- History for Peace
- 1 day ago
- 20 min read
I am honoured to speak at the ‘Idea of Belonging’ conference and grateful to the organizers, especially Meena Megha Malhotra and Naveen Kishore. I deeply regret not being there. Borders, boundaries, and the inclinations of state have a way of keeping us from each other, more and more of late.[1]
Suicide in Assam
January 29, 2020.[2] A Muslim man committed suicide by hanging himself in a primary school in Assam where his two children studied. He had been missing for two days. Originally from another district, at the time of his death he had been resident in his current village on the char (river islands) for several years. His spouse was the recipient of a house through a government scheme. Previously, he had also worked in construction in Guwahati, the largest city in Assam. On settling down in the char he commuted to Guwahati to work as a daily wage labourer while his wife earned a living as an agricultural labourer in their village. Notwithstanding the hardships, in the words of his family, they felt truly blessed to have each other and their home.
The protracted process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) to verify their family’s citizenship status was daunting and painful. As a non-formally literate person and someone without means, it had been extraordinarily difficult and incapacitating for him to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles, misinformation, and procedural requirements and to locate and procure the requisite documents to establish their family’s legacy as apposite residents of Assam. Despite repeated verifications, his name along with the name of one of his very young children, was absent from the NRC list published on 31 August 2019. His spouse’s father was also identified as a ‘D voter’ (doubtful voter) and omitted from the NRC.
He could not fathom why he, his family and community were being estranged from their homeland. His family was apprehensive that their being Muslim and the multiple local migrations necessitated by poverty had cast them as people ‘without roots,’ and therefore, as ‘foreigners’. He began to experience mental health issues which escalated with loss of income, debt, anxiety, increasing depression and severe stress. He lived with foreboding about his future and that of his family. He started to consume alcohol in excess and was easily angered. He attempted to break their home down with an axe. He once consumed pesticide to kill himself and at another time, tried to hang himself. She [his wife] used to watch over him all the time. Just before his death, he had rowed with her.
His family lived through a vortex of threat, sadness, humiliation and deprivation. They were uneasy about the trials of the Foreigners Tribunal process where they felt increasingly pre-judged. Exhausted, they withdrew from various aspects of collective social life. They feared for his well-being and the impact his deterioration was having on his children. Then, one day, he took his life. With his death, fragments of hope and history were irreparably broken for his family.
Majoritarian State
The pliable, everyday nature of social and political belonging, the cultural and linguistic differences that bolster them and the strategic and shifting identities we inhabit, acquire, or reject, allow for vibrant relations to self and neighbour, history and worlds, memory and remembrance; they sustain and repair shared intimacies, coexistence, recognizability, understanding and respect for difference. Starkly clear and opaque, frozen and unceasing, all at once. India—a multiethnic and multireligious nation state—inherited colonial (and certain feudal) modalities of managing cultural diversity through differentiated legal regimes for various communities (combining common law, personal law, customary law, reservation/affirmative action and security law) and differentiated management of space, identity, land, resources and cultural belonging. Formulas of limited protections and dissolution of protections have precipitated increasing social pressure in recent decades.
Against this, the contemporary majoritarian moment in India struggles with the fixities and relations of power enforced through casteification, identity politics and religionization, and a ghettoing of the ‘Other’ that marginalizes and violates. A problematic presentism seeks to totalize and revision history to weaponize ‘majoritarian becoming’ and ‘national belonging,’ via modalities that destabilize meaning-making, breaking skin from bone.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP)[3] election to national government in 2014 and popular re-election in 2019 and 2024 amplified the bricolage of a majoritarian state in India configured along the colonial and feudal fault lines of religion, ethnos and identity. Decades of political conflict, radical inequities and repressive governance in India’s already conflicted democracy enabled the capture of state power by the Hindu Right.
The BJP and Narendra Modi-led government incorporates[4] populism, nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism while the grassroots cadre of millions of Hindu nationalists weaponize[5] religion and politics to incite the Hindu majority. The politicization of religion and the racialization of Muslims across India target difference as ‘anti-national’. Majoritarian nationalism sanctifies India as intrinsically Hindu and marks the non-Hindu as its adversary. Race and nation are made synonymous, as Hindus—the formerly colonized, now governing, elite—are depicted as the national race and ‘authentic citizens’. Social, economic, legal and organized physical attacks and deep systemic discrimination have made India’s Muslims one of the most vulnerable populations anywhere in the world.
Contemporary political movements have pushed for more uniform national legislation and a stronger definition of citizenship (and implicitly, national belonging) based on the acculturation of religious and ethnic differences and the consolidation and racializing of national identity. Powerful social currents are seeking to redefine citizenship, connecting it with Indian-ness, public safety and national security. These trends are inevitably accompanied by intensifying cultural nationalism whereby the majority and dominant community is modifying institutions and social relations, in consolidating social, economic, political and juridical forms of power.
To mobilize a Hindu state,[6] the Hindu Right has worked to manufacture the ‘Muslim problem’ through decades. Its unchecked escalation today bolsters the movement to destroy Muslim belonging. To erase foundational dimensions of India’s makeup—Muslim communities, Islamic cultures and their contributions—Hindu nationalists revision history and viralize falsehoods to fabricate Muslim persecution of Hindus. Formative to generating Muslim unbelonging is the development of a conscious and repressive and always gendered, apparatus to marginalise and diminish minorities as ‘Other’. This is held in place by upper-caste dominance, reinforced in policy, education, law, economy and segregationist social, domestic and quotidian life.
Majoritarian leaders depict Hindus as the national race and ‘authentic citizens’. The Hindutvaization of national culture and cultural citizenship effect monumental social estrangements, unleashing frenzied and calculated exhibitions that target the sanctity of Muslim lives. The Modi-led government’s aggressive minoritization is made synonymous with national security. ‘Bulldozer justice,’ ‘love-jihad,’ the continued siege on Kashmir, are elements of this enterprise. The ‘citizenship experiment’ commenced by the BJP via the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA), ratified in December 2019, is paramount to this imperative.[7]
Birthright Citizenship to Nationality Law
Previous territorial definitions of citizenship (jus soli) are giving way to community and descent-oriented understandings of citizenship (jus sanguinis). Questions of belonging and recognition were addressed through the formation of linguistic states since the mid-1950s. This process continues to this day with the formation of several new states in central and northern India, configured to accommodate demands for recognition of linguistic and cultural identities.
The other mechanism has been the extension of reserved seats in educational institutions and in elections, for caste-oppressed communities and the so-termed ‘scheduled tribes,’ in many instances reinscribing caste and failing to address radical inequities and alleviate the dominant grip on power, rather than imagining a caste-free society. Religious identities and religious minorities have not been included in either of these mechanisms.
Led by the BJP, India’s majoritarian turn displays a singular depravity. Citizenship rights and the attendant belonging of vulnerable religious groups, especially Muslims, numbering approximately 200 million, have come under asphyxiating pressure and resurfaced highly contested and unresolved issues.
While changes were facilitated by the Indian National Congress (party), the post-2014 Narendra Modi-led government has been responsible for the stratagem to base citizenship on descent and religion. In its 2014 campaign to govern India, the Modi-led BJP had promised to reconstitute the basis of Indian citizenship through exclusionary, nativist changes to the law, privileging Hindus.[8] Following re-election in May 2019, the BJP-Government of India set in motion two initiatives to recast the basis of Indian nationality. Two initiatives sought to recast the basis of Indian nationality; the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (2019) (CAA), which came into effect in January 2020 and the proposal to create a National Citizen’s Register (NRC), also in 2019,[9] that would attempt to establish through documentation of descent going back several generations, who can be considered a bona fide citizen of India. The CAA and NRC both authorize the collection of highly sensitive information utilized by the state for social engineering, promulgating fear and isolation.[10]
The passage of the CAA and its larger-than-the-BJP-political-acceptability bears deep scrutiny. Premised on the claim by senior BJP leaders that many Muslims are residing in India ‘illegally’ and are not Indian, the citizenship dictum is consonant with Hindu nationalist ideologue M.S. Golwalkar’s injunction that that non-Hindus in India ‘may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges… not even citizen’s rights’.[11]
The BJP passed the CAA and determined to commence an all-India National Register of Citizens (NRC),[12] claiming that many Muslims are residing in India ‘illegally’ and are not Indian.[13] India’s citizenship experiment resonates with the Nuremberg Race Laws[14] instituted in September 1935 in Nazi Germany, which affixed citizenship rights with German ‘blood’, ‘purity’ and ‘honour’ and to designate the ‘Reich citizen’, decreeing them as exclusive holders of full political rights.[15] Four years after it came into force, the CAA was approbated for countrywide implementation in February 2024.[16] In March 2024,[17] the Government of India issued rules and documentation requirements for persons seeking recourse to the law to obtain or confirm Indian citizenship. The forms incorporate an oath of allegiance to the Indian Constitution; queries regarding applicant identity, family and criminal history; and seek confirmation of the applicant’s previous relinquishment or loss of Indian citizenship.[18]
The thrust of the citizenship movement attests to a flatlining of law and democracy and the normalization of the extraordinary power of the Modi-led BJP. The citizenship experiment fortifies legal discrimination based on religion. It has led to the violent and gendered targeting of vulnerable groups through organized physical attacks, lynching, and abuse and the escalation of political conflict. These issues also find strident fiscal and political support among India’s powerful, Hindu-nationalist-supporting diaspora, including in the United States.
‘Infiltrators’ v. ‘Asylum Seekers’
The BJP government’s pilot experiment to reposition citizenship focused on Assam in the Northeast, enflaming long-standing disaffections to question: ‘Who is Axomiya/Assamese?’ The momentum for prejudicial citizenship was operationalized by three intersecting campaigns: injurious amendments to the law, racialization of Muslims in public discourse, and political discourse that relayed signals to trigger and heighten violent vigilantism by Hindu nationalists. The criteria for citizenship in Assam include: (1) Applicants who entered Assam before March 1971, and (2) Children of such persons. Even if an individual was born in Assam in 1973, and never travelled out of Assam since, they will not be treated as a citizen unless they can verify that their parents entered Assam before March 1971.
The drive to accord citizenship to Bangla-descent Hindus exclude and enervate Assam’s Muslims, severing diverse communities from each other, vitiating everyday relations. When Bangla Hindus are targeted, they are cast as ‘asylum seekers,’ allowing for approbation, while Bangla Muslims are portrayed as ‘infiltrators’. This dangerous purgatory also obfuscates the porosity of borders between what is ‘India’ and surrounding states and regions for reasons of history and geography. Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries are fabricated as causal to population growth contaminating the Hindu nation.
In 2020, while Muslims reportedly constituted 37.1 percent of Assam’s population of 35 million and numbered about 13 million, Bangla Muslims numbered approximately nine million. To manufacture Muslims as the ‘enemy within,’ the BJP weaponizes citizenship along the fault lines of religion and identity. Official discourse propagates Bangla-descent Muslims of Assam are ‘foreigners’ and ‘intruders’.
In recent history, Sangh Parivar (Hindu nationalist) organizations intensified their campaign for prejudicial citizenship through decades. In the Northeast, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) appointed an office bearer in 1949. In 1983, a pogrom victimizing Bangla-descent Muslims was orchestrated in Nellie. By 2016, the RSS reportedly had 830 centers in 672 locations across Assam. Between April and December 2019, Amit Shah advocated for a populist movement for racialized citizenship, and the amplification of the NRC across India, to halt Muslim ‘infiltration’. His call found resonance as Hindu nationalists marshalled social discontent and political grievances of marginalized Hindus to propagandise ‘Hinduphobia’ and Muslim culpability. Between 2019 and 2023, Hindutva activists used the CAA to rekindle protracted disaccord afflicting Assam. In 2020, while Muslims reportedly constituted 37.1 percent of Assam’s population of 35 million and numbered about 13 million, Bangla Muslims numbered approximately nine million.
The CAA requires Individuals to prove that they are citizens through an arduous process that is heavily weighted against Assam’s sizeable Muslim population with injurious, gendered impact, and affect Adivasis, Dalits, and other caste-oppressed groups. Individuals incriminated as ‘foreigners’ are mostly local inhabitants, citizens, and often socially and economically marginalized. The revisionist purgatory also obfuscates the porosity of borders between what is ‘India’ and surrounding states and regions for reasons of geography, relationships, and intimate histories. Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries are fabricated as causal to population growth contaminating the Hindu nation.
The effort to legislate and recast citizenship has been accelerated in Assam since colonial and post/colonial time. While changes were facilitated by the Indian National Congress (party), the present BJP government is responsible for the stratagem to base citizenship on descent and religion. Three parallel and intersecting changes to citizenship laws have been enacted through the years: (1) Modifications to criteria for acquiring citizenship by descent (jus sanguinis); (2) Instituting mandatory registration of citizenship through documentary evidence; and (3) Adding religion as a criterion for certain pathways to citizenship. The CAA and NRC both authorise the collection of highly sensitive information utilized by the state for social engineering, promulgating fear and isolation.
Seeking to exclude a community based on their faith, the modalities for safe harbor that apply to other communities exclude Bangla-descent, Axomiya (Oxomiya)-speaking Muslim inhabitants of Assam, fabricated as ‘foreigners’ and ‘outsiders’. The structure (systems, institutions) and instruments (laws, policies) of ‘citizenship’ have rendered exceptionally vulnerable Bangla-descent Assamese-speaking Muslim inhabitants of Assam (who also self-identify as ‘Miya’ Muslims), particularly women among them, together with ‘tea [plantation indentured labour] tribes,’ and the orphaned, deserted, and destitute.
Prevalently, persons among Assam’s diverse Muslim communities possess documentary records that corroborate their claims to inhabitancy and citizenship and/or evidence based in oral history and customary practice. Frequently, proof of belonging rendered by individuals to the stipulated state institutions is discredited, dismissed, or deemed inadmissible.
The momentum for prejudicial citizenship was operationalized by four intersecting campaigns: amendments to the law, communalizing local cultures, the racialization of Muslims in public discourse, and political discourse that relays signals to trigger and heighten vigilantism. Widespread, diverse community-based, student-led, grassroots organized, and nationwide civil society protests followed. The prolific dissent of Muslim community members, as in Shaheen Bagh, were volubly demonized by the state. The government’s brutal suppression of dissenters, alleging seditious intent, evidenced the growing acceptability of supremacism as a governing strategy within a large section of the electorate.
Prejudicial Citizenship
The law in India omits to differentiate between ‘illegal’ (undocumented) immigrants and refugees. The initial NRC was a list of names of Indian citizens, many of whom were refugees, premised on the first post-1947 census of India (which reportedly did not include names of individuals from at least six districts in Assam). In 2013, the Supreme Court of India instructed the NRC to update the list. In Assam, every individual claiming to be a citizen was required to make an application to the local authority with the necessary documents. More than four million persons were excluded from the draft NRC list released in July 2018. While a majority were not of Hindu descent, reportedly between one and 1.5 million were Hindus. As well, in 2018, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was extended in Assam.
The exclusion of many Hindus from the 2018 NRC list is presumed to be the foremost reason for the 2019 Amendment. The most recent update to the NRC was published on August 31, 2019, and reportedly excluded 486,000 Bangla Muslims from the published list. Bangla Muslims constituted 25.5 per cent of those excluded of a total of 7,00,000 excluded Muslims (36.7 per cent of the excluded);[19] approximately 5,00,000-6,90,000 Bangla Hindus (26.2-36.2 per cent of those excluded);[20] and approximately 60,000 Assamese Hindus (3.1 per cent of the excluded). Those from indigenous groups number between 2,40,620 and 6,70,657 (between 12.6 and 35.2 per cent of the excluded).
Hindus excluded from the 2019 NRC list may find protection through the 2019 amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955, wherein certain non-Muslims adjudged to have ‘illegally’ entered India before December 31, 2014, may obtain citizenship. In addition to the NRC list, the Assam Border Police pronounced certain persons to be ‘foreigners,’ in a reportedly non-transparent use of power. The Election Commission decreed various individuals as ‘doubtful’ citizens, declaring them ‘D voters’ (‘doubtful voters’) and divesting them of voting rights and referred their cases to the ‘Foreigners Tribunals’.
Foreigners Tribunals: Administering Injustice
The Assam Foreigners Tribunal(s), created under the Foreigners Act, 1946, are the state mechanism of appeal for persons excluded from the NRC. While on March 16, 2021, the Lok Sabha recorded 300 Foreigners Tribunals in Assam,[21] in February 2024, only 100 tribunals were operational. Individuals who receive an unfavourable judgment from a tribunal have the sole option of appealing to the Assam High Court (unaffordable for many), followed by a (small) possibility of approaching the Supreme Court.
In 2005, the Supreme Court of India rescinded the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, 1983 (IMDT),[22] reconfiguring legal parameters of citizenship. The apex court controversially returned the burden of proof for a person’s citizenship status from the state to the individual. The revocation of the IMDT led to the creation of the Assam Foreigners Tribunal(s) for detecting ‘foreigners’.
The Foreigners Tribunals routinely lack transparency with respect to principles, standards, staffing and functioning.[23] There is pressure on tribunal appointees to decide against citizenship applications brought before them and officials frequently extort bribes and criminalise targeted persons. As of December 2023, Foreigners Tribunals had reportedly processed 337,186 cases[24] and declared 159,353 persons to be foreigners,[25] and 8,461 cases were on appeal at the high court.[26] As of February 2024, 96,149 cases were pending before Foreigners Tribunals. Of those declared ‘foreigners,’ community leaders say, reportedly, above 70 per cent are Muslims and among them, 90 per cent are Bangla-descent Muslims. As of 2023, of those adjudicated ‘foreigners,’ reportedly 40 per cent were stipulated through ex parte proceedings, with judgments issued in absence of the accused. These records reportedly address only heterosexual and cisgender relationships.
Arbitrary rulings hazardously impact an individual’s citizenship status.[27] These relate to lack of birth certificates and name changes due to marriage for women that are not recorded on identity documents. In September 2019, a Muslim family with land documents dating to 1927 found family members excluded from the NRC due to: ‘an objection filed [apparently anonymously] by someone against their inclusion in the final draft’.[28] Community knowledge holders say that most individuals adjudged to be ‘foreigners’ are local inhabitants with documentary evidence of belonging and citizenship. Further, the NRC may refuse citizenship to Muslim asylum seekers, refugees and any undocumented persons.
In 2024, I reviewed 241 Foreigners Tribunals Orders; of which 196 were issued to persons of Muslim descent between February 5, 2013, and December 29, 2020, spanning 15 districts in Assam. In 2021, I reviewed 37 Foreigners Tribunal orders; of which 34 were issued to persons of Muslim descent between March 2005 and October 2020, spanning 9 districts. Of the 230 orders against persons of Muslim descent, 219 persons had been deemed ‘foreigners’. Among 278 Foreigners Tribunals Orders:
Orders against Muslim individuals | 230 |
Cases in which Muslim persons were ruled to be ‘foreigners’ | 219 (95.2%) |
Cases in which Muslim persons were ruled citizens | 11 (4.8%) |
Cases which tried a single person | 220 (96%) |
Cases which tried multiple persons | 10 (4%) |
Total Muslim persons tried | 256 persons (130 women; 126 men) |
Orders issued after 2014 | 224 orders (97%) |
Various of the 230 orders were adjudicated with no state representative on record on the order. Certain orders where individuals were deemed to be noncitizens counselled police to open investigations into other family members, without noting due cause. At least one person ruled a citizen in a previous case was ruled a noncitizen in another. Certain cases presumed mala fide intent on part of the appellant, disqualifying documents without justification. Various cases had references to the IMDT dating to the 1990s.
Muslim-Outsider and the Hindu Nation
Muslim community members I have been privileged to interviewed between 2014 and 2024, spoke to the devastating impact of Islamomisic policies on Muslim lives. Made invisible, demonized, criminalized, made ‘Other,’ violated, ransacked, boycotted, impoverished, bulldozed, evicted, decitizenized, lynched, threatened with genocidal violence…amid the double bind that must be underscored wherein Muslim-community-based resistance is officially, routinely adjudged anti-national, even ‘terrorist’.
The CAA fortifies legal discrimination based on religion in a country of over 1.4 billion persons, where ‘minority’ religious communities comprise approximately 20.2 per cent of the population. In Assam, Bangla-descent Muslims, who are unable to meet the state’s demands to prove their citizenship, or whose documentary evidence is rejected, are faced with the threat of expulsion, exile and presumptive statelessness. People have been declared ‘foreigners’ without their knowledge, families have been forcibly separated, suspects have been detained in makeshift ‘internment’ camps. Between July 2015 and February 22, between 40[29] and 44[30] persons––overcome by the process––reportedly committed suicide.
Various NRC-excluded Muslim individuals have been reportedly debarred from army recruitment. Unable to acquire passports, many have been unable to go on pilgrimages. Eviction campaigns compound the crisis, targeting Muslims, as in September 2021, when police reportedly assaulted several protestors in Dharrang district and shot at least two persons.[31] Earlier, Assam Chief Minister Sarma reportedly commended the police for ousting 800 households, 700 of which were Bangla Muslim.
Contemporary racialization of minority religious communities by the Hindu Right creates representations of the Other through ascribing pejorative and revisionist identities to peoples. Violence, subjugation, minoritization target the material culture and psychosocial well-being of minority/marginalized communities. Making aggression ordinary presents violence as inevitable and crisis and militarization as propitious to national enterprise. The majoritarianization of citizenship seeks to militarize the contention: Who is Indian? Social and legal citizenship are essential markers of selfhood and cultural worlds that sustain vitality, entitlement and belonging. The modalities of majoritarian exclusion inherent to caste/oppression are ascendant. The architecture and apparatus of citizenship marks another moment in this process, perhaps mobilizing new forms of partition to come.
Postscript
Nation states build upon the very frailties that can render them fatally vulnerable. Knowledge and intimacy born of inhabitance are militarized by those dominant to fiction representations, a constant slow boil that ruptures worlds with precarity. The rage and arrogance that fuel absolute nationalism unfolds in varying registers, constitutive of states of exception without-end. Reactionary fervour makes vindictive passion and emotion. Just transformations are fraught, uneasy, even (im)possible. We must attempt them, nonetheless.
Affective solidarity and scholarship for social change require interventions on one’s own positionalities. For me, it necessitates recurring confrontations with relations to belonging, privilege and unbelonging and a now-habitual out-of-place-ness. Following Gujarat 2002, my work has focused on the majoritarianization of the state in India. I have been privileged learn from the local knowledge, agency and the extraordinary, life-affirming courage of those ‘Othered’ by the state and cultural dominance. Among them are Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Dalit, Adivasi and Tribal communities forced to the margins across Gujarat, Odisha, the Narmada Valley, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Haryana and those targeted by India’s administration and colonial subjection of Kashmir. Discussions of the latter are too often silent out of fear or ambivalence in India, including on the incarceration of Kashmiri human rights defenders under the UAPA, such as Khurram Parvez.
Foundational to majoritarian governance is the ability to rally turbulent markers of religion, ethnos and identity. It is of note that post-1947, events of political violence have been routinely characterized as ‘Hindu-Muslim riots’ in India and often represented as spontaneous in nature. Such events, however, have variously been anti-Muslim (and anti-Christian and anti-Sikh) massacres and pogroms. Frequently, they have been premeditated and intensively organized even as they are surfeit with unscripted acts of terror.
The 2024 national elections braked India’s slide into authoritarianism but did not halt it. For targeted communities, struggles for justice and accountability have led to a fundamental questioning of relations between minority and majority, nation and Other. People’s understandings of an event of violence are differently politicized. Memory attests to the weight of incidents and conditions that are in and of themselves incomprehensible. Subaltern agency through speech-acts intercedes on political silence. Remembrance as resistance is dangerous for perpetrators. The depth of trauma and the exhaustion and anguish of this alienation is memoried by a Bangla Muslim woman, as she says: ‘I can no longer see my reflection in the river that gave us life. I am become a person without a shadow. In their [Hindu Right’s] truth, we must no longer exist. I am become a person without a shadow’.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
[1] Note: This article draws on current research and an earlier collaborative work by Angana P. Chatterji, Mihir Desai, Harsh Mander and Abdul Kalam Azad, BREAKING WORLDS: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India; The Story of Assam, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative Centre for Race and Gender (University of California, Berkeley) (2021), http://dx.doi.org/10.25350/B5F59Q (Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n).
[2] This narrative is based on conversations and interviews with civil society leaders, lawyers, and community members undertaken by the author, taken from: Angana P. Chatterji, Mihir Desai, Harsh Mander and Abdul Kalam Azad, BREAKING WORLDS: Religion, Law and Citizenship in Majoritarian India; The Story of Assam, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative Center for Race and Gender (University of California, Berkeley) (2021), http://dx.doi.org/10.25350/B5F59Q (Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n).
[3] Parliamentary wing of Hindu nationalism.
[4] Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), The Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (London: Hurst & Company, 2019).
[5] Jeffrey Gettleman, Suhasini Raj and Sameer Yasir, ‘The Roots of the Delhi Riots: A Fiery Speech and an Ultimatum’, New York Times (26 February 2020) (available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/world/asia/delhi-riots-kapil-mishra.html).
[6] Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), The Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019; online edition, Oxford Academic, 20 Feb. 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190078171.001.0001
[7] Chatterjee et. al., BREAKING WORLDS (Retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n#article_main); and The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (available at: https://indiancitizenshiponline.nic.in/Documents/UserGuide/E-gazette_2019_20122019.pdf).
[8] Chatterjee et. al., BREAKING WORLDS (Retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n#article_main).
[9] See: Amnesty International, Designed To Exclude How India’s Courts are Allowing Foreigners Tribunals to Render people Stateless in Assam (Bengaluru: Indians for Amnesty International Trust, 2019) (available at: https://www.amnesty.be/IMG/pdf/rapport_inde.pdf), p. 18, p. 22.
[10] Sushil Aaron, ‘CAA+NRC Is the Greatest Act of Social Poisoning By a Government in Independent India’, Wire (23 December 2019) (available at: https://thewire.in/communalism/caa-nrc-bjp-modi-shah).
[11] Varghese K. George, ‘Wholly Subordinated to the Majoritarian Nation’ Hindu (20 December 2019) (available at: https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/wholly-subordinated-to-the-majoritarian-nation/article30270140.ece).
[12] The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003 (available at: https://prsindia.org/files/bills_acts/acts_parliament/2003/the-citizenship-(amendment)-act-2003.pdf).
[13] ‘National Register of Citizens (NRC) Will Rid Assam of Infiltrators: Amit Shah’, Sentinel (18 February 2019) (available at: https://www.sentinelassam.com/topheadlines/national-register-of-citizens-nrc-will-rid-assam-of-infiltrators-amit-shah) and Devjyot Ghoshal, ‘Amit Shah Vows to Throw Illegal Immigrants Into Bay of Bengal’, Reuters (13 April 2019) (available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RO1YC/).
[14] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Nuremberg Laws’, Holocaust Encyclopedia (available at: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nuremberg-laws).
[15] Angana P. Chatterji, ‘Citizenship Laws and the Nazification of India,’ Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs (9 March 2020) (available at: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/citizenship-laws-and-the-nazification-of-india).
[16] ‘ ‘CAA will be implemented before Lok Sabha polls’: Amit Shah’, India Today (10 February 2024) (available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/caa-implemented-before-lok-sabha-polls-amit-shah-big-claim-2500078-2024-02-10).
[17] The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2024 (available at: https://indiancitizenshiponline.nic.in/UserGuide/E_gazette_11032024.pdf) and ‘CAA Rules Notified: A Timeline of Events’, Hindustan Times (11 March 2024) (available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/caa-rules-notified-a-timeline-of-events-101710170195496.html).
[18] The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2024 (available at: https://indiancitizenshiponline.nic.in/UserGuide/E_gazette_11032024.pdf)
[19] ‘7 Lakh Muslims Among the 19 Lakh Left Out of Assam NRC, Says CM Himanta Sarma’ Scroll.in (18 March 2024) (available at: https://scroll.in/latest/1065331/7-lakh-muslims-5-lakh-bengali-hindus-left-out-of-assam-nrc-says-cm-himanta-biswa-sarma).
[20] ‘7 Lakh Muslims Among the 19 Lakh Left Out of Assam NRC’.
[21] ‘Constitution of Foreigners’ Tribunals’ (Unstarred Question No. 3280 of Lok Sabha; Vishnu Dayal Sharma to Minister of State in the Ministry of Home Affairs), Ministry of Home Affairs, Govt of India (16 March 2021) (available at: https://www.mha.gov.in/MHA1/Par2017/pdfs/par2021-pdfs/LS-16032021/3280.pdf).
[22] The Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 (available at: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/1766?view_type=browse&sam_handle=123456789/1362).
[23] See: Amnesty International, Designed To Exclude, p. 25.
[24] Adarsh Kumar Gupta, ‘More than 1.59 Lakh Declared as ‘Foreigners’ in Assam: Himanta Biswa Sarma’ Hindustan Times (12 February 2024) (available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/more-than-1-59-lakh-declared-as-foreigners-in-assam-himanta-biswa-sarma-101707746927720.html).
[25] Adarsh Kumar Gupta, ‘More than 1.59 Lakh Declared as “Foreigners” in Assam’. (available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/more-than-1-59-lakh-declared-as-foreigners-in-assam-himanta-biswa-sarma-101707746927720.html).
[26] ‘Citizenship Act: Not Possible to Collect Data of Illegal Migrants in Country, Centre Tells SC’, New Indian Express (12 December 2023) (available at: https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2023/Dec/12/citizenship-act-not-possible-to-collect-data-of-illegal-migrants-in-country-centre-tells-sc-2640858.html).
[27] See: Amnesty International, Designed To Exclude, p. 30.
[29] Chatterjee et. al., BREAKING WORLDS (Retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6w56781n#article_main).
[30] Citizens for Justice and Peace, ‘Citizenship and NRC Related Deaths in Assam (as of March 2024)’ (available at: https://cjp.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Citizenship-and-NRC-Related-Deaths-in-Assam.pdf).
[31] Mahmodul Hassan, ‘Two Years After Assam Evictions, Hundreds of Families Wait for Their Promised Land’, Frontline (23 September 2023) (available at: https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/human-rights/spotlight-two-years-after-violent-eviction-drive-in-assam-darrang-hundreds-of-families-wait-for-their-promised-land/article67337541.ece).
Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights at the Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar of South Asia, she is a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights at University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice Stanford University; a Global Fellow at the Center for Law and Transformation, Chr. Michelsen Ins stitute and the University of Bergen; and a Distinguished Fellow, Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, in Bergen, Norway. Dr. Chatterji’s
work since 1989 has been rooted in local knowledge, witness to post/colonial, decolonial conditions of grief, dispossession, agency, and affective solidarity. Her foundational investigations with colleagues in Indian-administered Kashmir includes inquiry into unknown, unmarked and mass graves. Chatterji’s recent scholarship focuses on political conflict and coloniality in Kashmir; prejudicial citizenship in India; and violence as agentized by Hindu nationalism. Her research also engages questions of memory and belonging, and legacies of conflict across South Asia. Chatterji has served on human rights commissions and offered expert testimony to Indian Commissions of Inquiry, United Nations, European Parliament, United Kingdom Parliament, and United States Congress, and has been variously awarded for her work. Her sole and co-authored publications include: Breaking Worlds: Religion, Law, and Nationalism in Majoritarian India (2021); Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (2019); Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal (2016); Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; Notes on the Postcolonial Present (2012); Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011); Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present; Narratives from Orissa (2009); and reports: Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval (2015); BURIED EVIDENCE: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Kashmir (2009).
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