I was born in the 1970s, at a time when South Asia had undergone fundamental changes with regard to experiences of citizenship. Growing up in Shillong, we carried the imprints of the debates surrounding these experiences with a lightness that is typical of confident youth. Yet, barely along a 400 km radius from where we were growing up, other young people were experiencing what must have been bewildering changes. Bangladesh had become an independent country, Sikkim had ceased to exist as an independent kingdom, Bhutan had just become a member of the United Nations, Nepal experienced the consolidation of the imperial panchayati system and General Ne Win pushed through a new constitution that established a unicameral parliament in Burma.

Within Northeast India, Shillong itself stopped being the capital of Assam. This led to some bewilderment for a generation of people, like my parents, who had come to think of the city as the place where life-changing decisions were taken. These political events were marked by dissent and anxieties that led to sharp debates about how communities and collectives would have to organize their lives and relationships to one another in the future.

In the following essay, I dwell on three issues that I believe are integral to any understanding of contemporary citizenship debates in India. I begin with an overview of the kind of changes that the world was experiencing in the 1970s. I then move on to discuss the manner in which these experiences resulted in tensions around the protection of differences and erosion of inequalities in the Indian Constitution, especially in matters pertaining to identity and autonomy. I end with the discussion about current unrests over the Indian government’s new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), especially their ability to turn the global clock back to a less flattering time.

The decolonizing process across the world, especially in Africa and Asia following World War II, was one that was staggered across several decades. Some would argue, then as now, that decolonization continues to be an ongoing project that requires greater engagement from activists and academics alike. However, by the 1970s, most would agree that citizenship was an ideal that motivated struggles for freedom against European, American and Asian imperialist colonialism. It involved a commitment to justice and equality of all those who lived within a territorially inscribed nation state, especially in the three constituent elements made popular by the British sociologist, Thomas H. Marshall: civil, political and social aspects of citizenship.

This implied that people of the period could think about an association based on camaraderie that tied them to others who were from the same country. In reality, the states that emerged from the formal end of imperialism were also beset by challenges in the 1970s, some of which were a result of old colonial machinations, while others were the outcome of resoundingly poor judgement on the part of the newly decolonized nation states.

 

The persistence of violence in settling political scores was an important feature of the 1970s. In our neighbourhood, the liberation of Bangladesh was preceded by untold tragedies that have since been documented by historians, archivists and documentary filmmakers alike. In victory, the country witnessed another series of repressive actions against certain collectives that were not considered to be full rights-bearing citizens. The Jumma people – a category that denotes a very wide spectrum of indigenous non-Bengali communities who lived along the country’s northern and eastern borders with India – claimed that their rights and resources were under threat. This led to a rebellion, mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which was brutally crushed by the Bangladesh Army.

The other section of people who faced a hostile state were the non-Bengali, Bihari Muslim community, many of whom were accused of collaborating with the Pakistan Army during the war of liberation. Bihari Muslims had been forced, or had chosen to move to East Pakistan during partition of British India in 1947 and were committed to the two-states theory. For the thousands who were forced to remain in Bangladesh after the liberation, citizenship of the new country was a vexed issue, more so since the new political establishment in the country began by denying them the right to vote.

 

Elsewhere in the neighbourhood, the 1974 constitution in Burma claimed that it was addressing the debilitating effects of colonialism by establishing a unicameral system. The constitution claimed that citizens could realize their aspirations and rights by their membership of the dominant Bamar community, or one of the national races and through a basic system of representation to people’s councils. The obvious problem with such a system was the insistence on something called a national race.

Legally, the state recognized eight national races that included the dominant Bamar and other relatively smaller communities fixed to territory such as the Chin, Kachin, Kayin, Kayah, Mon, Rakhine and Shan. However, since the 1940s, many of these groups had had a tense relationship with the Burmese state; some wanting complete independence, while others demanding greater autonomy within the union. Moreover, certain other communities like the Rohingya were completely outside the pale of even such a harsh, regimented and almost comical description of communities in the country in the 1970s. Even the subsequent movements for democratization following the upheavals of 8 August 1988 uprising were unable to address the vexed issue of who could call themselves citizens and who wanted to opt out of the citizenship system (of the country) altogether.

It was in the 1970s also that this peculiar predicament came in for some consideration. What were governments to do when a large segment of their citizens wanted to secede or demanded maximum territorial and political autonomy from centralized states? Furthermore, how would governments deal with large collectives within the country who claimed the rights of citizens, but who (for historical reasons) were seen as political and social interlopers by others? These were not merely academic discussions, as they had a long-lasting impact on those of us growing up in Shillong.

Thrown together from this diverse neighbourhood, we tried to make sense of the changes that were going on around us, even though we had no idea how deeply they would continue to affect us into the 21st century. Our cohort included boys from every ethnic community in Northeast India, including some from Bangladesh and Bhutan. We were students whose parents had the wherewithal to circumvent national crises about identity. Thanks to them, we were then able to attend a school where we would be deracinated from the troubles about identity and citizenship that our parents were embroiled in.

 

Our peers from Mizoram and Nagaland had similar concerns that they were trying to find some distance from. Our parents also had to piece together a semblance of affection and respect for those who were not quite like us but had suffered just as much. In this inchoate moment, they bequeathed their version of civil society to my generation, as we were on the cusp of phenomenal changes, especially in relation to technology and communication.

That decade also saw the emergence of small but significant advocacy for minority rights across the world. Part of it was driven by indigenous, first nation activism in settler colonies like Australia, Canada and the United States. They found solidarity in massive movements for democracy and social justice, such as the civil rights movement in the United States, the anti-nuclear campaigns in western Europe and North America and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. These campaigns filtered their way into various national and international legal regimes that protected the rights of minority communities in countries across the world.

For perhaps the first time since the idea of nation states spread and found expression across the world, there was also an effort to recognize the idea of differences and inequalities that existed for citizens of countries that were part of the United Nations. It was an instructive decade for a world that was trying to come to terms with differences and overcome past experiences of oppression.

 

For the world coming apart and being rebuilt around us in the 1970s (and into the 1980s), citizenship was experienced through legal pluralism that was supposed to be built into the Constitution of the country. Hence, the formation of new states like Meghalaya, was done without any bloodshed and was a source of hope for many, including insurgents who were trying to find a way out of intractable conflicts with the state. The Sixth Schedule and Article 371 (with special provisions for different states running from A to J) were frequently invoked by the government, primarily as a way of addressing the issue of autonomy for regions that had a very different social and political history from the so-called mainland of the country.

Following the creation of Meghalaya, activists demanding autonomy in Assam struggled to ensure that the provisions of the Sixth Schedule resulted in the devolution of powers of local governance. Similar provisions were extended to political leaders, including former insurgents, when they decided that they would negotiate for peace with the Government of India. The government, for its part, did not stray too far from the constitutional path. For policy makers seeking to de-escalate violence in the region, the Constitution seemed like the best instrument to invoke, if only to show that the government was capable of accommodating a wide range of demands.

 

In the early years of the 21st century, I was involved with a fascinating global network of academics, activists and practitioners of international law who were all engaged in studying autonomy and autonomous arrangements across the world. This eclectic network, made up of several smaller study groups, scrambled for money and tried to meet as regularly and wherever possible. Disparate locations like Uppsala, Kolkata and Hong Kong were linked together by individuals who were studying a wide array of matters that pertained to the granting of autonomy and experiences around it.

Experts on legal pluralism, as well those studying constitutional arrangements across the world, dominated these groups. My own contribution to them was based on the fieldwork I was doing around the Sixth Schedule areas of Assam, primarily in the two hill districts of Karbi Anglong and North Cachar Hills (which has since been renamed Dima Hasao).

The idea of autonomy is crucial to any modern constitution. It is an acknowledgment of diversity across a national political landscape, regardless of the size of the country in question. Modern nation states that emerged from the debris of war in the middle of the 20th century had mostly adhered to the republican traditions that emerged in Europe after the renaissance and French Revolution. Part of the compelling idea that new nations promised themselves was equality of all citizens, which was in tune with the republican traditions of the time. However, governments of these countries that followed republican ideals needed to find ways to share resources and power with emerging collectives based on religious, linguistic, national, ethnic and other differences that challenged republican ideas of equality.

For the practitioners among the network that I belonged to, many of these demands that pointed to an asymmetric relationship between centres and peripheries, the powerful and those seeking their share, was to be found in the study of the constitutions of these countries.

 

In India, the constitutional acknowledgement of the benefits of autonomy are best exemplified in the Fifth and Sixth Schedules, as well as Articles 370 and 371. These constitutional safeguards are the distillation of a violent process through which certain parts of the country were colonized, a legal reminder of the vast spectrum of social histories of communities and territories that are included within the boundaries of the country.

Political scientist Anupama Roy’s seminal work on citizenship, draws the reader’s attention to the various ways in which claims for inclusion into Marshall’s ‘camaraderie of equals’ has been accommodated in the Constitution by promising equality and recognizing community/territory-based inequalities.¹ This has not always been a very seamless process. It has been the result of great struggles for both autonomy and social justice. These struggles in turn have led researchers and activists to disaggregate the collectives who demand change, inclusion and at times exclusion, from constitutional platforms.

Those seeking autonomy in Northeast India have argued for a more differentiated understanding of identity and territory. These demands emanated among indigenous communities that were not neatly included into caste and religion based classifications that defined the partitioning of British India and codification of constitutional laws aimed at social justice. An early proponent of this argument was the Naga leader, Angami Zapu Phizo, who asserted that with the transfer of power from the British to India and Pakistan, the Naga peoples had every right to be sovereign as they did not belong to either new country.²

Moreover, Naga nationalists claimed that their ancestral territories were dispersed across the erstwhile colonies of India and Burma, and sought to integrate them into a homeland. Over the next few decades, various elected governments sought to engage this form of irredentism by making adjustments and overtures to the Naga leaders, as well as to other communities that had begun to challenge the government’s writ along its eastern international borders.

 

Such policies were instrumental in the creation of a two-tier citizenship regime in Northeast India, where certain communities that were included in the Scheduled Tribe list of the Indian Constitution and were inhabitants of the region, were entitled to protective discrimination that allowed them a degree of political and economic preferential rights in designated territories.³ On the one hand, these measures were also responsible for further tensions between various communities who lived in the same territory. On the other hand, the persistence of conflicts between armed groups that were willing to enter into ceasefire agreements with the state, while they continued to mobilize against those perceived to be outsiders in their territory, points to the compromises and tragedies involved in the constitutional process of granting autonomy in Northeast India.⁴

 

Though articulated with the global discourse on indigenous rights, the question of who belonged and who did not were often about very local negotiations. Here, the constitutional category of (Scheduled) Tribe – widely considered to be anachronistic within academia – was actually embraced by non-caste societies in the region in their political struggles against dominant, often caste based Hindu communities who lived in proximity and among them.⁵

Given the region’s complex history of immigration, especially the one that began with the establishment of colonial rule and tea plantation in the late 19th and early 20th century, this constitutional blind spot has had very tragic consequences for groups of people. This is especially true of those whose identities are tied to the kind of labour they do in the plantations and paddy fields. Adivasi activists and advocacy groups among Muslims of East Bengal heritage in Assam have had to constantly remind political organizations and civil society groups about their contributions to the region’s culture and social history.⁶

 

Today, the Adivasi communities in Assam are joined by five other communities in their demand to be included among the Scheduled Tribes in the state. This is a crucial aspect of their political struggle, as it alludes to some basic, watered-down acceptance of reparations for historical injustices of the tea industry’s indentured system of labour recruitment.

The autonomy study network I referred to earlier in the section helped me understand the comparative scales of constitutional safeguards for minorities across the world. However, where our discussions usually tapered off was when the issue of forced migration and borderlands found their way onto the table. This is an important factor, as the experience of Muslims of East Bengal heritage have highlighted time and again. Our network conversations relegated these issues to the international legal regime on refugee rights, but it was clear that there was much more to this question than simply trying to figure out how to deal with people who were not claiming territory, or political rights. Also, not everyone who lived in borderlands and were forced to move several times over, were actually seeking the same rights as refugees.

As Ranabir Samaddar reminds readers, borderlands (such as North East India) sustain and nurture an immigration discourse where post-partition migration and contests over citizenship rights are built on the lines of historical continuity.⁷ This can be detrimental to groups that are unable to find a foothold in the political discussions around ethnic homelands/ autonomous territories. Under such conditions, the constitutional sureties of non-discrimination and secularism seemed like a foundation principle upon which further negotiations about belonging could take place. This edifice seems to have been shaken by the government in recent times.

 

Since 2009-2010, the government of India has pushed the discussions around undocumented migration and citizenship to a drastic position that challenges the existing stability of constitutional guarantees of citizenship in India. Again, following Anupama Roy’s argument that the citizenship regime in India had been amended, first in 1986 and then again in 1992, 2003, 2005 and 2015, began with a response to the demands raised in the course of the Assam Agitation (1979-1985).⁸ The agitation began with demands for protecting rights of indigenous communities against outsiders, and soon was transformed into a movement to force the state to detect, detain and deport undocumented persons who had settled in Assam after the liberation of Bangladesh.⁹ Muslims of East Bengal heritage were particularly affected by this turn in the movement.

The struggles for autonomy in Assam were violent, where aspirations and grievances from below were met with an equal, if not disproportionate, expression of brute power from above. They added a poignant tone to the otherwise technical discussions about autonomy, constitutions and citizenship within our network. Here, one could detail the micro-level anxieties of indigenous communities that were confronted with better organized neighbours who controlled local markets. However, the undercurrent of acute tensions and competition among people was impossible to ignore, especially in the wake of clashes and conflicts between indigenous communities in the Sixth Schedule areas.

Hence, one was compelled to revisit the fundamental ideas of solidarity and camaraderie that remain central to the free associations of willing people. In doing so, one had to confront the long history of militarization and counter-insurgency that continued to underwrite any discussion around citizenship and autonomy in the region. The success of counter-insurgency in Assam and Northeast India can best be seen in the erosion of solidarity among suffering communities. Instead, every community feels that their suffering was unlike that of others and more importantly, they felt as though they suffered alone.

 

Hence, when the Supreme Court directed the Government of Assam to update its National Register of Citizens (NRC) under its supervision in 2013, most civil society actors viewed the suggestion with a sense of equanimity in the hope that it would resolve some of the residual issues of the partitioning of British India. Within a few years it was apparent that finding documentation that was crucial to prove one’s citizenship that went back to a family genealogy was going to be a very onerous task. The Government of Assam had to employ its vast bureaucracy, as well as call in software companies to digitize and code the data of millions of inhabitants of the state in order to determine who were genuine citizens.

This was perhaps the first time in the 21st century that a state had explicitly invoked law, technology and the bureaucracy in order to resolve an old, seemingly intractable understanding of friendships, neighbourliness and belonging. The process resulted in the inversion of political positions of progressive and conservative views.

 

Within Assam, sections of the progressive community saw this as a way to come out of the old debates about citizenship and partition that began in the 20th century. They were genuinely bewildered when their counterparts from other parts of mainland India saw the process as an example of Assamese chauvinistic politics pushing at the boundaries of citizenship discourse in India. While the NRC process was underway in Assam, the government of India introduced a Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in Parliament allowing for granting citizenship to minorities from the Muslim-majority countries in South Asia (specifically Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan) if they were able to prove that they had been persecuted because of their religion and show proof of uninterrupted residency in India for five years.

When CAB was introduced in 2015, the media and civil society organizations in Assam were far more interested in the commentaries and opinions around the NRC. However, ever since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made it part of their election manifesto, civil and political organizations in Assam and the Northeast have come out on the streets to oppose the possibility. Commentators were once again faced with a seemingly paradoxical situation, where those holding an angular position on the NRC were unequivocally opposed to any amendments to the existing citizenships laws in the country.¹⁰

On 11 December 2019, when CAB was passed in the Parliament and became the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019, Assam was one of the first places where angry citizens poured out onto the streets. In the initial moments they came out in demonstrations without any exhortations by political parties and the powerful student organizations. Within a few days, most organizations and individuals that claimed to represent regional interests as well as the welfare of indigenous communities had taken a virulently anti-CAA position. They sang the national song, O mwr apunar dex (Oh my endearing land/country) and waved the gamosa as though it was their flag.

 

On the streets, their anger was directed against four individuals – the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Chief Minister and the Finance Minister – as well as the act itself. The slogans on the street were about resistance to the government’s insensitivity towards the clauses of the Assam Accord that promised that undocumented migrants from Bangladesh would be deported. Instead, they argued that the government was keen to settle large number of Hindu Bangladeshis to offset the perceived growth of Muslims, as well as secure a solid electoral base among Hindus in the state.

Very soon, the rest of the country joined in protests that drew massive crowds of disparate communities across the class, caste, religious and regional divide. They too sang songs and waved flags that inspired them. In this case, vast crowds of protesters sang the national anthem and waved the Indian flag in defiance. They congregated in streets and lanes, reclaiming the language of a Constitution that they explained, was being surreptitiously subverted by the government.

 

For many, including this author, the protests against CAA were significant for the kind of people who were being drawn into the movement. In the rest of India, as in Assam and the Northeast, it was mainly students who began the protests. Women formed a vast majority of the protesters across the country. Notably, the other visible demographic cohort were older women. The Prime Minister, as well as the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, muddied the waters by making disingenuous claims that the protests were being supported by the opposition and capable of drawing only minorities out on the streets.

In its present form and moment, CAA symbolizes a strange throwback to an era of colonization that included disempowerment of natives and settlement of colonies in the early 20th century. In proposing to be the safe homeland for Hindus suffering under alleged tyranny across Muslim dominated countries in South Asia, the proponents of CAA wish to invoke the kind of passion that 19th and 20th century Zionism drew from sections of oppressed Jews in Europe (and other parts of the world).

Israel’s experience with creating an ethnic homeland for Jews has been a violent process of securing territory and resources by dispossessing older inhabitants. Geographer and peace activist Oren Yiftachel called this a colonial process of creating an ethnocratic state through the manipulation of liberal democratic systems and institutions.¹¹

 

Since it was elected into power for the second term in May 2019, the Indian government has ensured that this resemblance to aggressive Israeli policies is amplified. It has done so by reversing the guarantee of autonomy to the state of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Subsequently, the country’s Home Minister has made several statements in public and to sections of the media that the NRC process – initially seen as an antidote for Assam’s persistent political problem with undocumented migration – would be extended to the whole country. His famous caveat was that the NRC would be preceded by CAA, thereby allowing Hindu migrants to feel reassured that they really belonged to India regardless of what was assured in the Constitution or by those of other political persuasions.

Hence the symbolism of the anti-CAA movement, as well as the rhetoric employed by those who support the act, are of equal importance in the manner in which debates around citizenship are playing out in our corner of the world in the 21st century. In invoking the national anthem and the state song of Assam, protesters are pointing towards a similar algorithm, where they are drawing on an idea of solidarity and community that offsets the government’s narrow definition of nationalism and citizenship. Contextually, the protests differ from one place to another, but one senses an underlying debate about pluralistic and monochromatic views of citizenship.

For the government, there was need to unite Hindu votes and find some common cause with Christians and Buddhists in other states of the Northeast in order to establish some sort of comradeship of religious identity. In fact, the Christian-dominated states of the Northeast have been left outside the ambit of the act, in order to convince Christians that there is a greater enemy in the shape of Muslims in the immediate international neighbourhood – a fact that has not quite played out as the government would have liked.¹²

 

Instead, this has reignited the local versus outsider debate within the Northeast. On 28 February 2020, an anti-CAA activist, Lurshai Hynniewta lost his life as activists of the Khasi Students Union (KSU) were out campaigning against the act in a border village called Ichamati, near the town of Shella that is host to a now-stalled limestone mining project that was set up by the French multinational company Lafarge. In 2014, I had followed my geologist friend to Ichamati, barely managing to get there from Shillong city that had shut down because of protests in favour of the Inner Line Permit (ILP) that restricts the movement of non-local persons into the state.

The mines were still operating in nearby Shella on the sly, despite a Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) order for them to stop doing so. The limestone was being taken in large conveyor belts to a cement factory in Bangladesh. Ichamati village was inhabited by an equal number of Sylheti Hindu and Khasi families, where most men spoke Khasi, Sylheti, Nepali, a smattering of Garo and Assamese as well. It was seemingly unaffected by either the ILP protests or the mining in the neighbourhood. I recall being impressed by a young Sylheti shopkeeper in the village telling us that his peers and he could not think of joining the mining as the hills were almost sacred to them.

Facing north, where the verdant hills had massive, dark gashes resulting from explosions and limestone quarrying, my friend and I thought that the village epitomized a celebratory cosmopolitanism. Not only had the villagers resisted the seductions of the mining company, they lived in a crossover world that they had created against a backdrop of bitter conflicts that waged just about 100 kilometres away in Shillong. Yet again, this tragic death in 2020 was a reminder that I had not visited Ichamati (or Shella) since 2014 and much of the ground had shifted beneath our feet. Hynniewta’s killing at the hands of alleged Hindu-Bengalis led to a series of retaliatory violence in Shillong, leaving the tenacious civil society there to come out and appeal for peace, as they had done in our parents’ time in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Postscript: These discussions about citizenship are happening at a time when the world is going through changes that are no longer under the control of governments, authoritarian or otherwise. Had we been asked to write this essay a year ago, my tone would have been more adversarial and less charitable to the government. I would have relentlessly focused on the systematic destruction of hope for smaller, non-caste, non-Hindu communities across the country.

However, here we are, humbled by two extraordinary phenomena. The first is a spectrum of concerned citizens, especially women and students, who find it difficult to concede to a Faustian pact with those in power in government. In their obdurate clinging to principles of pluralism and at different times, to that of justice for non-religious, indigenous communities, they have railed against a Hindutva imagination that was both colonizing and provincial.

 

The second is a fast spreading virus that is forcing all countries and their governments to think about the safety and public health of all people within their borders. The 2019 novel corona virus has made it impossible for any government to ignore concerns of all classes, races and genders of people regardless of the country of their origin. In many ways, this is the kind of impulse that Immanuel Kant had outlined in his treatise on ‘Perpetual Peace’, where he spoke of the necessity for expanding universal hospitality. While I agree that there is a great degree of coercion involved in acts of quarantining of large groups of population, as has been done in China and Italy, they still come from a compulsion to protect everyone else who has not been affected, even if the authorities (who quarantine) are not directly responsible for those not within their immediate sphere of influence.

As processes, both detention and quarantining have similar intentions. However, their intentions can be vastly different. Detention is punitive, while quarantining can be about care. As the world struggles to respond to both, it might be the case that authoritarian governments are finding out that it might be more effective to care than to coerce. This unscripted political moment has the capacity to show us great resolve, or a capitulation to the kind of racist inequalities that the citizenship discourse of the 1970s had begun to warn us about. If anything, the conversation about citizenship today has to epitomize Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s exhortation for the pessimism of the intellect (at the growing authoritarianism around us) and optimism of the will for a more pluralistic, just transformation of society.

 

Footnotes:

1. A. Roy, Citizenship in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016.

2. D. Kikon, ‘Engaging Naga Nationalism: Can Democracy Function in Militarised Societies?’ Economic and Political Weekly 40(26), 2005, pp. 2833-2837; A.S. Shimray, Let Freedom Ring: The Story of Naga Nationalism. Promilla and Co. and Bibliophile South Asia, New Delhi, 2005.

3. S. Baruah, ‘Citizens and Denizens: Ethnicity, Homelands and the Crisis of Displacement in Northeast India’, Journal of Refugee Studies 16(1), 2003, pp. 44-66.

4. S. Barbora, ‘Autonomous Councils and/or Ethnic Homelands: An Ethnographic Account of the Genesis of Political Violence in Assam (North-East India) Against the Normative Frame of the Indian Constitution’, International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 15(2/3), 2008, pp. 313-334.

5. B.G. Karlsson, ‘Anthropology and the "Indigenous Slot": Claims to and Debates about Indigenous Peoples’ Status in India’, Critique of Anthropology 23(4), 2003, pp. 403-423; Virginius Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous Peoples of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 34(51), 1999, pp. 3589-3595.

6. A.K. Azad, ‘Growing Up Miya in Assam: How the NRC Weaponised my Identity Against Me’, The Caravan, 23 September 2018. https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/growing-up-miya-in-assam-how-the-nrc-weaponised-my-identity-against-me (Accessed on 9 March 2020); D. Kikon, ‘Jackfruit Seeds from Jharkhand: Being Adivasi in Assam’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 51(3), 2017, pp. 313-337.

7. R. Samaddar, ‘Forced Migration Situations as Exceptions in History?’ International Journal of Migration and Border Studies 2(2), 2016, pp. 99-118.

8. A. Roy, op. cit., 2016.

9. S. Barooah Pisharoty, Assam: The Accord, The Discord. Penguin eBury Press/Random House India, New Delhi, 2019.

10. S. Barbora, ‘National Register of Citizens in Assam: Problems and Prospects’, in Explorations, e-Journal of the Indian Sociological Society 3(2), October 2019, pp. 3-28.

11. Oren Yiftachel, ‘Between Colonialism and Ethnocracy: "Creeping Apartheid" in Israel/Palestine’, in Na’eem Jeenah (ed.), Pretending Democracy: Israel, An Ethnocratic State. Afro-Middle East Centre, Johannesburg, 2016, pp. 95-116.

12. A. Longkumer, ‘Anti-Indigenous Sentiment in the Citizenship Amendment Act’, Berkeley Forum blog, 9 March 2020. https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/anti-indigenous-sentiment-in-the-citizenship-amendment-act (Accessed on 10 March 2020).