THE end of 2019 saw the ruling BJP government passing the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), and announcing its intention to set up a National Register of Citizens (NRC). Somewhat unexpectedly, these met with fierce resistance that began in the smaller cities across India before spreading to the metropolises. Lakhs of people poured out onto the streets to oppose what they saw as anti-Muslim legislation. In the months since, the government has made no moves towards repealing or amending the CAA, but they have had to backtrack on their aggressive stance regarding the NRC and its prelude, the National Population Register (NPR).

The tenor of the protest in Assam, however, was somewhat different. On the one hand, the protests against the CAA began here as early as 2016, when the BJP government first proposed it. On the other hand, people have not been entirely averse to the Assam edition of the NRC. Notably, while protests elsewhere rallied to defend the secular spirit of the Constitution, the debate in Assam took the protection of the rights of indigenous people as its starting point. While the rest of the country saw CAA and NRC as unprecedented, protestors in Assam read these as another chapter in the long-standing political debate on migration and ethnic conflict in the region.

In this article, I will trace the contours of this debate in Assam, with the intention of flagging some of the more contentious issues. I will begin by looking at how the constitutional principle of differentiated citizenship was actualized through the categories of ethnicity and territoriality. I will show how these have existed in an uneasy relationship with the notion of indigeneity, which has been the mainstay of political discourse in Assam for a very long time. I will then look at how the Assam NRC exercise has effectively inaugurated a regime of citizenship that implicates the notion of indigeneity in new ways.

The NRC exercise has been promoted as a rational and foolproof resolution of the long-standing ‘illegal migrants’ issue. However, in the latter half of this article I suggest that the terms of this contentious debate, though articulated in the language of constitutionality and rule of law, are animated by a whole range of contemporary conflicts, anxieties and aspirations that have condensed on the two terms of the indigenous-outsider binary. I will end by discussing how these came to be articulated in the brief but intense anti-CAA movement in Assam.

 

The Indian Constitution ascribes to a notion of differentiated citizenship where, in addition to recognizing the individual as a citizen and bearer of rights, the community is also considered a relevant collective unit of social and political life of the nation.¹ Even as the Constitution guarantees certain rights to all individuals, it also empowers the state to make special provisions in favour of certain communities that have a long history of social discrimination and oppression. In some special cases, the Constitution also tied this community-based notion of citizenship to territory and autonomy.

 

In Assam, the Sixth Schedule and Article 371 provide for the formation of autonomous districts and district councils in tribal areas of the state. This ethnic-territorial logic of citizenship provided preferential protections to citizens from the region, which would not be available to those from elsewhere in the country.² This constituted an acknowledgement of the rights of indigenous peoples and the intertwined histories of modernity, imperialism and capitalism in these areas.

Movements demanding autonomy and special protections for indigenous tribal communities led to the formation of the Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao Autonomous Districts. This ethnic-territorial logic of citizenship also became the framework within which the state dealt with insurgent groups, as in the case of the formation of the Bodoland Autonomous Council in 1993. The approach, however, has seen limited success. Often, the formation of these administrative units has made small tribal and non-tribal groups living within them more vulnerable. Elsewhere, members of armed groups have surrendered but continue to mobilize against those perceived as outsiders in their territory.³

In addition to the questions of autonomy and representation, the political discourse of indigeneity has also developed a nuanced critique of cultural practices, and rights to public space. These assertions became all the more vocal particularly in the 1980s and ’90s, in the form of a strong resistance to caste-Hindu Assamese chauvinism during the Assam movement. These critiques have since crystallized into political movements demanding Scheduled Tribe status for six communities in the state. As such these present an intractable problem for state policy that continues to imagine the region through a colonialist cultural geography, peopled by culturally discrete and geographically bounded primitive societies.

 

State policy can engage with demands that mobilize the notion of indigeneity in struggles for social justice only if they can be translated into the language of ‘authentic’ tribal identity. Consequently, the extent of Hinduization and relative social mobility of the Koch Rajbongshi, Moran, Motok, Tai-Ahom and Chutia communities is seen as grounds to oppose their demands. The Adivasi community find themselves in a difficult predicament, given the complex colonial history of their immigration into Assam in the 19th and 20th century as indentured tea-garden labour. The history of their violent displacement and close association with the modern tea industry has meant that the state does not see them as fulfilling the criteria for inclusion in the ST list.

The notion of territorial autonomy, too, has become equally problematic. An unintended consequence of the formation of autonomous councils has been that the idea of exclusive ethnic homelands has come to be normalized. Once again, the neatness of the policy perspective has had to contend with the complex history of migration within and from outside the region. Significant minorities constitute the population of each of the existing autonomous regions, yet find themselves potentially excluded from political representation and vulnerable to legislation regarding ownership of land and property. This has meant that many communities within these regions feel threatened⁴ and have themselves made claims for protection.

Each of these, no doubt, marks an aporia of the ethnic-territorial logic of citizenship that had remained the dominant frame for political imagination, confrontation, as well as resolution. And by the end of the 1990s the logic of accommodating demands through bureaucratized ethnic-territorial readjustments seemed to have become hopelessly entangled.⁵

 

The Assam Movement (1979-85) ostensibly began with demands for a durable solution to the issue of massive inflow of migrants from neighbouring East Pakistan/Bangladesh. In the discourse of popular politics, however, the question was an effort to seek protections for the rights of indigenous people in Assam. The sit-ins and dharnas soon became massive protests, boycott of Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, and much ethnic violence especially in the run-up to the 1983 Lok Sabha elections. The movement’s demands could not be accommodated within the ethnic-territorial model, mainly because it claimed to represent the ‘indigenous people’ and included areas that were not covered by the Sixth Schedule.

The approach eventually adopted in the Assam Accord, 1985, marked a significant departure. It mandated the detection and expulsion of foreigners who had entered Assam after 1971, and the grant of citizenship after ten years’ residence to those who had entered between 1965 and 1971. This was followed by the insertion of Section 6A in the Citizenship Act in 1986, which inaugurated what Anupama Roy has called ‘a hierarchized model of citizenship constituted by the universal "we", the Assamese people, whose claim to citizenship was beyond any legal dispute, superimposed on residual citizens, whose citizenship was rendered ambivalent by their linguistic identity and their religion.’⁶ This moment was significant because where the earlier approach had been built around special protections for indigenous communities, the Accord sought to put in place a regime that secured their rights by excluding certain other groups from equal citizenship.

 

This new paradigm of hierarchized citizenship, together with the massive militarization of politics by the state in the 1990s, have created a situation where groups have often sought to realize exclusive ethnic homelands through violence targeted at specific communities. The protection of indigenous rights increasingly came to be linked with exclusion from citizenship of those perceived to be outsiders. It is not that these tensions had not existed before, but the frequency with which these became fault lines of violent conflict was unprecedented. This pattern of ethnic violence must be understood as the contradictions of the ethnic-territorial logic of citizenship coming together with the idea of hierarchized citizenship.

This new regime of citizenship began to take concrete shape with the passing of the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 and two important Supreme Court rulings in 2005 and 2014. The 2003 rules provided the basis for the NRC by making the registration of all citizens of India, issue of national identity cards, the maintenance of a national population register, and the establishment of the NRC by the central government, compulsory.⁷

Following this, the Supreme Court in 2005 scrapped the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, 1983 as unconstitutional and went on to describe illegal immigration as a form of external aggression. Finally, in a ruling pertaining to Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha and Others v Union of India and Others, 2014, the Supreme Court spelt out in further detail the process for the preparation of the NRC for Assam, with directions to the Gauhati High Court to expedite the setting up and monitoring of Foreigner Tribunals and a fixed timeline for the publication of the register. The central government was to discuss with the Government of Bangladesh modalities for the deportation of illegal migrants.⁸

 

The present NRC shares only its name with its 1951 predecessor, which had been a hurried affair carried out before the dust of Partition had settled. It has introduced new procedures to identify ‘Indian citizens who are originally inhabitants of Assam’ and looks to implement a bureaucratic rationality that can manage and collate massive amounts of information into an error-free register. The first stage of the process included the preparation of the ‘legacy data’, which included the names found in the 1951 NRC and electoral rolls published in Assam up to 24 March 1971. All applicants were required to provide documentary evidence tracing their lineage to an ancestor whose name was included in the legacy data. This was then verified on a house-to-house basis, and by comparing the submitted claims of ancestry with software-generated family trees.

This approach not only places the idea of ancestry at the very centre of the debate on citizenship, but also makes it subject to verification through documentary evidence. However, this determination of citizenship and residence through kinship ties has also excluded many women and transgender persons who have been unable to produce the necessary documentation.⁹

The exclusionary logic of citizenship set in motion by the Assam Accord has thus reached a culmination of sorts in the NRC initiative. Moreover, it has brought about a reorientation of the relationship between the judiciary, bureaucracy, and the government in deciding on questions of citizenship. The matter of who is not a citizen, it seems, is now to be decided through a bureaucratic process subject to judicial oversight and not as a subject of debate on political existence in the postcolonial nation-state.

 

The NRC initiative received a range of responses in Assam. Many have argued that the NRC had been made possible not so much through government initiative but the painstaking work of building a broad consensus on the issue among all communities with the aim of putting an end to ethnic strife in the region.¹⁰ Some are also hopeful that inclusion in the NRC would put a definitive end to the discrimination, harassment, and exploitation faced by many Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims.¹¹ Others, however, are not so optimistic and remain unconvinced that the NRC will actually be able to secure the rights of indigenous people in Assam. Some activists have also pointed out critical lapses in the functioning of the Foreigners’ Tribunals and the use of the D-voters’ category as an instrument of disenfranchisement and harassment of Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims.¹²

 

Where the legal narrative framed undocumented migration as an act of aggression against the state, in political debate the main point of contention has been the relationship between this new regime of citizenship and the history of ethnic violence in Assam. Commentators are acutely aware that beyond the cut-off dates and the foolproof procedures, the social effects the NRC initiative cannot evade are closely tied to the history of ethnic conflict in Assam over the last three decades.

That being said, any discussion on indigeneity and ‘outsiders’ invariably draws upon a whole range of anxieties and aspirations that often have a cultural and economic dimension. Over the last decade or so, these debates have also come to be strongly inflected by two other factors – namely, neoliberal market forces and the emergence of Hindutva in Assam. In a context shaped by a new regime of citizenship, rapid economic transformation, and the cultural politics of Hindutva, the notion of indigeneity and ‘the outsider’ are themselves being redefined. Consequently, the debate on whether the NRC will put an end to ethnic violence is somewhat misplaced. The real question is how these three factors, together, have today transposed the question of ethnic conflict onto a vastly transformed terrain of social conflict.

 

As Assam began to feel the effects of a neo-liberal in the form of ‘flexible labour processes and markets, of geographical mobility and rapid shifts in consumption practices’,¹³ the notion of indigeneity also came into play in various ways. Struggles against hydroelectric projects and polluting industries drew on the popular discourse of indigenous culture and rights to protest the usurpation of land, displacement and ecological destruction. Communities demanding land and forest rights often invoke it. The rapid expansion of the market in the last two decades or so has drastically altered the political economy of rural Assam. Caught between an increased dependency on the market and declining returns in agriculture, people have sought alternatives, including taking up non-farming activities or emigration to the metropoles for work. The proliferation of micro-finance has led to the monetization of a wide range of activities, from weaving to rearing livestock and setting up fisheries, and with it heightened exposure to financial volatility and risk.

In contrast to the reformist impulse of earlier times, a certain construction of ethnic rusticity has today become the site of subsumption within the market. The new demand for organic and ethnic food products has brought in a number of new entrepreneurs. Similarly, the success of new eco-tourism ventures is dependent on a smart combination of modern communication and financial technologies, with a cultivated performance of rustic authenticity that can appeal to a national and international tourist clientele. This plays out in the local markets as well, in the form of the prevailing middle class demand for ‘organic’ vegetables rather than pesticide-laden vegetables – a distinction that comes to be marked on the body of the seller rather than the product itself.

 

The market has today become the prominent site of economic competition and conflict between ‘indigenous’ and ‘outsider’. The new regime of flexible accumulation has also encouraged new trends in capital ownership and business partnerships, operating in networks that are no longer restricted to one’s own community. This has been accompanied by a broader regional scope as businessmen from Assam have now begun making investments in areas such as North Bengal.

With the rise of local entrepreneurs, and emerging conflicts over control of markets, the conventional image of the merchant/money lender/capitalist outsider and the poor indigenous worker/consumer today seems considerably more complicated. Similarly, the anxieties associated with migration are very different today – being rather more concerned with emigration for work rather than immigration as land grabbing.

In recent years, the emotive discourse of indigeneity has come to be challenged by the rapid rise of Hindutva in Assam. Long before the BJP came to power, Hindutva organizations had long been working in the state. Focusing on cultural and religious activities, initiatives such as their Ekal Vidyalayas have been reported upon in some detail.¹⁴ Organizations such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram have also sought to become increasingly involved in the activities of various religious sects such as Donyi Polo¹⁵ in Arunachal Pradesh and Lokhimon Dharma in Assam,¹⁶ and among communities such as the Bru.¹⁷ The ‘saffron wave’ in Assam has not been restricted to sweeping elections – Hindutva has become deeply embedded in popular cultural discourse.

 

Emerging as a challenger to regional political formations, they have worked to delegitimize existing ethnic political and cultural assertions, looking to neutralize them through an appeal to a Hindu whole composed of separate but harmonious parts. There has been a sustained effort to ideologically delegitimize longstanding ethnic identity struggles as being the product of Christian missionary influence on their educated elites. Amongst the caste-Hindu Assamese, they have sought to appropriate Assamese Vaishnavism as irrefutable proof of cultural affinity with the ethos of ‘Hindu’ culture. Since coming to power, this cultural project has been ingeniously coupled with the BJP’s recently established control over the state’s apparatus of targeted welfare to stifle incipient opposition. Not surprisingly, this has placed Hindutva in direct confrontation with the politics of indigeneity.

 

This ongoing struggle was abundantly visible in the trajectory of the recent anti-CAA protests as well. The protests began within hours of the bill’s passage, as spontaneous demonstrations began blocking traffic in Guwahati. Matters soon flared into massive protests all across the state, with government property bearing the brunt of the people’s anger. The administration, momentarily caught unawares, soon responded with massive force, shooting dead five and detaining hundreds. All major towns were placed under curfew, internet connectivity was blocked, and activists were picked up from their homes in nightly raids.

Beyond the massive popular participation itself, the protests were notable for other reasons. The speeches, slogans, and the word of the street spoke of the protests as rekindling the spirit of the Assam Movement. Some of the typical forms of local mobilization deployed during the Assam Movement were reactivated – civil society groups, naamghars, mahila samitis, and students all mobilized. And yet, beneath the revival of the old vocabulary, symbolism and narrative also palpable was an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and lack of enthusiasm for the traditional Assamese nationalist leadership, including organizations such as the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). The situation was somewhat unprecedented, in that the enthusiastic popular participation in the movement actually began to dissipate when AASU joined in the protests. In fact, in everyday conversation many protestors were apprehensive that given their new bonhomie with the BJP, AASU would only work to divert attention from the real matters at hand.

 

The anti-outsider narrative, too, was a shell of its former chauvinist self. Even as anti-Bengali sentiments remained part of the protest vocabulary on the street, the protestors themselves discouraged chauvinist slogans.¹⁸ And even as there were isolated incidents of attacks on business establishments owned by Bengali and Hindi speakers, the massive protests did not turn into planned and targeted ethnic violence against communities, as often happened in the past.

Instead, the protestors’ ire soon shifted from the law itself and became a far more wide-ranging protest against BJP-RSS. The students of a number of state universities banned the entry of BJP leaders and MLAs; a BJP legislator’s house was burnt in Chabua, and BJP leaders were shown black flags at virtually every public appearance and were barred entry into countless villages across Assam. In places, RSS offices were ransacked.

These developments signal a significant departure in how the idea of indigeneity is being articulated today. The political subject of 2019 is not the protestor who took to the streets in 1979. Drained of its ethnic particularity, the ‘indigenous people’ the movement claimed to represent is better understood as a populist articulation. It constructs its other not so much as an ethnic community but as a certain agency in an oppressive political structure. Unhinged from its culturalist moorings, this populist reconstitution has expanded the scope of indigeneity as a political category. Ironically, the return of the slogans of the Assam Movement mark not the resurgence of caste-Hindu Assamese chauvinism, but its appropriation by the politics of indigeneity.

 

These critical shifts hardly seem to have caught the eye of most observers of the NRC/CAA protests in Assam. The arguments in favour of the NRC and the assertion of the rights of indigenous people are not the result of an unjustifiable privileging of a ‘primordial conception of identity over constitutionality.’¹⁹ Rather, this tension is very much part of the constitutional principle of differentiated citizenship. Nor can the broad spectrum of positions vis-a-vis the NRC, indigenous rights and citizenship be reduced to so many expressions of chauvinism or xenophobia.

That being said, there is little reason to expect the NRC to offer any substantive ‘resolution’. Despite its claims to being a rational, foolproof process, the logic of exclusion that guides this exercise will have to be reckoned with at the level of everyday interactions between communities. Far from representing a broad consensus that legitimizes the exercise, the support for the NRC is best understood as condensing together a whole range of anxieties, grievances and aspirations that are tenuously held together by a notion of indigeneity that is being thoroughly reconstituted. How this will play out remains unclear, but we can be sure that it will entail a rethinking of the very notion of citizenship in neoliberal times.

 

Footnotes:

1. Anupama Roy, Citizenship in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016, p. 18.

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

3. Sanjay Barbora, ‘Autonomous Council 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.

4. Sanjib Baruah, op. cit., 2003.

5. Sanjib Baruah, ‘Territoriality, Indigeneity, and Rights in North-East India’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(12-13), 2008, pp. 15-19.

6. Anupama Roy, ‘Ambivalence of Citizenship in Assam’, Economic and Political Weekly 51(26-27), 2016, pp. 45-51.

7. Anupama Roy, ‘The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and the Aporia of Citizenship’, Economic and Political Weekly 54(49), 2019, pp. 28-34.

8. Anupama Roy, ibid.

9. Ditilekha Sharma, ‘Determination of Citizenship through Lineage in the Assam NRC is Inherently Exclusionary’, Economic and Political Weekly 54(14), 2019. https://www. epw.in/engage/article/determination-citizenship-through-lineage-assam-nrc-exclusionary (Accessed on 15 May 2020).

10. Hiren Gohain, ‘It’s Important to Know the History of the NRC Before Passing Judgment on It’, The Wire.in, 8 August 2018. https://thewire.in/rights/assam-nrc-history-immigration (Accessed 15 May 2020).

11. Udayon Misra, ‘Why Many in Assam See the NRC as a Lifeline’, The Wire.in, 24 August 2018. https://thewire.in/history/history-nrc-assam (Accessed 15 May 2020).

12. Nazimuddin Siddique, ‘A Response to Hiren Gohain: The NRC is a Product of Xenophobia in Assam’, Economic and Political Weekly 55(14), 2020. https://www.epw.in/ engage/article/response-hiren-gohain-nrc-product-xenophobia-assam (Accessed 12 May 2020).

13. David Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity. Blackwell, Mass., 1992, p. 124.

14. Rajeev Bhattacharya, ‘Saffron Wave in Assam: Ekal Vidyalayas Helped BJP, RSS Establish Strong Roots in Assam’s Tribal Areas, Tea Estates’, Firstpost.com, 24 May 2019. https://www.firstpost.com/politics/saffron-wave-in-assam-ekal-vidyalayas-helped-bjp-rss-establish-strong-roots-in-assams-tribal-areas-tea-estates-6696851.html (Accessed 10 May 2020).

15. Nitin Sethi, ‘RSS Turns Arunachal Tribals Towards Hinduism’, Business Standard, 1 May 2014. https://www.business-standard.com/article/elections-2014/rss-turns-arunachal-tribals-towards-hinduism-114042900231_1.html (Accessed 10 May 2020).

16. Bidyut Sagar Boruah, Gaurav Rajkhowa and Ankur Tamuli Phukan, ‘RSS Aru Karbi Jonogusthir Hindukoron’, Amar Asom, 29 and 30 September 2018.

17. Furquan Ameen Siddiqui, ‘Target Northeast: How RSS Plans to Make Region Saffron’, Hindustan Times, 13 December 2014. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/target-northeast-how-rss-plans-to-make-region-saffron/story-YZGPkOBXb6tS301 BvpunpJ.html (Accessed 12 May 2020).

18. Arunabh Saikia, ‘Why Guwahati Exploded in Protests and What Explains Assam’s Resistance to the Citizenship Bill’, Scroll.in, 12 December 2019. https://scroll.in/article/946563/why-guwahati-exploded-in-protests-and-what-explains-assam-s-resistance-to-the-citizenship-bill (Accessed 15 May 2020).

19. ‘Quandary of National Register of Citizens’, Economic and Political Weekly 54(37), 14 September 2019, pp. 7-8.