14 February, 2023 - Talk by Dr. Adil Hasan Khan - The University of Texas at Austin School of Law

Date and time: Tuesday February 14, 2023 4:00 pm–5:00 pm
Location:  Eidman Jury Room (Room CCJ 2.310 of the University of Texas School of Law)

‘There is a widely perceived and ongoing “citizenship crisis” in contemporary India, as the Indian Supreme Court's authorization of a massive citizenship status verification process (NRC) in the state of Assam threatens to render stateless several million people, especially those belonging to religious and ethnic minority groups. At the same time, the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) provides expedited access to citizenship to members of select religious minority groups from neighboring states. Critical commentators have identified a double-standard in the invocation of the legal category of minority in these processes: While in the first instance, minority is a marker of a “lesser” citizenship status to which the state owes only limited, or no, obligations, in the second, it is a marker of a subject of rights protection notwithstanding a lack of formal status vis-à-vis the state. 

In this talk, titled ‘An Imperial Genealogy of Minority as a Legal Category: The Making of a Crisis of Citizenship in South Asia’, Dr. Adil Hasan Khan will situate these treatments of minorities in the mid-19th century British imperial regimes of indirect rule, on one hand, and capitulations, on the other, to suggest that the approaches are less contradictory than they might seem. By illuminating the intimate historical relationship between the phenomenon of statelessness and the institution of and protection for minority’s, he aims to move beyond a critique of double-standards.’

For more information and to register, please see UT School of Law website.