ABSTRACT
The state of Assam underwent a spectacular phase of socio-political mobilisation between 2014 and 2019 around the vexed issue of defining the contours of India’s citizenship discourse. The process of the updation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the amendment of the citizenship laws of the state, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) sharply polarized opinions in the region. Drawing from field insights as well as literature an argument has been made that the reception and implications of exercises like NRC and CAA that lie at the interstices of the political, legal and the social needs to be read as a complex ensemble of political and social practices anchored around contestations over belongingness and mediated through the parameters of the state and various social actors of the region. Out of this complex negotiation new political subjectivities of the region unfold, vernacular but precarious.
