The Partition's long shadow: the ambiguities of citizenship in Assam, India

Abstract

Citizenship practices in the Indian state of Assam have a serious fault line. The government appears uninterested in policing borders and enforcing the citizen/alien distinction. This has drawn the ire of even the Indian Supreme Court. Certain ambiguities about citizenship in post-Partition India explain these practices. Pragmatic politicians have adapted to the reality of a post-Partition space that does not conform to the idealized notion of a bounded national territory with a clearly defined community of citizens. However, the tensions between ‘the national order of things’ and the reality of a non-national space have consequences: they adversely affect governmental legitimacy. Policies premised on the fiction of hard national borders that are fundamentally at odds with ground realities cannot provide the foundation for a stable legitimate political order.

Keywords:

• borders
• migrants
• citizenship
• undocumented
• illegality
• right to stay/right to return

Acknowledgements

The author has borrowed the title of the article from the theme of the lecture series, ‘Partition: The Long Shadow’. This article grew out of his lecture in that series at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi. He is grateful to Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan for the invitation. The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript who reviewed it for this journal, and to audiences at the Habitat Centre lecture as well as at Bard College, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Tokyo for their comments on earlier versions of the argument presented in this article.

Notes

1. Assam today is part of what is officially called Northeast India. Four of the eight states of this region, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, were part of the province of Assam. In this paper, Assam refers to both undivided and reorganized Assam. While referring to the period since the 1970s when Assam acquired its present boundaries, and when an issue that cannot be restricted to these new boundaries, I use the standard term Northeast India.

2. In August 2009, Mr Singh was expelled from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

3. In 1941 the Hindu population of eastern Bengal was about 28% of the population. Immediately after the Partition, the percentage dropped to about 22% in 1951. The percentage has gradually been coming down, and in 2001 it was about 9.2%. It can be assumed that the missing Hindus have mostly gone to India.

4. For an elaboration of this argument see Baruah (forthcoming).

5. In Assam it is crucial to distinguish between Muslims of this background and Assamese Muslims.

6. The account of this episode in Assam politics is based on Prabhakara (2003, pp. 41–42).