One day in 1949, my grandmother, then all of seven, walked from East Pakistan into India holding her father’s hand. Their lives had been up...
One day in 1949, my grandmother, then all of seven, walked from East Pakistan into India holding her father’s hand. Their lives had been uprooted by a line drawn on a map by a British lawyer who had just five weeks to divide a country. They left their home for India, carrying only a few bundles of clothes and utensils.
Seventy years later, Alata Rani Saha failed to make it to a list of Indian citizens in the state of Assam. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam sought to establish the Indian citizenship of its residents and thereby weed out the non-citizens. The exercise was “the first of its kind in the history of the country”. It reimagined how the Indian state relates to its citizens.
It was carried out following a Supreme Court order and, more importantly, under the apex court’s continuous supervision. An ethnically diverse state trusted bureaucrats and technology to solve a sociopolitical problem – at a cost of over Rs 1,600 crore to the exchequer.
To make it to the NRC, around 3.3 crore people, supported by over 6.6 crore documents, attempted to prove that they or their ancestors had been in Assam or anywhere else in...
