Postcolonial Modes of Nation Making

Abstract

Assam as a borderland province has always attracted immigrants be it the Aryan migrants from Northern India or the Shans from South-East Asia. Waves of migrants have poured into this fertile Brahmaputra River Valley from the prehistoric past who have been absorbed and assimilated into one great Assamese cultural community. However, due to the rise of communal consciousness in British India, the colonial state-sponsored immigration of Bengali Muslims from Eastern Bengal districts was resented. The Caste Hindu Assamese elite tried many methods –both violent and non-violent method to get these immigrants expelled from Assam. When both failed, they tried a constitutional method to legally expel them through a device called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2014. The strategy was to disown the citizens through this device. The NRC enumeration process in Assam and the subsequent announcement of nation-wide implementation of the same process coupled with the enactment of CAA 2019 have resulted in a civil uprising in India which was unprecedented in the history of India since 1977. It, in fact, has created a crisis in the body polity of India by trying to redefine Indian citizenship and thereby subvert the Indian Constitution. But the NRC was neither a new phenomenon nor an isolated issue. The manner in which it was excavated and made relevant to the current politics of citizenship was also not innocuous. It is related to the Assamese national question and the Hindutva agenda of the current dispensation of the Indian ruling regime. It is also a reverberation ofthe way Indian national identity was visualized and conceived. This chapter is an attempt to understand the underlying ideological currents and philosophical underpinnings of the current imbroglio created by the NRC and the CAA.