopher Sperfeldt, Balu Nair, and the present author, at the Melbourne Law School, along with, Professor Kate O’Regan and Dr Christos Kypraios at Oxford University, and finally, Professor M Mohsin Alam Bhat at Jindal Global Law School. Hannah Gordon and Elif Sekercioglu, ‘Citizenship Denied: Two Million in India Face an Uncertain Future’, Right Now (Blog Post, 13 June 2020) <https://rightnow.org.au/analysis/citizenship-denied/>.