Few exercises in modern India have asked as much of ordinary people as Assam’s continuing effort to re-determine who among its residents is a citizen. Part of what drives it is anxiety rooted in suspicion and otherisation. Through registers, tribunals, references and re-verifications, the question has been put to families again and again, often to people who have lived nowhere else and know no other home. The state’s concern with unlawful migration is a legitimate one, and it is a legitimate aim to pursue, but the means chosen for it must be proportionate in the broad sense. The question this commentary raises is whether the method chosen meets that standard, and whether it reads the history of Assam and Bengal in a way that history itself does not support. Law alone cannot answer these questions. They have to be approached through the disciplines that study how people actually live, belong and remember: sociology and anthropology.
A Shared Past, Not Two Separate Stories
The present framing of the issue tends to treat Assam and Bengal as two sealed compartments, with movement from one to the other presumed to be intrusion. That picture sits uneasily with the region’s past. For long periods under colonial rule, Assam and Bengal were administered together or alongside one another, and the boundaries between them were redrawn more than once for reasons of revenue and governance rather than culture. The colonial economy encouraged and organised the movement of people into Assam, for plantations, for cultivation of land and for administration. Partition then cut through this landscape, separating communities that had been linked by river, market, marriage and language. People from various parts of India also settled in Assam, including Marwaris from Rajasthan.
Anthropologically, the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys are best understood as a frontier of contact rather than a fixed territory with one original people. Languages, faiths, farming practices and kinship networks overlapped and blended here over generations. The changing contours of the river have also shaped the region’s geography. To ask a resident of such a region to prove, through paper, that their roots lie on one side of a line drawn in the twentieth century is to ask a question that the region’s own history was never organised to answer.
Belonging Is Lived Before It Is Documented
Sociology reminds us that belonging is a social fact before it is a legal one. A person belongs to a village because neighbours know their family, because their parents are buried there, because they farm a particular plot, speak a particular dialect and celebrate particular festivals. Documents arrive late in this story, and for the poor, the rural and the displaced, they arrive unevenly or not at all.
A re-determination exercise built on documentary proof inverts this order. It treats the paper as the reality and the lived life as the claim to be tested. The burden then falls hardest on those whose lives leave the faintest paper trail: daughters who married and moved to another village, families uprooted by floods and river erosion, landless labourers, and people whose names were spelt differently by different clerks. These are not marginal cases in Assam. They describe a large part of its social world. This is also a place where paper trails are destroyed in floods, and where the poor find it far harder than the rich to keep and maintain documents. A process that predictably fails these groups is not neutral merely because its rules are formally the same for everyone.
The Question of Proportionality
Proportionality asks whether a measure that pursues a legitimate aim does so in a way that is suitable, necessary and balanced against the harm it causes. The aim of identifying unlawful migrants may be accepted for the sake of argument. The difficulty lies in the means, and the four-prong test of proportionality is the key to assessing them.
When citizenship is not settled once but kept permanently open to question, the harm is not limited to those eventually declared foreigners. It extends to everyone who must live under suspicion, keep documents ready, attend hearings, travel long distances and spend money they do not have, sometimes repeatedly. The fear of statelessness, detention and separation from family is itself a serious injury, felt across whole communities. A measure whose costs fall so widely, on so many who are in fact citizens, in order to find a smaller number who may not be, invites the question of whether less intrusive means were available and whether the balance has been struck fairly. The human costs of this are huge. Sociologically, such exercises also harden social boundaries. They turn neighbours into suspects and identity into a ledger of who is entitled and who is not, with consequences for social trust that outlast any individual case.
Negating History, Reshaping Identity
There is also a deeper cost. Every exercise of this kind tells a story about the past. By presuming that movement from Bengal into Assam was illegitimate, it rewrites a history of connection as a history of invasion. Anthropologists have long observed that identity categories are not simply discovered but are produced, sharpened and fixed by the state’s acts of counting and classifying. When the state repeatedly sorts people into “original” and “outsider”, it does not merely record identity; it manufactures it, and it teaches the next generation to see a shared region as a divided one.
This is why the issue matters beyond Assam. The histories of Assam and Bengal are intertwined in language, labour, literature and lineage. A citizenship process that cannot accommodate that intertwining ends up negating it, and in doing so it diminishes both the people it questions and the region it claims to protect.
Conclusion
Assam’s anxieties about identity and demographic change deserve to be taken seriously. But a constitutional democracy must address them through means that respect the lived realities of its people and the complex history of the land they inhabit. Repeated re-determination of citizenship, resting on documents that history never equipped people to hold, risks being disproportionate in its burdens and distorting in its account of the past. The better path is one that recognises that in a region shaped by centuries of contact, belonging is something people have built together, and that law should be slow to unmake it, especially a law that ignores the idea of fraternity.
This post is commentary and not legal advice.
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