On June 24, the Election Commission of India (ECI) kickstarted an administrative exercise – ‘Special Intensive Revision’ (SIR) – of the electoral rolls in Bihar for assembly elections in November. The enumeration exercise seeks to reassess proof of citizenship of the existing voters in the state. One of the key contentions has been using the 2003 state electoral roll as the benchmark for ascertaining whether someone has the right to vote. If a person’s name does not appear in the 2003 electoral roll, they would then need to furnish additional documentary evidence to prove their citizenship.

In a country where the poor and marginalised have a deeply unequal relationship with the administrative/bureaucratic machinery, to introduce an exercise of this nature portends to disenfranchisement of Indian citizens, not to speak of the psychological and social toll it might take. Multiple public commentators have critiqued it and what it means for people, especially those from the economic and socially weaker sections. Petitions have been filed by civil liberties groups as well as political parties in the Supreme Court of India.

While we witness events unfolding in Bihar, it might be instructive to turn our attention to the history of the citizenship quagmire in Assam. On July 17, 1997, the ECI marked 3,70,000 people as “Doubtful” (D) voters against their names on the electoral roll. Over the years, many of them have been sent to Foreigners Tribunals (FTs) to prove their citizenship. Most of them were from the Bengali Hindu or Bengali Muslim community. This came on the heels of the bidexi aandolan (anti-foreigners’ agitation) that took place in Assam between 1979 and 1985, where one of the major demands was to remove the names of undocumented immigrants from the electoral list.

Who is ‘doubted’?

While Assam has a complex history of colonisation that saw people from other parts of undivided India being moved to work in the bureaucracy, railways, tea gardens and the untilled fertile lands of western Assam, including the chars (riverine islands), it is the body of the working class labourer –  be it the Adivasi worker in the tea gardens of eastern Assam or the working class Bengali Muslim and Hindu that have borne the brunt of the Empire, which was eventually replaced by the Indian nation-station in 1947. The figure of the working-class Bengali has always been one of suspicion. The fact that Indian citizens whose names were on the electoral rolls were, overnight, made to occupy a legally liminal zone was not considered remarkable or shocking to anyone. It was universally accepted, not just in Assam, that the state faced unprecedented “illegal immigration” and that something must be done to stop it – the specter of which continues to haunt Assam even today.

Abhishek Saha, in his book No Land’s People, provides a historical perspective of the issue and ways in which “Doubtful” voters came to discover that they had been moved to a grey zone of citizenship. Often, people who had been marked as “D” voters had no idea about it until they received summons from the FT or had gone to get their names registered in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) – a parallel citizenship-mapping that took place in Assam between 2015-2019 where 1.9 million people’s names were missing from the list. Alongside this in December 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed where members of minority community (Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs) from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan could apply for Indian citizenship if they came to India before December 31, 2014. Muslims were excluded from the Act – a move that had direct consequences for Bengali Muslims in Assam, with its history of “D” voters and the NRC exercise.

While working on my multi-format research project Facing History and Ourselves (2021-2023), I primarily worked with the Bengali Muslim community – those who were marked as “D” voters and those whose names were not in the NRC. There was no singular narrative of how they came to be identified as “D” voters or ended up in various detention centres across the state, after losing their cases in the FT; or what that experience had left it in its wake – psychologically and socially. But if one were to look at the larger structure of what is taking place in Assam today, a frightening picture emerges. Fissures that have always existed in a multi-ethnic and linguistic society, in a precarious geo-physical landscape that experiences earthquakes and devastating floods/erosion, are being weaponised through the twin projects of infrastructure “development” and Hindutva ideology. The state is currently witnessing mega-development projects and embankments across the river Brahmaputra that is pushing an already fragile landscape to the brink, and along with it people who live around it. Various news stories have also documented the multiple eviction drives against the Bengali Muslim community under the fig-leaf of “foreigners’ encroachment”.

In early July 2025, chief minister of Assam Himanta Biswa Sarma, in the Assam legislative assembly, declared bringing back The Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 that empowers all district commissioners to expel “foreigners” out of India if they have prima facie evidence. He said that “pushing back” “illegal immigrants” to Bangladesh, instead of sending them to the FTs to prove their citizenship, was their new strategy. If there was any pretense of following basic democratic principles and rule of law, that mask too has been ripped apart – all under the guise of law and constitutionality!

A reimagination

In such a scenario, how do we respond? While legal defense being put up by lawyers and civil liberties groups is important and critical work, what strategies can we imagine outside of the courts and FTs? In Assam, where people live with diverse linguistic, social and cultural histories, perhaps it’s time to reimagine practices outside the cartography of the nation-state that we all find ourselves trapped in. Globally, we are all living in a time where regimes of identity paper, borders and passport control have spread their tentacles into every aspect of our lives – Bengali Muslims who experience its violence are those whose lives are filled with everyday precarity. Perhaps what may be needed at this moment is to pause, think and imagine other forms of belonging outside of identity documents – and if one did – what shape and form would it take?

Since 2018, after the advent of the NRC exercise and a focus on the state of “D” voters in Assam, there have been a proliferation of journalistic/narrative writing, images and sound on the Bengali Muslim community. Most of them frame them through their legal status or their material conditions of relative poverty – a spectacle from which they must be “rescued”. In a piece titled Ecological Witnessing (in an edited collection of essays), artist and researcher Imani Jacqeline Brown writes on hurricane Katrina and image-making practices that arose from it:

Spectacular images are wildly untethered from politics. They circulate as easily through human rights reports and internet memes of solidarity […] Having been fully disarticulated and dispossessed of her integral dignity, value, and rights to her image, story and identity, the Black woman in the floodwater has become capital. More than this, she, along with the hurricane, our city, our losses and our trauma have become a brand…

While the contexts are very different, I extrapolate the idea of the ‘spectacular image’ to the Bengali Muslim community in our social and cultural lives – forever asked to produce evidence of their selves through the regime of identity documents and/or legality. Till date, in courts and outside, members of the community are forced to answer question around their “place of origin”, the language they speak, the customs they follow, their loyalty to the village, state and country – in short, their very presence in the world!

Perhaps it’s time for us to be asking a different set of questions to reimagine the world. In the book Engaging Transculturality, the editors in their introduction speak of transculturality as a lens that has developed as ‘an antithesis to a national approach that implicitly or explicitly accepts nations as given entities’. I extend this framework of transculturality to what historian David Ludden eloquently reminds us in his seminal piece Where is Assam? where ‘looking at any area's geography in slightly less conventional ways allows for the appearance of a kaleidoscope of social realities. Such an understanding allows for important new frames of reference for scholarship, activism and policy-making’.

I would like to end the piece by illustrating two different modes that provide us a window to repair and reimagination in Assam. The rise of Miyah poetry since 2016, that began as a form of protest by young Bengali Muslims is one such example. By resisting and reclaiming ideas about their community and selves, they have shown us that, much like any other identity, the Bengali Muslim one in Assam is a rainbow of diverse things that can hold multiple histories.

In a very different context, the Garo community lives across both sides of the India/Bangladesh border. The women from the community in Bangladesh often bring goods into Meghalaya (India) to sell in the border towns, thereby creating transnational mobility and their own place-making. In her book Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility and Citizenship at the North-East India Bangladesh border, anthropologist Malini Sur describes how the women traverse the jungles of the borderlands with what they call as ‘jungle passports’ which allow them to move across freely. I see the term as not one not rooted in legality but a moral/ethical one that insists that individuals and communities shape different relationships to a place based on ties of community, kinship, trade and sharing of common resources, and one that can never be fixed.

It is time for a new set of inquiries to emerge in Assam – one that can hold its many-hued topography, complex colonial political past along with its ethnic/linguistic diversity, to shape multiple possibilities of belonging.

Subasri Krishnan is a filmmaker and film curator whose work in Assam includes the films What the Fields Remember and Sikhirini Mwsanai (Dance of the Butterfly).

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