Ancestrality, Migration, Rights and Exclusion: Citizenship in the Indian State of Sikkim

This is the introduction to a special issue of Asian Ethnicity that includes six papers on the issue of citizenship in the Indian state of Sikkim, from the perspectives of anthropology, political science, sociology and history. These contributions explore the entanglement of migration and ethnicity that defines political membership and exclusion in Sikkim, as it does in other parts of India. They give a central place to the consequences of the combination of the 1961 Sikkim Subject regulation (that remained valid after Sikkim became a part of India in 1975) and ‘group-differentiated citizenship’ in a context where Sikkim’s population – formed through people’s mobility within a region that has long been a crossroads between Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and India – was brought into the frame of a territorial concept of the nation. These papers also explore the means used by people in Sikkim to contest their categorisation by the state.