ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the tripartite matrix of the border, the census, and citizenship pushes the boundaries of violence into a routine one in postcolonial Assam. It also elaborates upon the implications of these anxieties for Indo-Bangladeshi relations. Although Assam figures prominently as a prime border state and a place that is integral to the region's borderlands as a whole, it is yet to become a prime reference point for the Indo-Bangladesh foreign policy framework except for its exclusive claustrophobic focus on "security" issues. The India-Bangladesh border, however, owed little to modern concepts of spatial rationality. Political pressures played no small part in partitioning the eastern territories, in haste and in ignorance, along the Radcliffe Line. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) found resolution in the Assam Accord of 1983, signed between the movement leaders and Rajiv Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India.
