Description
In 2019, nearly two million people were excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and put them on the verge of losing their citizenship and making them vulnerable for forced dispossession and detention. Prior to NRC, two more parallel mechanisms called ‘reference case’ by border police and ‘D voters’ by the election commission have also contested citizenship of over half a million people. Many of them are officially declared as foreigner nationals, a shorthand for stateless people. These stateless people are kept in six detention camps within the jail premises in Assam. The government has been constructing giant detention camps to detain thousands of people.The people who are affected by the citizenship contestation processes, majority of them are from the Miya community – the decedents of Bengal origin Muslim peasants who were brought to Assam by British colonizers under the policy called ‘grow more food’. In the post-colonial Assam, the community has been subjected to discrimination, segregation, and violence. The current regime is contesting their citizenship and belonging. Most recently, hundreds and thousands of them are being uprooted from their homes and hearths. Today almost everyone in the community suffers from the fear of detention and dispossession.
In the face of these violent processes and mechanisms the community is building resilience and agency to support the most vulnerable members of their community. The community is building their own support system, creating and facilitating a solidarity network to assist the poorly lettered people to pass through extremely discriminatory and dehumanizing processes. They have also taken initiative to counter the dominant narrative through unique and powerful initiatives like the Miya Poetry movement in order to re-humanize their stories, achieve epistemic justice, and counter the dominant system of knowledge production.
| Period | 2021 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom |