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Download Download Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 3-25 ISSN 2414-8636 doi.org/10.36886/nidan.2020.5.1.2 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: [email protected] Suryasikha Pathak Faculty, Centre for Tribal Studies, Assam University Email: [email protected] 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 3 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands 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. 4 Nidān, Volume 5, No. 1, July 2020, pp. 3-25 ISSN 2414-8636 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. 5 Ahmed & Pathak / Voices from India’s Borderlands 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,
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