While my research does not focus on the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), it was hard to avoid talking about it this summer in Assam. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu right-wing party, formed a coalition government in 2016, one of its mandates has been to publish an NRC update which will outline the legal citizens of the state. Assam has had a long and entangled relationship with the region of Bengal, a part of which—East Bengal—became the country of Bangladesh. Shortly after the 1905 partition of Bengal under the British government, Assam and some of the neighboring zones were still legislatively and juridically a part of this British territory. In 1947, however, Assam was brought under the independent territory of India, while East Bengal became East Pakistan, a part of the independent country of Pakistan. In 1971, when East and West Pakistan became independent from each other after a complex, violent struggle, East Bengal became Bangladesh. During the times of partition and political violence, people from the region of East Bengal/Bangladesh migrated into the region of Assam.
Borders seem impermeable: they appear to make hermetic containers out of nations. They are believed to keep out those elements that could contaminate the attempt to achieve a national identity within. But the very desire to make the border impermeable is often accompanied by anxieties around the porosity of the border and the fear that the nation will inevitably become contaminated. Such anxieties played a role in the creation and implementation of the National Registry of Citizens in 1951. Indian citizens were identified as persons who entered the sovereign state of India before November 26, 1949. Registering yourself with the nation would allow you to claim legal status as an Indian citizen. The “others” could be identified as foreigners and deported. However, in spite of these attempts to seal the border, migrants from Bangladesh continued to come into Assam. In 1983, the central government, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, created the Illegal Migration Act to mitigate the situation. However, the act made the police—rather than the defendant—responsible for producing evidence of illegality. As evidence of citizenship is sometimes hard to produce, the act made it difficult to delineate “foreigners.” The act was met with protest in Assam, led by the All Assam Students’ Union (AASU). Among the protesters was Sarbananda Sonowal, the now chief minister of Assam.
In 1985, the central government signed the Assam Accord, which promised to update the NRC in Assam. The government sought to grant citizenship to all migrants who had entered India before March 25, 1971. However, the Accord was never really enforced, leading to further unrest in Assam. In 2005, after the AASU protested again, the central government and the government of Assam renewed attempts to enforce the NRC.
The displeasure in Assam paved the way for the victory of the current right-wing led coalition. The aforementioned Acts and Accords were brought in by the Indian National Congress (INC) party both at the center and in the state of Assam. As of late, however, the INC has been losing trust among the voters. In 2014, a right-wing led coalition won the national elections and formed the government at the center under the leadership of Narendra Modi. One of their promises was to address the “ineffective” governance of the INC. In 2016, the BJP joined hands with two local parties in Assam—the Bodoland People’s Front (BPF) and the Assam Gana Parishad (AGP)—to contest and win the state elections, and ultimately defeated the INC in Assam. Incidentally, the man who led BJP in this victory was Sarbananda Sonowal, who had already demonstrated his interest in the NRC. It must come as no surprise that his government has pursued the immigration question and is keen to implement the National Register of Citizens Update in Assam. This would mean, however, that anyone who is not registered through this bureaucratic processes can be deported.
Given the BJP’s pro-Hindutva ideology, it is obvious that the current government’s interest in the NRC is yet another attempt to keep people who identify as Muslim out of India. However, the history of the NRC in Assam is a little more complex and cannot be distilled to any one political party’s political motives. Historically, the Bengalis and the Assamese have shared a tenuous relationship. When the colonial regime brought Assam under East Bengal, both Bengali Nationalist and Assamese Nationalist movements had already begun to take root. Not only were they opposed to the colonial regime, but they also became antagonistic to each other because of linguistic differences. Similarly, communities delineated by the British as “tribes,” such as the Bodos, have continued to agitate against Assamese as well as Bengali hegemony in their region. Thus, local parties such as the BFP and AGP have historical reasons for backing the BJP. Of course, the Hindu right-wing’s own interest—voiced by Sonowal in several interviews over the past two years—in deporting Bengali Muslims while desiring to demonstrate leniency towards Bengali Hindus is another factor. The desire to mandate the NRC Update thus represents multiple complex motivations to define, detect and deport undesirable subjects out of the state of Assam. While the BJP, BFP and the AGP differ on several grounds, the NRC Update has given them reason to come together over the immigrant issue in spite of their mutual differences.
That said, this bill does not bode well for several migrants who have made home in Assam since 1971. Last summer, I met Muslim families during my travels, who had a very different point of view. According to these families, as well as some Hindu and indigenous families that I also spoke to, these migrants are part of the labor force that sustains both agricultural ventures as well as development projects in Assam. Expunging them might prove impossible or foolish from an economic point of view. Other families I spoke to believe that the interest in implementing the NRC simply reopens old wounds and prevents a future in which immigrants may be allowed to make a life in Assam. There are also concerns that all Bengalis or all Muslims would be discriminated against socially, even if not legally, because of the NRC. These conversations were rarer, and most people I spoke to believed that there was a need to secure the border of Assam by implementing stricter laws on immigration.
This issue comes at a time when immigration—and in general, the question of the “foreigner”—has become salient in many countries across the world. It also raises the question: who is indigenous? In areas such as Assam which have enjoyed centuries of interconnectivity with Tibet, Southern China, Bhutan, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, and the rest of India through the state of West Bengal, what does it mean to be labelled indigenous or foreign? Though my dissertation—which is on environmental precarity and the floods along the Brahmaputra—does not get into this issue directly, I hope to uncover more about the tensions between indigeneity, settler colonialism, and later immigrants as I do more fieldwork.
By Shweta Krishnan, Sigur Center Field Research Grant Recipient for Summer 2018. Shweta is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the George Washington University. Krishnan examines religion, environment, and transnational connections in Majuli, a river island in the Indian state of Assam, which is subject to massive erosion by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Her research examines how geological transformations on this island shape the memories of transnational migrations, the practice of religion, and the ethics of subject formation.
