The Making of the NRC: Chronicling the Onslaught on Citizenship in Assam

The politics of Assam has been centred around a discourse on citizenship for decades. Contests and politics over citizenship have led to the termination and formation of governments in the state multiple times. Episodes of terming and labelling citizens as non-citizens and claiming and reclaiming citizenship have been incessant in Assam. Experiences of refusal of citizenship of citizens belonging to minorities are widely visible in digital, print and electronic media. Some citizens are also categorised as asomiya while others are called bohiragoto,1 positioning the former as the self and the latter as the ‘other’. The claim that there are many undocumented non-citizens has led to the question of testing the citizenship of the people and subsequently documenting the state’s citizens.