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Voices from India’s Borderlands: Indigeneity and the De-Centering of Dissent against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) Shaheen Salma Ahmed PhD Candidate (Cultural Studies), Monash University Email: shaheen.ahmed@monash.edu Suryasikha Pathak Faculty, Centre for Tribal Studies, Assam University Email: sikhapathak@gmail.com Abstract India’s Northeast region (NER) has been framed politically over the years in myriad ways, often as a frontier for resource extraction, or a frontier with strategic boundaries. It has also been perceived as the margins of a pan-Indian civilization, wherein the communities are constructed as the racial ‘other’. This construction has prevailed in even the precolonial discourse of difference when Assam was ruled by several dynasties and was a not part of the Mughal map. Colonialism accentuated these polarities through its administrative and ethnographic discourses. Despite being fairly integrated as a part of British India, postcolonial northeast India witnessed growing marginalisation from the centre. Issues of demographic change, resource extraction, governance, sovereignty remained political issues for movements from the region. The region remained as a ‘law and order’ situation for India. The delegitimization of voices from the Northeast has been a long historical process. The movements against CAA and the entanglements of NRC bring back those issues of ‘othering’ and ‘silencing’. Key Words: Frontiers, Borderlands, Citizenship, Northeast India, Indigeneity, Immigration Two political acts, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) have brought questions of citizenship in India’s Northeastern borderlands to the forefront of all political debates1. Since 2018, 1 The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) to amend India’s citizenship laws in 2016. The Bill was passed in both houses of the Parliament and received the President’s assent in December 2019 and is now the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This new law amends India’s Citizenship Act, 1955 and provides a faster

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and more aggressively since 2019, the people of this region have been protesting against the CAA for undermining especially the NRC that resulted from many decades of mass struggle in Assam. Whereas Indian ‘mainland’ protests against the NRC/NPR (National Population Register) and CAA are specifically framed within parameters seen as going against the ‘secular’ grain of the Indian Constitution, the CAA has further become communally motivated by the BJP, the Hindu right-wing political party of India.2

Voices of protest from Northeast Region of India (NER) have become ignored and lost in this current conundrum where a crescendo of protests have emerged in mainland India. In the light of a long history of protest against illegal immigration from East-Pakistan/Bangladesh into Assam, this paper argues that the CAA is an anti-indigenous policy implementation for the NER that effects a complete demographic restructuring of its many regions. NER being home to many linguistically and culturally varied ‘tribal communities’, its unique cultural space has come under further significant cultural and political threat from the proposed demographic restructuring motivated by the CAA. While one might claim that the presence of Bengali speakers in the region is nothing new, since Bengali speakers are already the second largest linguistic group in the state of Assam, this number has witnessed a steady increase between the 1991 to 2011 census. This increase has yet not marginalised the Assamese language spoken predominantly in Assam.3 Bengali speakers of the region have, nevertheless, been aggressive about imposing their linguistic and cultural presence in the region. While Bengali is the eighth largest language in the global map of languages in terms of the number of its speakers, no other language from the NER figures in the top fifty languages in terms of its speakers. Moreover, it is not about language alone, but in terms of cultural practices too, the regional hegemony and homogeneity of Bengali language speakers from erstwhile East Bengal/East-Pakistan/Bangladesh makes them an aggressive community in the NER.

This paper discusses how people from the NER have been both at the centre stage as well as the receiving end of discriminative ‘mainland’ Indian policies route for citizenship to refugees who have fled religious persecution from India’s neighbouring countries. Thus, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Parsi and Jain refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, who came to India before 31 December, 2014 and have stayed in India for a minimum period of six years are now eligible to be Indian citizens. Cf. Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019: What is it and why is it seen as a problem, The Economic Times, 31 December, 2019, accessed 11 September, 2020, for further information on the CAA. 2 Mainland India is a term used in political parlance of Northeast India as a ‘place making strategy’ producing Northeast India and its terrains as administered, governance category. Geographically speaking, the Northeast in this case refers to what is beyond the narrow landmass of 22 kms in Siliguri, West Bengal, named the chicken neck, which connects the 7 states with the rest of Indian states. This term also refers to a discourse stemming from political movements that sees Assam and other states of the region as marginalized by the Central government, and its seat of power in Delhi. (Cf. Sanjib Baruah, 2005: 3-29). 3 For further information, Cf. Sushanta Talukdar, Census 2011 Language Data: Assam records decline in percentage of Assamese, Bodo, Rabha and Santali speakers, Nezine.in, 28 June, 2018, accessed 18 May, 2020.

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imbricated within the larger history of colonialism. In fact, we argue, that the onslaught of colonialism and its political legacies are strongly entangled in the structuring and transformation of demography in the NER, with what was first a comprador relationship slowly turning into settler colonialism. This paper discusses what underlay this discriminative and selective promotion of communities in the NER, concluding that colonial methods such as racial discrimination and race sciences popular in the 19th century, were in fact at the heart of a rationale that marginalised the indigenous populations of Assam in particular and the entire NER in general.

The current peoples’ movement against CAA and the controversies around the NRC regarding its implementation, awakened issues of the distant and recent pasts. Margins have evoked and provoked constructions of stereotypes. This paper delves into this opportune construction of the ‘other’ that is always interlinked racially and politically.

The Lazy Native subject vs the Hardworking immigrant: Colonial Stereotypes

The East India Company (EIC) annexed Assam in 1826 after the first Anglo-Burmese war. Already strongly and profitably entrenched in the massive Bengal plains, the Company had no real economic interest in the region per se. Precious resources like limestone, were already being accessed from the Bengal plains into the Khasi and Jaintia Hills. As empire grew changes were imminent, as explained by historian Gunnel Cederlof; the ‘Northeast’ was to become important due to different reasons. “To the British East India Company (EIC), it spelt wealth and extended endlessly towards China. This strategically located region, termed ‘the North-Eastern Frontier’, was a factor in securing the global dominance of the British Empire” (Cederlof, 2014:1). This emergence of the NER as an important frontier / borderland was in opposition to previous, long standing, pre-colonial imagery drawn from Sanskrit and Persian texts that depicted “Assam as a remote periphery to which legend and hearsay attributed a fearsome reputation for supernatural wonders and esoteric witching rituals” (Sharma, 2012:2). The transition towards becoming an important hinterland, for Assam was finally marked by the discovery of tea. Since the presence of ample land in the province was a moot administrative point for the colonial state, the EIC in its early surveys used two metaphors for the land of the Northeast - ‘land abundant’ and ‘jungly’, both of which indicated that capitalist exploitation of land was yet to take place in Assam.4 The period after Burmese invasions experienced a sharp dip in population, with many abandoning home and hearth. Tea emerged as a commodity par-excellence in terms of its market value for the British Empire. Having run into trade troubles with China, the discovery of tea in Assam opened an opportunity for venture capitalism, and “instead of a profitless jungle, a new Eden beckoned” (Sharma, 2012: 27).

4 See Baruah, 2005: 86-87 for more discussions.

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The departure from settled and unsettled rice cultivation into commercial agriculture marked the first changes in land usage patterns in colonial Assam that witnessed the emergence of the ‘modernisation’ paradigm that subsequently developed in different directions. For example, while the profitable discovery of tea and its associated establishment as a major venture, initiated changes in land regulations in Assam, it also created an artificial shortage of manpower. The British abolished the Ahom Paik system, hoping that people freed from this system would fulfil the requirement of labour within newly acquired and functioning tea gardens.5 This expectation however, failed, and was replaced by the gradual emergence of racial stereotypes in terms of geography – producing the region and people now as an “insalubrious valley” of “lazy and indolent people” (Sharma, 2012: 63:65). Moreover, thick jungles considered malarial tracts were cleared to establish new tea plantations, and due to the growing demand of clerical work, both in the colonial bureaucracy and in the management of the tea gardens, people from other regions migrated into the province. While the first category of these ‘Babus’ hailed largely from East Bengal, they consisted of educated Bengali-speaking Hindus from districts like Sylhet, who collaborated with the EIC to build a mechanism of local governance and control over the native population of Assam. Only a few people from erstwhile scribal classes of the Ahom kingdom managed to occupy such positions. The bulk of labour came from the tribal areas of the Chotanagpur region, Eastern UP and present day Telengana, mostly brought by coercive mode of labour recruitment.

Towards the end of the 19th century, there were many other groups that arrived in Assam to build a career or to speculate, due to the opportunities offered by the colonial state. The region became incorporated, not only into the fiscal and economic mechanisms of the colonial statecraft, but also within its administrative and political framework. Mills Report, which was the foundation of many such administrative decisions, described the hills as inhabited by ‘uncivilized tribes’, further referring to the Assamese common peasant as ‘apathetic and indolent’.6 The condition of Assam described by Jenkins7 was

5 During the Ahom period, adult males arranged in what is known as Khels, rendered labour services to the Ahom state. The colonial state, looking into the hierarchies of medieval Ahom in an attempt to find revenue lineages, focused on the administrative category of ‘paik’ which transformed over a period of time into the idea of a ‘ryot’. For further discussion on the subject, cf. Kar (2019: 38-65), and Amalendu Guha (1983: 3-34). 6 A. J Moffat Mills was Judge of the Sudder Court during the early days of British rule in Assam. In the preface of his republished report C.P Saikia writes “…the Volume deals separately with six districts of erstwhile Assam, namely. Goalpara, Gauhati, Lakhimpur, Nowgong, Sibsagar and Darrang. In his report, Mills gathered information and expressed his views and offered suggestions on such diverse aspects as the area of land, revenue system, modes of cultivation, rates of assessment, population patterns, manufactures, means of communication, education and schools, judicial system, etc pertaining to the districts under survey (Mills, 1984: Preface).” 7 Francis Jenkins (1793-1866) was a military officer under the East India Company. In 1834 the office of Commissioner and Agent to the Governor-General of Assam and North-east of Rangpur was created and this post was occupied by Captain Jenkins. It marked a departure from the usual norm because for the first time a military man was in-charge of civil administration. (Banerjee, 1992: 91)

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termed “unpromising” since the region’s population had floundered from the “ravages of cholera and epidemic disease, by inordinate use of opium, and the licentious habits of the people” and therefore “without a large increase of population” (Mills, 1984: 3, 5). From the middle of the 19th century the idea of the ‘indolent native’ took root. Mills reported that “three-fourths of the population are opium-eaters, and men, women, and children alike use the drug” (Mills, 1984: 19). The ‘laziness’ of the subject population was castigated as it “enfeebles the mind, and paralyzes industry” (Mills, 1984: 19). In contrast to natives, the land itself was constructed as very productive with an “overwhelming quantity of culturable waste capable of producing the finest crops” (Mills 1984: 5). Hence, it was converted into tea gardens, and as the estimate shows for 1901, tea occupied 244, 653 acres. And “13 percent of Assam’s population was born outside” the province (Sharma 2012: 78 & 79). Another group of people that arrived in Assam following upon the heels of the colonial rule, was, what historian Jayeeta Sharma refers to as ‘Babus’ and ‘Sylheti sojourners’, whose previous patterns of migration were drastically altered with the British inaugurating opportunities for educated classes from neighbouring East Bengal in government offices, schools and tea gardens in Assam (Sharma, 2012: 97). The colonial state also encouraged migration by making the transition of immigrants easier, a gradual process that undermined the indigenous Assamese. For example, for convenience’s sake, Bengali was introduced as the official language of the province, and this facilitated the migration of unemployed Bengali men from far-flung regions to Assam. The 19th century, remarkable not only for its political transformation but also for initiating demographic changes in Assam, thus progressively marginalised the indigenous communities as ‘indolent natives’ or ‘opium addicted’ idlers, who were considered not educated enough to take advantage of the opportunities offered them by the colonial state, or were simply, too lazy to work. The emergence of such racial stereotypes progressively led to the framing of administrative policies that actively supported non-indigenous subjects in the NER.

Remaking Land Policies: Indigenous and the Immigrant peasants

The knowledge of availability of abundant cultivable land and hence the push for raising land revenue was at the core of colonial fiscal policies. Racial tropes especially played a detrimental role in the agrarian economy of Assam, further marginalising the indigenous peasants, especially the tribes, tilting the colonial policies to favour the Bengali Muslim peasants entering Assam in large numbers. The Bengal plains were already densely populated and producing surplus food, and soon, speculators and traders circulated stories of abundant land and tea gardens in Assam. The introduction of railways facilitated the movement of large numbers of immigrants, and soon, “entire households moved into Assam from the East Bengal districts of Mymensing, Pabna, Bogra, Rangpur and

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Rajshahi” (Sharma, 2012: 100). This migration was not forced, unlike indentured labour in the middle of the 19th century, but facilitated by the colonial state, and financed by rich and powerful elites known as Matabbars and later by Marwari money lenders and Assamese Mauzadars.8 Contrary to the image of a landless agricultural peasant peddled in the recent discourses, the early decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of a class that had enough economic power to buy land, and push tribal peasantry out of the way.

In a dissenting note, about the controversial ‘Line System Committee Report’ of 1938, Rabi Chandra Kachari and others argued for the retention of the Line system,9 arguing that the government, while establishing land colonisation schemes, should have kept the “interest and well-being of the children of the soil” as a primary concern (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 20).10 Dissenters also claimed they “found there is hardly sufficient land for the satisfaction of the needs of even the present population and their future expansion” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 22). The Committee report that was claimed as being based on evidence held that “Bengalees, both Hindu and Mussalmans are for the abolition of the Line system; and so are an overwhelming majority of the Assamese Mussalmans, both official and non-official; while the Assamese Hindu witnesses as a rule, are definitely in favour of the continuance of the present system” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938:24). Another aspect of colonial bias manifested in this report in its emphasis on language and culture claimed that the economic grounds for the opposition of the line system was ‘spurious’, “evident from the persistency with which it is urged that the East Bengal Immigrants must “assimilate” with the Assamese by ‘adopting their language and culture” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25). The Report also claimed that it was too much to ask ‘proud people’ like the Bengalis, to give up their language for a mere ‘patch of land’ (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25).

Political leaders like Nehru were moreover, not in favour of the segregation of new immigrant populations. In fact, Khan Bahadur Sayidur Rahman, one of the members of the Line System Committee quoted Nehru’s opinion, “It is also bad

8 Mauzadar, a revenue collector responsible for a mauza, which was a unit of revenue assessment. 9 Rabi Chandra Kachari was a ‘Tribal League’ leader from Mangaldai and dissenting against withdrawal of the Line System, he opined (Guha, 2006: 166-67): “It was in the 1911 that the Census commissioner first took note of the ongoing immigration as a peaceful invasion of Assam…Administrative measures had to be devised to contain the conflict. The Line system – first mooted in 1916 and adopted in 1920 – was such a device. The government encouraged immigration; at the same time, there was an increasing awareness since about 1913 that the indigenes needed some kind of protection”. 10 Colonization Scheme or policy was a result of the growing demand for land among immigrants and the need to control the reclamation of land. “The first colonization scheme was started in 1928, was successively followed by one each in the Barpeta and Mangaldai subdivisions. Under all these schemes, a small family was given about 20 bighas of land on payment of premium. The areas allotted under the Nowgong scheme to 1,619 Muslim and 441 Hindu immigrant families amounted in all to 47,636 acres till March 1933” (Guha, 2006: 168-169).

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to confine immigrants in a particular area and so prevent them from being assimilated by the people of the province. This results in increasing separation and hostility between adjoining areas and a terribly difficult problem is created for future generations. The very basis of immigration must be the assimilation of immigrants” (Line System Committee, Vol II, Evidence, 1938: 90). The Muslim League, however, resisted this process of assimilation and there was propaganda that Bengali should be introduced in immigrant schools. (Line System Committee, 1938: 96). Questions regarding land alienation and the protection of tribal lands that had become important during the late 1920s, intensified in the 1930s, even as the report stated that members were opposed to “any discrimination, in any sphere, between Assamese and Bengalees, between ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant” (Line system report, 1938: 24). On the other hand, the colonial state opposed the idea of assimilation for immigrant populations and termed these demands as ‘blatant aggressive jingoism’, and an attempt by the Assamese to make “cultural conquest of the immigrants” (Report of the Line System Committee, 1938: 25).

There are several examples of harassment in the evidence provided by the Line System Report. For example, in Hirapara village in Mangaldai (a town and subdivision in the Darrang district of Assam), all the Assamese were driven away by the “oppression and harassment” of immigrants, who were considered “unruly and uncongenial neighbours” (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 90). One of the examined witnesses, Kumud Ram Bora, mentioned that he had appeared as a ‘pleader’ for some cases of clashes between immigrants and Assamese (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 90). Similar note was made by the Commissioner Mr. Cantlie regarding the Assamese deserting their villages and migrating to North Lakhimpur seeking refuge out of the fear of immigrants. (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 7) The terms of land acquisition were made very lenient and Maulvi Amiruddin Ahmed, who was a member of the Muslim League, mentioned that the sale of land took place on easy terms. On being examined, he said he had left Mymensing (in East Bengal) in 1921, and already possessed 230 bighas of land by 1937, having brought 200 bighas of land from a Lalung village at Rs 1000 (Line system committee, Vol II, Evidence 1938: 26-27). Clearly, immigrants arriving in colonial Assam were not all landless peasants in search of a livelihood. Many were land speculators and rich landlords, land in Assam being settled not only with Muslim peasantry from East Bengal, but also Hindus from Sylhet and Cachar, Nepali graziers and cultivators, and with time-expired coolies.

Tensions mounted over the fear of demographic shift in Assam from 1930s onwards, especially after the census of 1931, with the superintendent of Census for Assam, C.S. Mullan raising concern regarding the settlement of immigrants in almost all its districts.11 Though Mullan’s language about ‘army’ and ‘invasion’ was exaggerated, he did point to a demographic change, and 11 He wrote that during the years 1921-31, “the immigrant army has almost completed the conquest of Nowgong. The Barpeta subdivision of Kamrup has also fallen to their attack and Darrang is being invaded. Sibsagar has so far escaped completely…Where there is wasteland thither flock the Mymensinghias” (Guha, 2006: 171).

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despite what historians like Amalendu Guha state, it is not Mullan who made the indigenous people aware of the questions of land alienation and loss of culture. The Congress and the Muslim League debated the availability of land and the growing population of Assam as the number of Bengali speakers had grown exponentially in the decades between 1911 and 1931 according to census figures. In the 1930s, the emergence of political, religious leaders like Bhasani and the organisation of Muslim peasantry from East Bengal rendered the issue further volatile, as he articulated the demand for more land as opposed to the calls of the indigenous leaders for land protection, to stop its unabated settlement. Bhasani was himself instrumental in the colonisation of Ghagmari and Bhasanir-char (Guha, 2006: 174).

Colonial Continuities: Old Demands and New legalities

This immigration between the provinces of Bengal and Assam emerged as one of the most contentious political issues of the 1930s and 40s, defining the political articulation of the Congress Party, the Muslim League, and the Tribal League, with demography, language, and land, emerging as primary concerns. Despite Partition, the movement of immigrants across what then materialised as international borders continued. Political scientists, like Anupama Roy, have written about the “crisis of citizenship in Assam” linking all movements, like the AASU led Assam Movement and the ULFA struggle to this fundamental problem (Roy, 2016: 24). This is despite the Citizenship Act of 1955 that had taken the Partition and its aftermath into consideration, with Partition constituting massive migration movements between the two newly-created nations. The pushing forward of dates or ‘chronological boundaries’ from the decided date of 1951 to 1971, was an exception created specially in the case of Assam, whereas general ‘cartographic boundaries’ for other regions was decided by 1947. Sabita Goswami writes in her memoirs, “Every political party took the “illegal foreign immigrant” issue as their core point of discussion. The Janata Dal, Revolutionary Communist Party of India (RCPI), Congress (U) and the Plains Tribal Council of Assam (PTCA) – these political parties wanted a logical conclusion to the “illegal immigrant issue”. They wanted the deletion of names of illegal immigrants from the voters’ list and demanded that parliamentary elections be held on the basis of a reworked, correct voters list. Their demand included the updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC)…” (Goswami, 2013: 100-101).

This issue of citizenship, linked with voting rights is evidenced from the documentation of electoral rolls that came up during the Assam movement after 1979. And when elections were forced on the state in 1983, the AASU protested “since the issue of ‘who was entitled to vote’, which was at the crux of the movement, remained unresolved.” (Roy, 2016: 41) This conundrum regarding immigrants, the ones who became legalised, and the ones who did not, kept gnawing at the social and political fabric of Assam. The Indian state’s inability to respond to the complicated remnants of the colonial state, produced the

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frontier of Assam as a constant borderland. As various political movements emerged in Assam, the ‘lazy native’, ‘unproductive subject’ became branded as an ‘insurgent’ creating ‘law and order’ situations. While the Assam Accord of 1985 was signed to end this long protest, and resolve the issue of illegal migration, a specific clause in the Accord (clause 6) contained a strange legal twist, entrusting a committee with the complex and confounding task of defining ‘Assamese People’. Nowhere in the world are citizens given the task of defining themselves. The long complex histories that went into making Assam and the Assamese identity was obliterated by this clause that paradoxically, threatened the secular and heterogeneous fabric of the society. While debating the status of illegal migrants whose existence no one denied, the indigenous communities of the NER had the further burden of supplying the bureaucratic machinery with their own definition, as if their ‘being’ was not enough, as if their blood ties (jus sanguinis) were not enough, and as if belonging to the soil (jus solis) was not enough. Throughout the 1980s and onwards, the state and its indigenous people continued to struggle under draconian laws, resulting in Assam and the entire NER becoming demarcated as a case of exceptional governance – beginning with the colonial state continuing well into the postcolonial state. While an uneasy peace had settled over the area, despite the non-resolution of these issues, the contentious questions of the CAA and NRC deployed by the BJP reopened old fissures.

The Making and Re-making of the Northeast The colonial encounter irrevocably influenced the cultural and the political history of the Northeast, an influence that continued in the postcolonial to present times, within which the agitation against the CAA should be contextually located. What we must first try to understand is why ‘Northeast’ itself becomes an ontological term indicating the eastern borderland regions of South Asia. Willem van Schendel and Joy Pachuau trace the genesis of the term ‘North East’ to the Partition of the country. They argue that, “Partition created the region we now call Northeast India. Its new international borders disrupted long-established connections, both physical and man-made, and created new scales of association. The result was a configuration of contrary developments of homogenization and divergence within the region, making regional generalizations hazardous” (2016: 2). This disruption in the physical geography of the region has affected how the independent nation-state viewed its citizens belonging to the frontier zones. Richard Kamei (2020) further argues that, “the terminology northeast devoid of different states and diverse characters of inhabitants… are indicative of looking at [the people] from a top down approach”. Several authors writing on the subject have pointed explicitly to the racialisation of the NER. Jit Hazarika (2020), for example, points out, “Northeastern region of India, part of the sub-Himalayan topography, or as a colonial would describe the “Mongolian fringe” constitutes of several ethno-linguistic groups (Mon-Khmer,

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Tibeto-Burman, Tai) who become the racial Others in Mainland India due to perceived physical differences, where their bodies and identities are often misrepresented or imposed with different socio-political constructions”. While this racialisation can be traced to the colonial structure of mapping out locations not just spatially, but also racially, Papori Bora argues that the region inhabits “an ambiguous space – rather, a non-space” (2014: 2) within the Indian nation-state that inhabits an inclusive-exclusive political condition of being simultaneously included and excluded from the structures of representation and governance. Bora and other scholars, such as van Schendel & Pachuau (2016), Sanjib Baruah (1999), Yasmin Saikia (2006), Arupjyoti Saikia (2016) and Chandan Sharma (2009) have traced the creation of this ambiguous space to the colonial administration and how it configured the region as an administrative space, including through racial lines. Along with this ambiguous space demarcation, the region has also been ascribed as an ‘illegible space’ (Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, 2015), pitting the representation of Indian versus Northeastern (or colonial Assam inhabitants) space as binaries, a parochial process through which the Northeastern subject emerged as the ‘Mongolian Other’ of the mainland Indian. This ‘otherisation’ or othering of the Northeast citizen-subject has continued well into the postcolonial period, and it is precisely this otherisation that forms the Indian nation-state’s policy making process and treatment of the Northeastern indigenous communities, till today. The CAA is a manifestation of this process and as explained by Bérénice Guyot-Réchard, the post-colonial state’s policies towards Assam and the Northeast, “…reordering of this border-space from a colonial frontier to a component of independent India’s national space did not end marginality, but instead reinforced it” (2015: 931). As explained above, if ‘extraction economy’ informed colonial policies on migration and the marking of the NER as a borderland region, the postcolonial state was no better. The years before independence and the immediate post-independent period, saw Assam being further marginalised by Nehru and the Congress Party’s mainland India-centric discourse (Saikia, 2015 and Guyot-Réchard, 2015). The Cabinet Mission of 1946 for example proposed that Assam be clubbed with Bengal but the then Assam Premier, Gopinath Bardoloi, along with other Assamese politicians, fought a pitched battle with the All India Congress Committee (AICC) against this proposal. MK Gandhi was the only national-level political leader of the time who supported Bardoloi and Assam, allowing the state to narrowly escape becoming part of then East Pakistan.12 The implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), now CAA on Assam and the NER, despite a sustained and prolonged protest movement against it, must be viewed as a continuance of the postcolonial Indian nation-state’s discriminatory politics. Nayan Moni Kumar and Mridugunjan Deka (2020) locate the premise of Assam’s marginalisation politics in the postcolonial period as one that can be termed as the ‘politics of resentment’ because Assam has 12 See Arup Saikia (2015) for a more detailed description about the Cabinet Mission announcement and the opposition movements against it.

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“this resentment against the Centre which continues to belittle the identity concerns of the indigenous people. The former and now scrapped IMDT [Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunal Act, 1983] and the current CAA, in their own ways, can be seen as the materialization of such an apathetic attitude of the Centre towards Assam” in the context of which the imposition of CAA simply extends Delhi’s authoritarian attitude towards Assam.

This authoritarian attitude towards Assam and the rest of the NER that includes ignoring their dissent against the implementation of CAA, is also visible within prominent mainstream and intellectual discourses in mainland India, apart from actual political legislations and policies by the central and state governments. News and opinion pieces written in mainstream media outlets described the anti-CAA protest movement in Assam and the NER as ‘xenophobic’ 13 and ‘ethno-fascist’.14 Especially the term ‘ethno-fascist’ has been widely circulating recently in both mainstream as well as alternative media outlets along with social media, denouncing Assamese concerns over loss of identity in the face of demography change. This is a recent development in such intellectual discourses, although there is no such established term in academia as such. The first hit on a simple Google search is an article where a minister in Putin’s cabinet exercised his homophobia to critique the 2014 Eurovision contest as ‘ethno-fascist’ 15 . While more often than not, this term has been used in majoritarian discourses to negate at best, or intimidate at worst, indigenous voices of dissent against citizenship policies of the Indian nation-state from the NER. The most recent case is that of the Rongmei Naga tribal scholar Richard Kamei, who was labeled an ‘ethno-fascist’ by academics when he expressed the concerns about the indigenous communities of the NER regarding CAA implementation to noted public intellectual Noam Chomsky16. Kulajit Maisnam, in a searing essay, traces the cause of this bullying, against the indigenous people of the NER to mainstream Indian political and cultural discourses which terms the struggles of the NER as ‘belittling’ the issues of the region and its peoples17. Maisnam (2019) traces such dispensation, and mental landscapes of the Indian state and the mainland Indian citizens to the “strategic security approach to the region inhabited by people with pro-Mongoloid prejudices, the biopolitics towards the region includes the intention of demographic changes by its rulers from Delhi”. Both Maisnam (2019) and Walter Fernandes (2019) point to demographic changes brought about to the NER, especially Assam and

13 Further on this term and its problematic usage, cf. Samrat, Assam protests due to politics of xenophobia, Deccan Chronicle, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020. 14 On the casual and problematic usage of the term, cf. Ishadrita Lahiri, QDebate: Are Assam’s Anti-CAA Protests Ethno-Fascist?, TheQuint.com, 10 March, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. 15 The article referred is, cf. Stefan Wagstyl, Putin ally labels Eurovision contest as ‘ethno-fascism’, Financial Times, 16 May, 2014, accessed 11 May, 2020. 16 The statement by other writers and academics of Northeast who condemned this bullying and abusive tactic against Kamei, cf. Statement Against ‘Racist Remark’ And Academic Bullying Of A Naga Tribal Scholar, Raiot.in, 2 March, 2020, accessed 11 May, 2020. 17 For further reference, cf. Kulajit Maisnam, You Don’t Get North East Of India, Raiot.in, 17 December, 2019, accessed 11 May, 2020.

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Tripura in the post-Independence period, as the main reason for the indigenous support to the NRC and the opposition to the CAA. Maisnam links this contemporary struggle of the indigenous against the CAA to the callous attitude of the Indian state post-Partition towards the region, “The unabated influx from Bangladesh in the region since partition has been a crucial issue, particularly Assam and Tripura. As a matter of fact, Assamese nationalism is premised from the Bengali domination in the colonial and post-colonial period and has been the core of the politics in Assam. These two states have been taking the maximum ‘burden of partition’ in the region which was the result of the politics beyond the Chicken Neck” (Maisnam, 2019). He further adds, “Tripura today is a settler colonial state ruled by the immigrants pushing the Indigenous Tipras to fringes. When one says partition and the subsequent exodus of the people, it is not a one-time event, but rather a trail of human migration which continues for a long period and probably continuing till today” (ibid.).

Fernandes too makes a similar point, on the post-Partition migration patterns to Assam and Tripura, writing, “Assam’s residents have seen what has happened in Tripura, where the proportion of the indigenous tribal population has been reduced from 59.1% in 1951 to 31.1% in 2011. Only around two lakh of the seven lakh East Pakistani migrants who entered the state till 1960 are Partition refugees who came prior to 1951. The rest are landless peasants who came in search of land. The state government changed the land laws to de-recognise community-managed land, where the tribals lived. The migrants were resettled on that land and are now in control of the state. The fear of Assamese speakers – who are only around 50% of the state’s population – is around their land and identity” (Fernandes, 2019). But, the period from December 2019 up to March 2020 (the period of the anti-CAA protests in NER and the rest of India) saw many commentators mark the Assamese and other indigenous people of the NER and their protests as ‘xenophobic’, ‘racist’, and ‘ethno-fascist’ 18 . By March 2020, the only symbolisation of the anti-CAA movement was Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, in the media landscape, which was finally dismantled by the state authorities due to the Covid-19 pandemic19. This 18 While some such opinion pieces have already been cited above, there are many more which have been published. Predictably, there are more articles from the mainland Indian liberal commentariat describing protests in the NER as xenophobic, than indigenous voices finding articulation in national mainstream, and alternative media outlets. Only some webzines, such as the Shillong based Raiot.in have consistently provided spaces for the still invisibilised and marginalised indigenous communities of the NER. 19 Shaheen Bagh, emerged as a symbolic site on anti-CAA protests in New Delhi. First started by old women or the ‘dadis’ (grandmothers) of the locality as a sit-in protest against police brutality on students in the nearby Jamia Milia Islamia in mid-December, it soon metamorphosed into a site of protest against the CAA, NRC and NPR, frequented by many activists, academics, journalists and politicians opposing the BJP. While the protest site and the many forms of protest demonstrated there were regularly and heavily covered by the national media, it also led to many sit-in protest by smaller groups of Muslim women in different localities of Delhi. One such sit-in protest site emerged as a the battle ground between the protesters and BJP politicians who threatened to forcefully remove the protesters from the site.This tussle finally led to devastating violence in late February in Delhi, in which many Muslims were killed and displaced, even though there were also Hindu victims of this violence. The main point of

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invisibilisation and delegitimisation of struggles in the NER must ultimately be analysed through a historical framework subject to the background of colonial presence and perceptions about the region. Maisnam strongly asserts this invisibilisation to be the outcome of liberal, secular discourse that has currently emerged among contemporary mainland Indian intellectual classes in light of the anti-CAA opposition. He argues, “One can clearly observe the immorality of this discourse; news reports, opinion pieces announce the new Citizen Act as ‘Islamophobic’ and ‘anti-secular’ while using images from the protesting ‘North-East’. One will also find news reports where images are used from the current Assam protest and the news item never mentions the protest in Assam and its reason but talks of passing an ‘Anti Secular Bill’. While the BJP has completely annihilated the Assam Accord and the aspirations of indigenous people of ‘North-East’, the ‘liberals’ and ‘secularist’ have done no less than the BJP by muddying the entire issue at hand. BJP has killed the indigenous people of ‘North-East’ and Indian ‘liberals’ and ‘secularist’ are scoring brownie points in their liberal spaces through the bloodshed in the region” (Maisnam, 2019). This is not a recent phenomenon as we shall find out later in the paper.

The Contentious Construction of the NER Citizen-subject Peter Robb (1997) while discussing the history of citizen-subjects and the modern Indian identity describes the extent to which the colonial regime was entangled in shaping and constructing the Indian identity. Robb argues (1997:248) that at least three elements of colonial administration helped create this ‘Indian’ identity, “the first is the establishment of fixed borders, the second the assertion of undivided jurisdiction of sovereignty within those borders, and the third the assumption of state responsibility for the well-being of the people in a kind of contract between ruler and ruled”. This colonial definition of territoriality led to the creation of the frontier regions of the NER, which also included Assam. Within this process of frontierisation, British colonial administration further tried to define in absolute terms the borders that mark these frontiers. As Robb (1997: 262) explains, “The motive behind the closer definition of the frontier and the administration was not just the need to defend and define British territory, it was also the need to identify the peoples who were to be treated as British subjects”. What this also meant was that this process of defining the people through their identity as British subjects and fixing the political and geographical borders of the colony, became synonymous with marking the administration as a visible presence to the people in these regions. This was evident in how the then Chief Commissioner in the British administration, C.S. Elliott, demarcated the Naga Hills District in colonial Assam in the 1880s - both as a frontier region and as an administrative zone. Among the many steps he took towards governing the people of this district - some of difference between the Shaheen Bagh protests and the protests against CAA in the NER was that the former were protesting against the NRC and the NPR as well. In the NER, the people overwhelmingly support the NRC, while there was and still is ambivalence about the NPR since this discourse was yet to gain any ground in the NER before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

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which had progressive undertones such as enabling self-representation in local governance, others were questionable in motive, like major steps taken to create a series of frontier posts that “demarcate British territory more clearly, but also to “make our Government more visible” to people within the borders” (ibid.,: 258).20 This ‘militarisation’ of borders in the late 19th century was also accompanied by the clearance of forest lands so that enemy attacks could purportedly be easily thwarted. Nearly seventy years later, in the post-Independence decade of the early 1950s, another such process of government ‘visibilisation’ took place in Assam’s frontier regions under Nehru’s leadership. The central government under Nehru utilised the devastating earthquake of 1950 in Assam, to make itself ‘more visible’ to the people of the then frontier tracts of Assam (present day Arunachal Pradesh) couched as part of a rehabilitation process that also constructed military outposts, among other initiatives (Guyot-Réchard, 2015). This can be read as the first marker of postcolonial militarisation of the NER, which by now is ubiquitous to the dispensation of the region.21 The region, as Maisnam (2019) argues, is a “radicalised frontier territory and its large parts ruled by extra constitutional legislations (such as AFSPA)22 which put the entire populations as “suspects” and potential troublemakers”. Thus, the NER, including Assam, is continually marked in terms of a ‘state of exception’, visible again today in the aftermath of the anti-CAA protests.23

Combining the political and military histories, discussed in this essay, leads us to an understanding of how the citizen-subject of the NER has been constructed in the post-colonial period. The State has has long denied rights and now, a delegitimisation of protest movements too against legislations which are viewed as against the interest of the indigenous people of the NER. This multi-pronged ‘politics of resentment’ and struggle of the indigenous people in the NER, it is important to note, has substantial parallels to the identity struggles of the indigenous people just across the border in Bangladesh. Shapan Adnan (2008) argues that the indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) have long 20 According to Robb, Elliott planned on having a series of 45 frontier posts for the Naga Hills district, each with two head constables, assisted further by 20 constables for border patrols, etc. 21 The 1958 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) grants ‘special’ powers to the Indian Armed Forces to maintain law and order in ‘disturbed areas’ of the country. As of May 2020, the Act has become applicable in the whole of Assam, most of Manipur and some parts of Arunachal Pradesh. This Act has a history of violence and trauma in Assam. Many instances of abuse of power by the Armed Forces under the guise of the Act has been recorded from most of the NER wherever this Act was applied. 22 Authors’ emphasis on the extra constitutional legislation in operation in NER. 23 Post anti-foreigner and pro-indigenous Assam Movement of the early 1980s, the militant organisation United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) emerged, who wanted an independent state of Assam from India. The whole of 1990s and the early 2000s was marked by conflict and violence in Assam due to many such self-determination movements, excess of the Armed Forces etc. While there was relative peace in the state in the past decade, the CAA has threatened to undo the peace. The protests in December saw the killing of five young Assamese protesters by the police, during which there was also an internet blackout in the state for ten days and accompanied by a week-long curfew in the largest city, Guwahati.

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struggled against threats to their ethnic identity posed by the state, writing how (2008:27), “such threats, faced by ethnic minorities in the region have been aggravated by the impacts of the immigration of settlers, land alienation, and counterproductive development interventions”. This continued threat to the indigenous people in CHT since independence has led them to develop a means of ‘ethnic nationalism’ to safeguard their cultural, political, and material rights. Adnan defines ethnic nationalism as a “means of defence as well as a platform for demanding, fully-fledged citizenship rights and due protection from the state” (ibid.). Thus, the protests against CAA in the NER and especially in Assam, must be seen through the lens of ethnic nationalism against a heavily loaded ‘mainland’ centric state that acts against the interests of the indigenous people of Assam. Such state actions against the indigenous peoples of Assam include a continuance of settler policies started in the colonial period. The implementation of CAA constitutes its latest iteration. Hence, the popular Assam Movement that started in 1979 and continued till the early 1980s, can also be framed as an ethnic nationalist response against the excesses of the state which through settler policies, threatened the cultural, political, and material histories of the peoples of Assam. Though the Assam Accord was signed by the leaders of the Assam Movement with the central government led by Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, all the resolutions of the Accord are yet to be fulfilled,24 with the CAA practically nullifying the Assam Accord. One witnesses today, the indigenous people of Assam and the NER trapped between the wheels of dominant postcolonial nationalisms in the country that are increasingly hegemonic, producing an overarching Indian identity and nationalism, that renders regions such as the NER and the people of Assam, as suspect.25 And even though the Indian government may not have overtly tried to settle Bengalis from Bangladesh in Assam, there were at least no efforts made to stem the flow of migration. Adnan (2008: 38) explains how the indigenous people of the CHT were threatened by the newly formed Bangladesh, independent from Pakistan in 1971, through the “…combined pressures of (a) the assimilationist project of the Bangladeshi nation-state and (b) encroachment into their natural habitat by Bengali migrants, state-sponsored settlers, and the security forces”. There 24 The Assam Accord is not a legislation, but akin to a promise between the Indian state and the people of Assam, made in good faith. The leaders of the All Assam Students Union (AASU), leading the movement, Prafulla Mahanta, Bhrigu Phukan and Biraj Sarma, signed this Accord with Rajiv Gandhi, leading to the NRC in Assam as one of the outcomes of the Accord. While some commitments were fulfilled by the Indian government, such as establishment of an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Assam, an oil-refinery, etc, other commitments about safeguarding the rights of the indigenous people of Assam are yet to be fulfilled even after 35 years. To read the Accord in full, cf. Accord between AASU, AAGSP and the Central Government on the Foreign National Issue (Assam Accord), Peacemaker.Un.Org, 15 August, 1985, accessed 14 May, 2020. 25 Kulajit Maisnam (2019) describes the attitude of the first Deputy Prime Minister of India, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, often called as the Iron Man of India, to the NER as, “Patel saw the North-East frontier as ‘troublesome’ and a ‘weak spot’ to India’s security with reference to China, inhibited by people with ‘pro-Mongoloid prejudices’ having no “established loyalty or devotion to India”, and hence the approach to the region till today has been from the radicalised lens of India’s strategic security, a frontier ‘taken over’ to protect its ‘heartland’.

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are distinct parallels between this assimilationist, settler project of Bangladesh and what is happening in Assam and the rest of the NER, especially evidenced from the population change figures provided for Tripura and Assam. But what is yet to be discussed is how the Indian state in its many manifestations, under different political parties or ideologies allowed for unabated migration into the lands of indigenous peoples in the NER.

According to Mrinal Talukdar (2019: 14), the largest problem that Assam and its government faced immediately and continuously after independence was the “embezzlement of Assam’s land by East Pakistan and unabated migration to Assam”. While this was the immediate post-colonial challenge faced by Gopinath Bardoloi the first Chief Minister of Assam in independent India and its Premier in the period just before independence, Bardoloi and other politicians from Assam, as already mentioned, played the crucial role in convincing Nehru and other Indian Congress leaders not to make Assam part of Pakistan. But even in the post-Independence period, the Indian state under Nehru seemed nonplussed about acknowledging and addressing the legitimate concerns of the peoples of Assam regarding marginalisation of their resources and identity in the face of relentless migration from East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh). Talukdar (2019: 18) notes the situation in Assam and efforts to resolve this by the political leadership as, “although Gopinath Bardoloi made utmost efforts in the interests of Assam’s security and existence, but the Government of India (under Nehru) not even showed a slightest interest to stop migration through a legitimate provision”. The anti-indigenous, patronising policies of the Indian state towards the peoples of Assam continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s with the Indian government’s refugee rehabilitation policies, when the central government brushed aside all concerns of the Assam government regarding refugee rehabilation of East Bengalis on indigenous lands. When the government demanded some amount of reservation for the indigenous peoples of Assam “in the industrial and cooperative organisations, which the centre planned to establish for the refugees for their rehabilitation…. the Government of India insisted that this appointment will be made” (Talukdar, 2019: 19) only after the Assam government handed over lands which were marked for the indigenous people to the refugees. Thus, by 1950, as a humane gesture and under obligation to the centre, the Assam government rehabilitated almost 235,000 refugees from East Bengal. However, the central government under Congress that was pro-settler in its ideological underpinnings, allegedly cultivated what is now coloquially referred to as ‘vote-bank’ politics, in Assam,26 wherein after thirty-five years since signing the the Assam Accord, the BJP uses the same ‘vote-bank’ politics to cultivate a saffron political base. This term, vote-bank politics, which should be better termed ‘settler politics and policies’, endanger the already marginalised indigenous communities of Assam, as also observed in the case of CHT. The state’s settler policies therefore require re-framing as a regional postcolonial politics that allows for the bypassing of the

26 This essay refers to the alleged vote-bank politics by the Congress in Assam, cf. Hiren Gohain, 2017. For reference on Congress playing ‘vote-bank’ politics in Assam, cf. Snehesh Alex Philip, 2019.

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Assam Accord and its promises to stringently protect land and the resources of the indigenous people of Assam.27

Given this history, it is thus, not surprising to see the erasure of voices of dissent from the NER working through multiple ideological prisms in mainland India that then accuse the pro-indigenous protests of Assam and NER as xenophobic. Another theory that seeks to erase the indigenous peoples of Assam and the NER is to see their struggles through that of autochthony and not as that of indigenous people. Nel Vandekerckhove (2009) argues that the issues in Assam is of ‘son-of-soil’ politics and not that of indigeneity. Hence, the conflicts in Assam, “are not a reactionary outcry against the de-rooting of identity within the engulfing neoliberal world, but the result of too powerfully territorialized (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of “natural” geo-cultural links…” (2009: 524). Vandekerckhove further writes that she uses the terms ‘authochthony’ and ‘indigeneity’ interchangeably throughout her essay. Locating the struggles of the indigenous people in Assam and the NER through such neo-liberal lenses which have been applied to places of conflict such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), etc. only allows for unabated settler politics and policies of dominant communities to continue, while marginalising the already marginalised and threatened indigenous communities of Northeast, as well as the whole of South Asia.28 As Maisnam (2019) argues when describing the discrimination against the NER, “Dilution, defilement, belittlement have been the nature of the so-called representation(s) be it on our culture, identity or politics. This act of mis-representation is a conscious act of violence towards the people of the region by the dominant mainstream. A violence operational at the level of discourse. This violence on discourse justifies their dominance. We are, through their discourse(s) fixated into the categories of ‘anti-state’, ‘violent’, ‘unruly’, ‘barbaric’, ‘not liberal’, ‘xenophobe’ etc etc and so on”.

Contemporary Conundrums

As India prepared itself to face the challenge of the Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a ‘Janta Curfew’ or people’s curfew on March 22, 2020. This would become a precursor of a nation-wide lockdown, persisting at the time this essay was written. As the Janta Curfew ended in the evening, a young Manipuri female student, on her way to buy groceries, in New

27 These include guarding the long international border Assam shares with Bangladesh that includes both land and the riverine borders. Guarding and management of international borders of India are responsibilities of the central government and not state governments. For further reference, information is available on the website of the Ministry of Home Affairs, cf. BM-I: Department of Border Management, Mha.Gov.In, accessed 11 May, 2020. 28 For further reference on questions of indigeneity and citizenship in Assam, cf. Shaheen S. Ahmed, (2019).

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Delhi, became the victim of a targeted assault.29 A man riding a two-wheeler spat at her, shouting ‘Coronavirus’. Though this racist attack, typical of Delhi, India’s capital city, shocked the people of NER to the core, such racist behaviour towards Northeastern Indians is not surprising. There has been a long history of Northeast people facing racist attacks in mainland India, slurs that include ‘Momo’, ‘Chinese’ and the common-most of all, ‘Chinky’. 30 As Jit Hazarika argues, “The ordinariness of everyday racism faced by Northeastern natives is exceeded by its pervasiveness, demonstrated by the fact that it cuts across caste, class, gender, and religion” (2020). An earlier incident involving the killing of Nido Tania, a young boy from Arunachal Pradesh in a prominent market of South Delhi after he was racially abused in February 201431, led to the central government trying to institute some changes in legal provisions seeking to stem this racism. An eleven-member investigative committee headed by retired Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer M.P. Bezbaruah was immediately set up to understand the causes of this racism, and the committee submitted its recommendation to the central government within five months.32 The committee found that approximately 86% migrants from NER faced racial discrimination and/or abuse in Delhi. Among the committee’s recommendation was a suggestion to provide a stringent anti-racist law that would safeguard the people of the NER in mainland India. However, even after six years of this recommendation, the Bezbaruah Committee report is yet to be implemented by the central government. 33 As the pandemic, thus raged in India, young students or workers from the NER continued to be subjected to racism that took painful and humiliating verbal, physical and social forms. The new racist catch word, ‘Coronavirus’ was commonly being used to attack both men and women from the NER. While many Northeasterners were denied entry into grocery stores, or asked to leave their rented accommodations in different parts of India, the frequency and ferocity these increasingly racist attacks had political leaders and ministers issue strong statements against such racism on social media and within the legislative bodies of the country.34

29 To know more on the racist nature of the attack, cf. ‘He Spat and Called me Corona’: Racism Against North East Indians Feeds Off Coronavirus Panic, News18.com, 25 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 30 See this news article on the slurs used against the Northeast peoples in different parts of mainland India, cf. Bismee Taskin, ‘Corona’ is not just a virus. Indians are using it as a slur against people from northeast, ThePrint.in, 26 March, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 31 For details on the assault case, cf. Tanima Biswas, Daylight attack with iron rods killed college student Nido Tania, NDTV.com, 10 February, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020. 32 For more information on the committee, cf. Pallavi Polanki, Bezbaruah report on North East community: Five key recommendations, Firstpost.com, 23 August, 2014, accessed 10 May, 2020 and, cf. Aniruddha Bora, The Bezbaruah Committee: Relevance in Corona Times, Bor Axom Chronicles, 26 April, 2020, accessed 10 May, 2020. 33 The last report on the Bezbaruah Committee implementation was reported in Indian national media in 2018. Since then there has been no such news reports, although the current wave of racist attacks have led to a renewed discussion on several regional media and social media fora in Northeast India. 34 For further information on the recent cases of racism, cf. Kiren Rijiju Calls Out Increasing Racist Abuse Against Northeast Indians in Wake of Coronavirus, News18.com, 18 March, 2020,

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It is important to remember that these cases of racism in mainland India have to be contextualized within a protracted historical, political, and cultural struggle in the NER, and not as something that is taking place within a social vacuum. As Kamei argues, “Racism in India is beyond ignorance and socio-cultural gap. It is structural in nature which enable (sic) people in power positions to racially discriminate the other” (2020). It is precisely through such a lens that we should examining the dissent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in Assam and the NER in general, to comprehend in a more holistic way, how voices of some citizens are deemed legitimate, while others are erased in the Indian nation-state.

Thus, as conclusion we argue that the de-centering of dissent from the Northeast has to be located within specific histories, political genealogies, and narratives that have been implemented to colonise land and resources owned by indigenous communities of the NER for the last two centuries. Colonial policies that have been enacted through various forms and means, has only led to the marginalisation of the already marginalised indigenous communities of the NER including Assam. The blatant mis-labelling this dissent as ‘xenophobic’ only serves to further settler and neo-colonial policies which have been prevalent not just in the political landscape but also in the mental landscapes of most mainland Indians when it comes to the peoples of the Northeast.

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Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 3-25 ISSN 2414-8636

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