Myanmar: The ‘Taingyintha’ and its Repercussions Perhaps the most extreme cases of statelessness in the world today are found in Myanmar, making its citizenship laws particularly pertinant to examine. Further, the restrictive citizenship laws in place today have clearly been shaped by migration patterns and are configured around excluding groups perceived as ‘non-indigenous’, including Chinese, Indian and other ‘migrant’ populations, though the definition of latter group is highly controversial. A former British colony, British Burma was closely interlinked with British India, and for most of its history was ruled as part of British India. The imposed importation of laborers and governors to Burma from other parts of British India played a major role in colonial methods of ‘divide and rule’ control. Partly due to this, contemporary Myanmar has had a bloody and turbulent post-independence history, with military juntas, ethnic cleansings, secessionist bids, and what has been coined an ongoing ‘genocide’ by a UN Fact Finding Mission (Council, 2018). The exact details of these events have been well documented elsewhere, so this paper will focus specifically on aspects that are relevant to understanding the progression of citizenship law, exclusion and the production of statelessness in the country. Religion is of great importance for contextualizing Burmese citizenship law. Traditionally, the Burmese king was considered the defender of Buddhism, and the terms ‘Burmese’ and ‘Buddhist’ were so closely overlayed as to become “synonymous” (Yegar, 2002). It was a crime for a Bamar (Burman) person to convert to any other religion, which was patrolled and severely punished by a large caste of monks. Nevertheless, given Myanmar’s geographic location, Muslim traders arrived in the region by the ninth century and were allowed to settle in some places, particularly the north-west Arakan region, along the Bay of Bengal. Unlike in places like Malaysia and Indonesia, and perhaps based on some combination of rugged topography and the deep-seated Buddhist roots of the region, Islam never attained any great degree of primacy in Myanmar, and Muslim communities largely remained somewhat segregated in Burmese cities, though were officially tolerated and allowed to build mosques (Yegar, 2002). The primacy of Buddhism was written into the 1947 Constitution of the Union of Burma, reading, “The state recognizes the special position of Buddhism as the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens of the Union” (Article 21.1) (1947). The terminology of ‘special position’ evolves from British influence, and is also seen in the Bumiputera clauses in contemporary Malaysia, which can also be traced back to colonial histories (Ong, 2006; Mamdani, 1996). The same Constitutional article specifically forbids discrimination on the grounds of religion, but religious biases quite clearly come into play when examining Burmese Citizenship Laws and their concept of taingyintha. Though taingyintha is translated somewhat inconsistently, it is usually translated as “national races” or “indigenous races” (in the 1947 Constitution), and it effectively serves as the marker of who is     20