People’s Archive of Rural India

Ulopi Biswas was declared a ‘foreigner’ despite the family’s Indian citizenship and her own papers that prove her nationality. She was declared a D-voter, and went through a trial at Bongaigaon Foreign Tribunal in 2017-2022 to prove her citizenship. Kulsum Nissa and Sufia Khatun, who are out on bail from detention centres, recount the time spent in custody. And there’s also Morjina Bibi, who spent eight months and 20 days at the Kokrajhar detention centre because of an administrative mix-up.

A video project featuring oral testimonies of those caught in the vortex of the citizenship crisis in Assam shows the devastating effects on individual lives and histories…

The long shadows of colonisation and partition of the Indian subcontinent continue to make their presence felt in Assam in myriad ways. Most evidently in the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a citizenship mapping exercise that could potentially leave 1.9 million people stateless. A manifestation of it has been the creation of a category of citizens called ‘doubtful (D)-voter’ and their incarceration in detention centres. The mushrooming of Foreigners Tribunals across Assam since the late 1990s, and the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 have further exacerbated the citizenship crisis in the state.

The history of the citizenship crisis in Assam is tied to waves of migration that resulted from policies of the British empire, and the partitions of Bengal in 1905 and Indian subcontinent in 1947

The oral testimonies of six people caught in the vortex of this ongoing crisis show us its devastating effects on individual lives and histories. Rashida Begum, a survivor of the Nellie massacre when she was eight years old, finds her name missing from the NRC despite all her family members making it to the list. Shahjahan Ali Ahmed’s name is missing too, along with the names of several members of his family. He is now involved in activism around the citizenship question in Assam….

https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/facing-history-and-ourselves

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Bengal Imam who lost son to communal clashes calls for peace / Students Across India Rise up to Protest Citizenship Act and Police Brutality

Patricia Mukhim: Nagaland’s people deserve neither AFSPA nor gun culture

G Kanato Chophy: For Nagas, the idea of India is not defined by the Brahmanical notion of a timeless civilisation

Madhavan Palat: Nehru talked of panchayats as if they were bureaucracies, imagining them as elected civil servants rather than political leaders

Chandan Gowda: Two Kinds of Hindus