Citizenship in Crisis? A Panel Discussion on India and Myanmar

CASI-Related Event

in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy

A Virtual Event — 11:00am EST | 9:30pm IST






Featuring NIRAJA GOPAL JAYAL (Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU and Professor, Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science), AMAN WADUD (Lawyer, Justice and Liberty Initiative for those who have been deprived of citizenship in Assam), ELLIOTT PRASSE-FREEMAN (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, National University of Singapore), and SYANTANI CHATTERJEE (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania).

THE PANEL WILL FOCUS ON CITIZENSHIP LAWS as instruments of exclusion, putting the two cases of India and Myanmar in conversation with each other. What are the reasons for and repercussions of modifying citizenship laws to exclude long-dwelling populations? What are the histories of nation-making in both the former British colonies that prompted these demographic tensions? Since religion has played such a critical role in both these instances, we will also question the particular ways in which religious rhetoric lends itself to bolstering these policies. Further, we seek to understand the overlap in technologies of persecution that are being used by the two states to strip individuals down to their "bare life" and visit violence upon them with impunity. These technologies include internment in "camps" across both nations, with Myanmar extending the persecution to include mass expulsion. By mapping out the conceptual terrain underlying these phenomena, this panel will afford us various ways of thinking through these policies and their effects upon the peoples of India and Myanmar.

The Nand & Jeet Khemka Distinguished Lecture Series is an endowed public program of the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI). Launched in the 2007-08 academic year, and made possible through the generous support of the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the series brings renowned India specialists to the Penn community and serves as a critical forum for analyzing and understanding the complex economic, political, social, and cultural changes that the world’s largest democracy is experiencing, as well as the challenges that lie ahead.
The Saluja Global Fellows Program has been made possible by the generous gift from Vishal Saluja ENG’89 W’89. CASI was excited to launch the program during the 2022–23 academic year, coinciding with the Center’s 30th Anniversary. This new program enables CASI to invite eminent leaders and rising experts on contemporary India preferably from the fields of media, culture, law, and contemporary history to be in residence for one to two weeks at CASI.