Often statelessness emerges from succession of states or territorial reorganisations. But it also emerges from persecution of minorities and a state’s majoritarian bias, which lead states at times to expel citizens or inhabitants. Also, states in South Asia, being what is sometimes referred to as ‘kin states’, represent social and ethnic continuities across the borders and the cases selected below illustrate this. Although there are overlapping sources of statelessness in contemporary South Asia, experts have identified three salient facts while analysing the causes of statelessness in South Asia.
• Very few contiguous South Asian states have entirely normalised relations with each other, usually on account of disputes concerning borders and cross-border movements. The inherent and massive heterogeneity of South Asian states has frequently given rise to militant resistance— often with a secessionist agenda. The states have progressively tightened their citizenship criteria, thus creating growing pockets of statelessness at their cultural and geographical margins
• Decolonisation in South Asia has involved multiple territorial divisions and casting out minority groups/ claims. Two of the most tumultuous dissections of South Asia occurred for precisely these reasons— the Partition of India in 1947 and the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971. It follows, then, that these nation-building experiments created the ideal conditions for inducing statelessness.
• The third aspect of statelessness in South Asia results from economic migration between states. The subcontinent in pre colonial times had retained fuzzy frontiers and maintained traditions of seasonal migration and permanent minority settlements. Since the advent of independent nation-states, however, leaders representing the majority have argued for the disenfranchisement of such groups, which appear to have closer ties to the national identity of a neighbouring state than to the identity of the states of their residence. Political centres have demanded migrants’ ‘repatriation,’ which has been refused by the neighbour states, leaving the group stateless.

Against this backdrop, this module seeks to find answers to the following questions (Participants are requested to make their presentations touching on any of these questions, or a combination of them, with reference to various cases of statelessness in the region.)
• How certain groups and communities are rendered stateless? While states often remain far from being ethnically homogeneous, are minorities living within them more vulnerable to statelessness than others?
• Does protracted refugee-hood eventually result in statelessness? Is the distinction between refugee-hood and statelessness increasingly wearing thin?
• Is the existing legal regime adequate to deal with the problem of statelessness? What has been the experience with case laws in different countries of South Asia and of other regions?
• Can judicial activism, as evident in some of the countries, particularly in recent years, serve as an effective guarantee?
• Does the varied nature of our experience call for changes in the existing municipal and international laws? Does this underline the necessity of framing regional laws relating to the stateless in different world regions? • Do policymakers need to think beyond legal terms? • Does all this call for activating and strengthening the civil society institutions?

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