ABSTRACT
Politics in North-East India has for long been dominated by contestations over belongingness and citizenship. Seventy years since the transfer of power and well into the twenty-first century, the tenor and the dominant theme of politics even today areno different from the time of C.S. Mullan, the Census superintendent for Assam who raised an alarm over the ‘invasion’ of Assam from East Bengal. The raging debate that was ignited in the last century has continued unabated in North-East India ever since with milestones such as the drafting of the Constitution of India, the Census Act, the Illegal Immigrant (Expulsion from Assam) Act 1950, the Citizenship Act (1955), the National Register of Citizens in Assam, 1951 and 2019, the series of subordinate legislations, the Prevention of Infiltration from Pakistan Scheme, Assam Accord Insertion of Section 6An in the Citizenship Act, the Citizenship Rules, 2003 and now the construction of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019. This has affectedthe people and community relations in Assam in diverse ways. The need of the hour is to identify and engage with theaforementioned historical-legal frameworksfor the citizenship question inNorth-East India and how the anxieties and antagonisms of the bygone era havecolouredthe construction of citizenship projects till the present. Recent imbroglio in Assam over the NRC and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 points to the urgent need to analyze and situate the legislative history of the region while dealing with the citizenship and refugee issues in Assam. Despite these intensely contested experiences over belonging in this region, there has not been any comprehensive engagement with it. The chapter seeks to embark on addressing these hitherto unexplored questions.
