India’s National Register of Citizens: Fine intentions, Ominous portents

The border state of Assam in Northeastern India has had a long history of migration from the neighbouring region that is now Bangladesh. This migration began well before the partition of India in 1947, when the international border between eastern Bengal (which became East Pakistan and subsequently Bangladesh) and India came into existence. Since the 1970s, a decade that began with Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan, the phenomenon of ‘suffraged non-citizens’ has been the cause of intense political controversy in Assam. Yet the legacy of the 1947 partition makes this issue more than just a matter of undocumented cross-border migration.

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