19 Apr The journey from “migration certificate” to “citizenship card”: Livelihood, demography and changing identities in post-1947 Assam
Postcolonial nation building saw the assertion of dominance by majority community and persecution of minorities. One method of building nation-states as an exclusive domain of the majority was to innovate devices to convert citizens into “other” and render them stateless and right less. The updating of National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam is one such endeavor. In order to build its exclusive domain, the Assamese has been trying to expel the group consistently. The current endeavor tries to exclude a linguistic/religious minority group by cancelling their existing citizenship. This is unprecedented and unheard of anywhere in the world. People who are citizens by birth are subjected to bureaucratic document verification process to annul their citizenship so that they could be rendered stateless and the host community attains unchallenged hegemony in the area.