1 00:00:00,630 --> 00:00:07,620 They will welcome everyone. Welcome to the first of the modern South Asian studies seminars at the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:07,620 --> 00:00:12,750 My name is Danica Amata. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme, 3 00:00:12,750 --> 00:00:22,040 and I'm absolutely delighted to be welcoming Dr Mullany Sewell all the way from Australia to kick off the new academic year for us. 4 00:00:22,040 --> 00:00:26,010 Made me sort of senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Western Sydney. 5 00:00:26,010 --> 00:00:33,030 She's an environmental and social cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia. 6 00:00:33,030 --> 00:00:40,020 Many of you might have seen her very, very exciting recent granule book Actually Jungle Passports, Fences, 7 00:00:40,020 --> 00:00:44,070 Mobility and Citizenship of the Northeast India-Bangladesh border that has 8 00:00:44,070 --> 00:00:48,780 been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press just earlier this year. 9 00:00:48,780 --> 00:00:53,370 I believe Dr Seward is going to be speaking from this book. 10 00:00:53,370 --> 00:00:58,800 And the title of a dog today is borders and identities. Who is a Bangladeshi in a song? 11 00:00:58,800 --> 00:01:04,530 So this could not be a more sort of contemporary sort of topic at this point. 12 00:01:04,530 --> 00:01:11,190 Just a couple of points on housekeeping, Dr Seuss will speak for about 40 minutes, and after that, we'll have a Q&A. 13 00:01:11,190 --> 00:01:17,310 Please either you can write your question in the Q&A box or in the or you could just raise 14 00:01:17,310 --> 00:01:24,250 your hand and we'll handle what the sort of the mike do you to ask your question after that? 15 00:01:24,250 --> 00:01:31,320 So, so also just to say that this is going to be recorded. So I hope you're all aware that it will be recorded. 16 00:01:31,320 --> 00:01:38,070 We want because given the sort of the time difference in other parts of the world, not everyone who wanted to attend is able to join us today. 17 00:01:38,070 --> 00:01:44,070 So we going to put this up on our podcast website subsequent to the dog. 18 00:01:44,070 --> 00:01:46,800 So OK with that, without further ado, over to your Maleny. 19 00:01:46,800 --> 00:01:51,960 Thank you so much for being here and thank you for being willing to speak to us at like midnight your time. 20 00:01:51,960 --> 00:02:01,030 We're really excited to have you here, and we're really excited to have you actually beginning the niceties for us. 21 00:02:01,030 --> 00:02:08,380 Good evening, everyone, thank you for your very kind introduction and your invitation. 22 00:02:08,380 --> 00:02:13,600 It's really an honour to be presenting my work to all of you. 23 00:02:13,600 --> 00:02:19,690 Today, I'm speaking to you from the lens of the Arab nation in New South Wales. 24 00:02:19,690 --> 00:02:24,970 I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. 25 00:02:24,970 --> 00:02:30,300 These lands have never been seised, and they never will. 26 00:02:30,300 --> 00:02:40,880 I'm going to speak to you about borders and identities, and my talk today is titled who the Bangladesh team is. 27 00:02:40,880 --> 00:02:51,800 Now, all the all the names of places accessing the asylum and all the names of people who I referred to in the still on pseudonyms so they can 28 00:02:51,800 --> 00:03:03,890 know as soon as the bus from this forest and Sheffield city into murky the loose bits that fix it suspended welcome sign greeted visitors. 29 00:03:03,890 --> 00:03:09,080 The frequent stopping of the overcrowded buses by Indian security forces ensured that 30 00:03:09,080 --> 00:03:13,970 the usual return journey to this far flung border town took another four hours. 31 00:03:13,970 --> 00:03:19,580 The troops collected passengers asking them to produce identity cards, 32 00:03:19,580 --> 00:03:26,720 suspecting them to be either unauthorised from the Vichy migrants or political dissidents in the border town. 33 00:03:26,720 --> 00:03:31,130 Most expressed gratitude for travellers visiting India. 34 00:03:31,130 --> 00:03:37,940 Announcing the end of Indian territory even before visitors could enter the town's bureaucratic chief, 35 00:03:37,940 --> 00:03:41,950 the English was at a short distance from the much deeper. 36 00:03:41,950 --> 00:03:51,490 Inside the enclave of foreigners tribunals, X1 and X2, two of the tribunals adjudicating the bodies of Indian citizenship and Bangladeshi migrants, 37 00:03:51,490 --> 00:03:57,880 illegality in assault from the Narrow Corridors Tribunal explained situated on the ground floor. 38 00:03:57,880 --> 00:04:03,490 Family members who accompanied the petitioners could be inside the trial chamber. 39 00:04:03,490 --> 00:04:12,040 They could also see police escorting handcuffed men into the narrow landing behind the tribunals that led to the district prison. 40 00:04:12,040 --> 00:04:17,590 All the mundane bureaucratic allotments had ensured the tribunal's proximity to the prison. 41 00:04:17,590 --> 00:04:24,860 This kind of handcuffed prisoner widows who had been summoned to the tribunal even more nervous. 42 00:04:24,860 --> 00:04:28,940 Judicial trials aim to deport Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived and resettled 43 00:04:28,940 --> 00:04:36,360 in Assam without authorisation after the legal cut-off date of 21st March 1971. 44 00:04:36,360 --> 00:04:42,330 The Soviets conducted by a specially constituted border police until since 2015, 45 00:04:42,330 --> 00:04:48,750 the updating of the National Register for Citizens have set this process into motion. 46 00:04:48,750 --> 00:04:57,300 The police scrutinised new names on the electoral register of the new arrivals, especially in districts of concern that border Bangladesh. 47 00:04:57,300 --> 00:05:05,970 Once the constables submit a report to the Tribunals Tribunal, someone the accused will appeal the documents for citizenship. 48 00:05:05,970 --> 00:05:12,270 They arrived with their lawyers and submit petitions to perform Indian citizenship through people with parentage, 49 00:05:12,270 --> 00:05:23,800 education residents and property documents. While state prosecutors, the original document scrutinise them and interrogate the suspects. 50 00:05:23,800 --> 00:05:31,090 When the identity papers finally reached the judge, he publicly scrutinised the scene once the trial concludes, 51 00:05:31,090 --> 00:05:36,100 the judge sits alone in this chamber reviewing the paperwork and the testimonies 52 00:05:36,100 --> 00:05:42,040 before finally deciding the terms on which Indian citizenship can be affected. 53 00:05:42,040 --> 00:05:47,560 As I started observing and noting the judicial proceedings in the two story house, 54 00:05:47,560 --> 00:05:56,370 the committee the tribunal takes one and explore the borders between Indian citizens and unauthorised one is constant. 55 00:05:56,370 --> 00:06:02,850 Sometimes silence defendants and the summons suspect mysteriously did not turn up. 56 00:06:02,850 --> 00:06:10,750 Neither police interrogation nor illegal settlements from the tribunals could have been impel people to attend. 57 00:06:10,750 --> 00:06:16,090 They're going to elaborate on how what the commotions and silences generate 58 00:06:16,090 --> 00:06:20,980 doubt about people's relationships to places and people identities in the south. 59 00:06:20,980 --> 00:06:26,950 Let me tell you a little bit about the specific history and politics that guide these trials and 60 00:06:26,950 --> 00:06:34,010 then make the concerns of Indian citizenship even more shadowy in the state there has been. 61 00:06:34,010 --> 00:06:42,740 Now, as you know, Indian sources estimate that over 20 million Bangladeshis suspected to have resettled in India without official documentation, 62 00:06:42,740 --> 00:06:47,080 of which six million are said to reside in a cell. 63 00:06:47,080 --> 00:06:55,790 Now this, you know, there's no there's no scientific basis for this kind of investigation now. 64 00:06:55,790 --> 00:07:06,140 Although both India and Bangladesh consider migration of 25th March 1971 without official authorisation to be illegal. 65 00:07:06,140 --> 00:07:15,700 Neither diplomacy nor the implementation of a legal cut-off date has resulted the issuance of divided household controls legal migration. 66 00:07:15,700 --> 00:07:23,320 Well, legally, as we know, citizenship and gender and Indian citizenship in particular is defined by exclusions, 67 00:07:23,320 --> 00:07:32,170 and Obama tries states that the legal locus of the migrant outsider has been indispensable to the crossing of the Indian system. 68 00:07:32,170 --> 00:07:38,860 The different configurations of migrants and refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh have informed 69 00:07:38,860 --> 00:07:45,580 the ideological premises and the institutional manifestations of Indian citizenship in India. 70 00:07:45,580 --> 00:07:51,310 Muslims are suspected to be perennially immigrants, non-citizens and outsiders. 71 00:07:51,310 --> 00:07:54,550 New Zealand giants have shown how over the years, 72 00:07:54,550 --> 00:08:04,180 Indian citizenship also came to be ascribed with qualifications that entail constitutional classifications as well as exceptions. 73 00:08:04,180 --> 00:08:06,040 These exceptions, she argues, 74 00:08:06,040 --> 00:08:16,030 operates in the sphere of the political sphere and closely follows the religious difference between between Hindus and Muslims in India. 75 00:08:16,030 --> 00:08:25,360 In December 2019, the long shadow of religious forced lines of Indian citizenship was further reinforced to the citizenship amendment. 76 00:08:25,360 --> 00:08:30,880 Obviously, this will put Indian citizenship the Hindu six games first, 77 00:08:30,880 --> 00:08:41,090 even Christians who had legally migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, or on or before 30 first before 2014. 78 00:08:41,090 --> 00:08:46,490 This legislation, as we know, has led to widespread fear that with one broad stroke, 79 00:08:46,490 --> 00:08:53,040 the government machinery puts many Muslims of very interesting consistency. 80 00:08:53,040 --> 00:09:01,520 Now, I want to tell you a little bit about questions of illegality and migration, and you're relying on the work of Madeleine Reeves, 81 00:09:01,520 --> 00:09:06,960 who has argued that migrant illegality operates in a space for her relations 82 00:09:06,960 --> 00:09:13,530 rather than in a precise distinction between the legal and illegal migration. 83 00:09:13,530 --> 00:09:21,120 We have shown how ambiguity is defined, the life flows of migrant labourers and what it's equally difficult for migrants, 84 00:09:21,120 --> 00:09:28,240 employers or law enforcers to implement the classification of the nation's. 85 00:09:28,240 --> 00:09:36,280 And many nation states, especially Panopto, once this complex ruling family is explained through the logic of migrant protection, 86 00:09:36,280 --> 00:09:44,880 political membership and citizenship remains fuzzy as unauthorised migrants easily procure citizenship documents. 87 00:09:44,880 --> 00:09:50,760 Now in India, the procurement of identity mediates this in-between space. 88 00:09:50,760 --> 00:09:54,390 Now, those who occupy these zones of elusiveness are, however, 89 00:09:54,390 --> 00:10:00,600 embedded in a constant struggle for legitimacy and claims for political membership in the 90 00:10:00,600 --> 00:10:06,090 absence of official policies to regulate legal migration between India and Bangladesh. 91 00:10:06,090 --> 00:10:11,730 India's security centric discourse and electoral politics have linked undocumented 92 00:10:11,730 --> 00:10:19,680 Bangladeshi migration with threats of infiltration and Islamic terrorism. 93 00:10:19,680 --> 00:10:22,380 Such claims are fraught with uncertainties. 94 00:10:22,380 --> 00:10:29,040 Indian political parties continue to vacillate between enabling Bangladeshi immigrants to fraudulently acquire 95 00:10:29,040 --> 00:10:39,330 identity documents to work in Indian elections and demanding speedy deportation of the Muslim illegal immigrants. 96 00:10:39,330 --> 00:10:47,130 Noting that this the main concern surrounding unauthorised Bangladeshi migration relates to the long standing history 97 00:10:47,130 --> 00:10:56,430 of the planet and conflicts over ethno linguistic ethno linguistic identity and precisely for these reasons, 98 00:10:56,430 --> 00:11:08,670 and this is far more than a century old, but the contours of Indian citizenship in Assam have come to be monitored, especially uniquely now. 99 00:11:08,670 --> 00:11:13,080 For those familiar with the, you know, the shifting wetlands, 100 00:11:13,080 --> 00:11:22,170 the landscapes that today are divided between parts of Bangladesh and some in northeast India, 101 00:11:22,170 --> 00:11:27,750 you may recall that these wetlands were settled by Buddhist administrators, 102 00:11:27,750 --> 00:11:41,550 and they became a bone of contention due to the mobility of peasant migrants who moved from Delhi, East and Bengal to the greatest province of Japan, 103 00:11:41,550 --> 00:11:51,390 and who laboriously reclaimed this land and cultivated silk produce food and whose production was absolutely essential in Yiddish. 104 00:11:51,390 --> 00:11:56,370 Because remember, the plantation economy relied on these migrants. 105 00:11:56,370 --> 00:12:06,780 They were not plantation plantation labourers, but Bengali Muslim migrants of Bengali origin were the primary food producers. 106 00:12:06,780 --> 00:12:20,100 And if you think about the contentious decade of the 1940s, when people, some hope and some feared that Islam would be placed in Pakistan, 107 00:12:20,100 --> 00:12:29,850 you know, food producers of Muslim Muslim food producers of Bengali origin from Eastern Bengal came to Albany, 108 00:12:29,850 --> 00:12:37,410 came to be seen as either, you know, helpless parents who needed things recovery or, 109 00:12:37,410 --> 00:12:44,010 as you know, foot soldiers who would take over some land budgeting. 110 00:12:44,010 --> 00:12:51,770 And you know, the anxieties surrounding landlords questions of language or Bengali words. 111 00:12:51,770 --> 00:13:00,180 Evacuees continued through the post-production period when the plan became a state in the newly independent India, 112 00:13:00,180 --> 00:13:04,260 and what was then Eastern Bengal became the territory of East Pakistan. 113 00:13:04,260 --> 00:13:07,230 And starting in the 1960s, 114 00:13:07,230 --> 00:13:18,090 there was a political discourse of infiltration from Bangladesh that led Azam to develop to demand the construction of a border fence. 115 00:13:18,090 --> 00:13:26,370 And in 1964, you know, a special law was enacted and mobile courts were set up next to police stations. 116 00:13:26,370 --> 00:13:39,940 And at that time, those who were depicted as Pakistani foreigners would be deported, and you may recall that it was also in the late 1970s. 117 00:13:39,940 --> 00:13:53,490 You know, from 1979 to 1985 that a large anti-foreigner anti Bangladeshi agitation occurred in a known as big as our movement. 118 00:13:53,490 --> 00:14:06,540 And as a consequence of this, the central government of India set up the emergency tribunals or the illegal migration determination by having to act. 119 00:14:06,540 --> 00:14:12,870 Now, the on Assam Students Union of the US, whose members had led the movement, 120 00:14:12,870 --> 00:14:20,370 could demanded that the names of all unauthorised Bangladeshi foreigners could be deleted from the electoral rolls. 121 00:14:20,370 --> 00:14:32,160 And you know, at this point in time, they were very unsatisfied with the low rate of deportations of the IMDb's tribunals, 122 00:14:32,160 --> 00:14:43,440 and they said that the Foreigners Tribunals Order, which drew from the Foreigners Act of 1946, 123 00:14:43,440 --> 00:14:49,230 which was passed just after World War Two, you know, under its control. 124 00:14:49,230 --> 00:14:58,620 It demanded the complete control of foreigners to be far more stringent and productive and. 125 00:14:58,620 --> 00:15:07,230 Now, it was in response to someone on the floor who was then a member of the oilsands student union who filed a public interest 126 00:15:07,230 --> 00:15:16,060 litigation that the Supreme Court of India held that large scale Bangladeshi immigration threatened will the fate, 127 00:15:16,060 --> 00:15:23,520 the professor and the rest of India in extending the meaning of external aggression to include economic aggression. 128 00:15:23,520 --> 00:15:30,540 And in 2016, several numbers turn around at the Bharatiya Janata Party to form the state government. 129 00:15:30,540 --> 00:15:40,500 Now, three decades after the Assam movement, the rise of Hindu nationalist politics has affected the political field by further sharpening ethnic, 130 00:15:40,500 --> 00:15:47,270 linguistic and religious differences and hatred towards undocumented Bangladeshi. 131 00:15:47,270 --> 00:15:55,190 Now, in 2015, under the BJP led government in New Delhi, the then started updating the National Register for Citizens, 132 00:15:55,190 --> 00:16:00,230 which aimed at detecting unauthorised Bangladeshi and in the process. 133 00:16:00,230 --> 00:16:10,130 In 2015 included 1.9 million people from the citizens list, and in this process, 134 00:16:10,130 --> 00:16:22,180 it rendered large sections of the Muslim population, especially lowland in Lower Assam stateless. 135 00:16:22,180 --> 00:16:29,030 Now, scholars such as Honjo, Bora-Bora and others. 136 00:16:29,030 --> 00:16:38,860 Initially suggested that, you know, in 2015, the National Register of Citizens peaceful for legal and political avenues, 137 00:16:38,860 --> 00:16:49,280 approval to resolve contentious issues of autonomy and social justice that shaped political mobilisation in the form since the mid-20th century. 138 00:16:49,280 --> 00:16:50,210 In contrast, 139 00:16:50,210 --> 00:16:59,480 Mora suggests that the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 reaffirmed India's colonial relationship with dissent from the rest of India, 140 00:16:59,480 --> 00:17:06,110 demonstrating a clear disregard for the political assertion of refugees and indigenous peoples. 141 00:17:06,110 --> 00:17:15,170 Now, the Saudis opposition to India's Citizenship Amendment Act emphasises the importance of Hindu Bengali refugees from Bangladesh, 142 00:17:15,170 --> 00:17:23,870 some of whom were also excluded from the National Register for Citizens would destabilise the demographic, language and culture. 143 00:17:23,870 --> 00:17:30,950 Now, today, both religion and ethnicity framed public debate on Indian citizen ship in Islamic religion, 144 00:17:30,950 --> 00:17:36,560 which for a very long time was on the backburner and the Senate has now been brought to the forefront. 145 00:17:36,560 --> 00:17:42,180 Political parties, civil society groups and the public at large have mobilised these categories 146 00:17:42,180 --> 00:17:47,660 to provoke demands for inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people. 147 00:17:47,660 --> 00:17:56,210 It's all it's fluid boundaries with Bangladesh, as well as its complex boundaries with India and contemporary electoral politics generally 148 00:17:56,210 --> 00:18:02,450 bureaucratic practises that specifically drive people into foreigners tribunals. 149 00:18:02,450 --> 00:18:11,150 The Police Service verifiable forms, judicial deliberations and the finality of court orders that seek to identify illegal boundary 150 00:18:11,150 --> 00:18:17,330 issues and deport them manufactured sufficient in ways that unsettles familial and familial ones. 151 00:18:17,330 --> 00:18:24,200 In a sense, as the borders of legality and the legality of transplanted into the judicial domain, 152 00:18:24,200 --> 00:18:33,320 police service and judicial trials generate and perpetrate bills by leaving unclassified the contentious issues of land laws and identity. 153 00:18:33,320 --> 00:18:44,090 The judicial processes makes suspicion rather than legal and procedural certainty fundamental to manifest Indian citizenship in the South. 154 00:18:44,090 --> 00:18:51,830 And now I'm going to take you to little foreigners tribunals X1 and X2 and where I was sitting, 155 00:18:51,830 --> 00:18:58,370 conducting participant observation and various Border Police walks in and out of the offices. 156 00:18:58,370 --> 00:19:04,940 Keeping interrogation reports on the desks of the tribunals should allow for trouble 157 00:19:04,940 --> 00:19:09,560 when they were the custodians of the most important documents of the Tribunal. 158 00:19:09,560 --> 00:19:14,340 The Registrar of Records that contain the dates for the court hearings. 159 00:19:14,340 --> 00:19:23,330 The loading then the district still would set into motion the judicial proceedings that would decide the fate of 19 different suspects online. 160 00:19:23,330 --> 00:19:30,350 Call me whose location was on the first floor of the building and will handle the first model number of cases. 161 00:19:30,350 --> 00:19:35,990 The first method blue is still always open for to police reports. 162 00:19:35,990 --> 00:19:43,400 These entries were constantly interrupted by people who gathered around the table for an allotment of hearing booths, 163 00:19:43,400 --> 00:19:52,730 thus attended to the case once she intentionally ignored the people who gathered around till she maintained a cautious distance from her colleague, 164 00:19:52,730 --> 00:19:58,910 keeping her to widowhood and the location of service rooms, and will keep a secret less. 165 00:19:58,910 --> 00:20:04,820 Being engaged in clinical trials comprised interrogation reports. 166 00:20:04,820 --> 00:20:13,280 If there is good summons and petitions submitted by both, the assemblies are accused of being illegally arrested in foreigners. 167 00:20:13,280 --> 00:20:18,500 The order sheets that covered each case and chronicle the summons hearings in. 168 00:20:18,500 --> 00:20:26,090 The petitioners. The petition was draughted by lawyers and copies of identity documents that were subsequently added. 169 00:20:26,090 --> 00:20:31,970 Meet these friends! The petitions were standardised, mostly typed in English. 170 00:20:31,970 --> 00:20:37,130 Without exception, the petitioners submitted that they could, neither, he nor write, had not received. 171 00:20:37,130 --> 00:20:42,380 The notices from the police requested more time to procure documents. 172 00:20:42,380 --> 00:20:52,820 No proof of Indian citizenship rested on being able to fulfil a range of identity papers in a tourist property paper citizens registration paper, 173 00:20:52,820 --> 00:20:56,550 but marriage and school leaving certificates. 174 00:20:56,550 --> 00:21:04,740 Writing, filing forms and the creation of its files was central to adjudicating the borders of citizenship in X one, 175 00:21:04,740 --> 00:21:11,910 and still they were far more than repetitive and routine bureaucratic acts and practises that makes the 176 00:21:11,910 --> 00:21:19,410 political the bureaucratic actions and paper documents that state agents and people provide a client to submit, 177 00:21:19,410 --> 00:21:26,370 classified, manage and retrieve or recall the sensuality of state machinery and their influence 178 00:21:26,370 --> 00:21:31,800 on democratic functioning and practises in generating complex paper economies. 179 00:21:31,800 --> 00:21:37,990 These not only support state actions, but are themselves constitutive of the state. 180 00:21:37,990 --> 00:21:45,230 As medical matter emphasises official papers and interviews that come into being for bureaucratic purposes, 181 00:21:45,230 --> 00:21:54,880 the issue of youth are both uncertain and violent and yet have life giving properties a sense of dual indeterminacy shapes, 182 00:21:54,880 --> 00:21:59,860 identity documents and enormous flaws and conflicting forces that produce the 183 00:21:59,860 --> 00:22:05,170 legality of identity documents and the thought that all of these documents. 184 00:22:05,170 --> 00:22:14,440 Kelly reminds us how to be linked to people who mediate their political subjectivity, official documents and science. 185 00:22:14,440 --> 00:22:23,710 As Matthew Hoh has stated, move between local governments and population in ways that shape the force of politics, 186 00:22:23,710 --> 00:22:33,610 as well as that of development and project, now what remains very critical is to be able to invoke Immortals Advocate to freeze. 187 00:22:33,610 --> 00:22:43,640 There's not so much what they can do about rules and procedures, but what they reveal about people's relationships to these rules. 188 00:22:43,640 --> 00:22:49,120 The petitioner constantly interrupted another looks and pleaded for more time to 189 00:22:49,120 --> 00:22:56,200 procure identity documents when lawyers urged her to provide a hearing date. 190 00:22:56,200 --> 00:22:59,560 Thus, put on an expression of self-importance. 191 00:22:59,560 --> 00:23:06,430 He took longer to draw the columns and draws on distance, stretching out her hand to retrieve the small green diary. 192 00:23:06,430 --> 00:23:15,520 She opened it and shook her head, so I stopped them from the trial chamber, regularly interrupted her dance and performances in the tribunal. 193 00:23:15,520 --> 00:23:18,500 The necklace that I sent to the. 194 00:23:18,500 --> 00:23:29,330 The bell was a signal for additional assistance, such as how to enter the chamber upon her entry, thus presented a case to the judge on that day, 195 00:23:29,330 --> 00:23:36,530 the final in the Thornaby Tribunal X-1 had someone given to the court on the suspicion 196 00:23:36,530 --> 00:23:41,900 that she was a dubious member based reporter who was illegally residing in the South. 197 00:23:41,900 --> 00:23:47,060 Thus becomes a heavy case to the judge. Bigelow's petition was detailed. 198 00:23:47,060 --> 00:23:52,160 She stated that she'd been married for 10 years, who was a local politician. 199 00:23:52,160 --> 00:23:57,200 She had relocated from her village to Aspen's village with Bangladesh. 200 00:23:57,200 --> 00:24:01,640 I spoke with bigger machine needed for the judge, for someone who took the courtroom. 201 00:24:01,640 --> 00:24:08,570 She emphasised the police harassment and delayed and delays had disrupted her life for several years. 202 00:24:08,570 --> 00:24:14,750 During this period, she traversed several times to her father's village to retrieve her school, leaving certificates. 203 00:24:14,750 --> 00:24:18,720 He also conveyed that the label Bangladeshi. 204 00:24:18,720 --> 00:24:27,070 And Broken Hill family had brought the family into disrepute and impaired her position as a local politicians both. 205 00:24:27,070 --> 00:24:29,560 Rumours about Meghan being in the lead in Bolivia, 206 00:24:29,560 --> 00:24:36,550 she had reached the village school in which her two sons studied while her eldest son, who attended secondary school in New York. 207 00:24:36,550 --> 00:24:40,480 His friends don't let. His mother was a Bangladeshi foreigner. 208 00:24:40,480 --> 00:24:45,610 The younger son was more curious. He asked her, Why are you being called a Bangladeshi? 209 00:24:45,610 --> 00:24:49,450 Are you really from Bangladesh? What does that country look like? 210 00:24:49,450 --> 00:24:53,410 Will we be sent to rubbish? Please, will you take me there? 211 00:24:53,410 --> 00:25:03,080 Like the insults that her native to southeast, her younger son's persistent village influence curiosity anguished father. 212 00:25:03,080 --> 00:25:10,370 Now begins trial actually animated versus case final. And this is we're writing about land documents in Islamabad. 213 00:25:10,370 --> 00:25:20,960 Matthew Hoh makes a compelling point about reading the Sun as a complex graphic John as artefacts whose histories are repeatedly inscribed them. 214 00:25:20,960 --> 00:25:26,900 Then lines are confronted with event like quality, not broken. 215 00:25:26,900 --> 00:25:32,900 Not only does this attribution define the role that finds play and the unique graphic artefacts, 216 00:25:32,900 --> 00:25:37,340 but it also demonstrates their relationship to people space and time, 217 00:25:37,340 --> 00:25:43,100 eliminating the finest possible material properties in the Indian context of the book. 218 00:25:43,100 --> 00:25:48,500 That draws a similar analogy for grounding fires as objects that retain a life of their 219 00:25:48,500 --> 00:25:53,820 own larger than the people who act on them as soon as they have made an appearance. 220 00:25:53,820 --> 00:26:04,220 The papers came nice to the performances of Indian citizenship, transcending their prior containment in as aspects in the films. 221 00:26:04,220 --> 00:26:10,370 In the trial, Shamima Begum faced the judge and the prosecutor brought her high school education 222 00:26:10,370 --> 00:26:15,440 and her identity as the wife of a local politician gave her enormous confidence. 223 00:26:15,440 --> 00:26:21,710 He answered all the questions that the prosecutor asked her. 224 00:26:21,710 --> 00:26:32,870 In Begum's case, the state prosecutor had carefully matched the identity document with the father's and her husband's while verifying these papers. 225 00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:38,480 The state prosecutor theatrically bit his tongue in embarrassment. 226 00:26:38,480 --> 00:26:44,120 The silence in which Begum's identity documents were retrieved from the plastic folder 227 00:26:44,120 --> 00:26:52,020 verified had reflected the consensus that her case was one of police misidentification. 228 00:26:52,020 --> 00:27:02,660 Now, I'm like big blue ribbon of modest means with few or no identity papers, and it's fast paced, aggressive cross examination. 229 00:27:02,660 --> 00:27:10,380 The frail Nihar baby was completely oblivious that the police had identified her the village 230 00:27:10,380 --> 00:27:16,200 teacher after seeing a notice pasted in English on the walls of the Village Primary School. 231 00:27:16,200 --> 00:27:21,710 Someone. When her name was announced, Vivi entered the courtroom, 232 00:27:21,710 --> 00:27:29,430 wiping the face with a green handkerchief exhausted from fasting for the holy month of Ramadan. 233 00:27:29,430 --> 00:27:33,910 It slowly grabbed the arm of the plastic chair by the door with her bony hands. 234 00:27:33,910 --> 00:27:37,780 She made an attempt at once felonious to go. 235 00:27:37,780 --> 00:27:48,290 Typekit glared at her from under his glasses. In the absence of the state prosecutor who was late, the judge asked BP to present. 236 00:27:48,290 --> 00:27:59,270 And, you know, she couldn't help, clearly confused, she made eye contact with her witness, a neighbour for anybody who presented himself to the court. 237 00:27:59,270 --> 00:28:05,360 It was only during his testimony to the court that the state prosecutor launched into the trial room, 238 00:28:05,360 --> 00:28:14,000 profusely apologising to the judge holding his hands that baby theatrically, he bowed in an obvious display of respect. 239 00:28:14,000 --> 00:28:18,290 He requested that does it matter? She she should forgive him for the question. 240 00:28:18,290 --> 00:28:28,200 He was obliged to us with this apology. He heard a torrent of questions and body Bibi's witness to compensate for his own. 241 00:28:28,200 --> 00:28:38,080 And, you know, his only two rival. Now, it was completely theatrical during his cross-examination of BP. 242 00:28:38,080 --> 00:28:47,250 You know, he confused her, the legal questioning was very aggressive and at the end of that cross-examination, 243 00:28:47,250 --> 00:28:53,940 theatrically and loudly announced You need to the you've come to India after the March 5th, 244 00:28:53,940 --> 00:28:59,220 1971 you have entered illegally and you're a Bangladeshi, 245 00:28:59,220 --> 00:29:08,670 so we could not sign the papers quickly assisted her to put the premium impression on a court document that stated her case had been examined. 246 00:29:08,670 --> 00:29:18,720 Now, it is not surprising that so many of these trials should follow completely opposite trajectories because of their socioeconomic distinctions, 247 00:29:18,720 --> 00:29:25,290 their differing political affiliations, their unequal access to identity papers. 248 00:29:25,290 --> 00:29:32,790 You know what would to be given Bibi's appearances before the court and the paediatrics that accompanied the court trial? 249 00:29:32,790 --> 00:29:37,440 The Ngubeni papers and performances reinforce one another. 250 00:29:37,440 --> 00:29:44,190 The final official paper of the judgement, this alleged affair with Bibi, said the judge. 251 00:29:44,190 --> 00:29:54,180 Instead of taking note of the state prosecutor, Patrick took note of Bibi statements about her father's compulsions to constantly migrate, 252 00:29:54,180 --> 00:29:58,200 able to seek work and her relocation to her husband's health. 253 00:29:58,200 --> 00:30:04,590 Upon marriage, he recorded that she submitted her father and husband electoral documents. 254 00:30:04,590 --> 00:30:13,560 The judgement stated that although the state prosecutor doubted whether Bibi was the daughter of the father and the wife of her husband, 255 00:30:13,560 --> 00:30:18,350 he was unable to provide any evidence to the contrary. 256 00:30:18,350 --> 00:30:25,700 Now, both the judgements were exactly two and a half pages long, but six to leave this to the park in full in the context, 257 00:30:25,700 --> 00:30:33,200 Bibi's begins neatly Typekit judgement, which had only one minor handwritten correction. 258 00:30:33,200 --> 00:30:41,810 You don't buy that the tribunal had established her as an Indian citizen and then concluded by emphasising that she was not a foreigner. 259 00:30:41,810 --> 00:30:49,050 By contrast, the typewritten judgements of Bibi's case only asserted that she was not a foreigner in the final version. 260 00:30:49,050 --> 00:30:56,330 Handwritten correction stated that Bibi was an Indian citizen under Indian citizenship. 261 00:30:56,330 --> 00:31:04,110 Now this was before the two years since. No, because and Bibi's troubles, 262 00:31:04,110 --> 00:31:12,000 religious be further testified to the gender traditions of Indian and fishermen from the Border Police routinely 263 00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:20,520 accuse Muslim women of being Bernardeschi migrants who marry the Indian men to fervently acquire Indian citizenship. 264 00:31:20,520 --> 00:31:30,810 The hunt for illegal Bangladeshi Muslim women exposes the contradictory use of official documents such as this. 265 00:31:30,810 --> 00:31:37,430 But they've given Bibi's judgements, also established the legality of their resistance in their marriages, 266 00:31:37,430 --> 00:31:47,060 their Indian citizenship on the basis of paternity by prevented Muslim women from voting and promoting in elections for extended periods. 267 00:31:47,060 --> 00:31:57,110 Police actions such as this ensure that their names for struggle to resolve their actions and show up the women became infantile. 268 00:31:57,110 --> 00:32:03,320 Political subjects and their marital relationships and mobility also came to be de-legitimize 269 00:32:03,320 --> 00:32:10,840 for an extended period as they waited for the tribunals to reinstate them as legal subjects. 270 00:32:10,840 --> 00:32:16,150 Now, the tribunals were usually places where there was constant commotion, 271 00:32:16,150 --> 00:32:23,890 but occasionally the din died down when they identified suspects who the tribunal had failed to appeal. 272 00:32:23,890 --> 00:32:33,010 Silence replaced the frenzied draughting of petitions and trials, as well as the clamour to avoid the empty offices and trial chambers, 273 00:32:33,010 --> 00:32:39,730 which enabled the regional assistance and feelings to take long enough to know who wanted attention. 274 00:32:39,730 --> 00:32:43,520 The hunt for the elusive Bangladeshi foreigner, in a sense, 275 00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:51,460 and the desperation to look at the state's invisible population, the people who went missing. 276 00:32:51,460 --> 00:33:00,510 So of those filed cases of lifting people under the level of UTI, the acronym for entrees treatable. 277 00:33:00,510 --> 00:33:06,100 A lot of those who failed to arrive at the tribunal were Mumtaz Bakam and Asma Bibi, 278 00:33:06,100 --> 00:33:12,340 suspected to be Bangladeshi women against whom the police had accused of illegal residents in the South. 279 00:33:12,340 --> 00:33:15,970 Both of them mysteriously disappeared in October. 280 00:33:15,970 --> 00:33:19,660 Bibi's case when the police and any rental verification. 281 00:33:19,660 --> 00:33:26,170 They located a young man with her husband's name, but his identity did not match the documentary details. 282 00:33:26,170 --> 00:33:36,280 The police report provided other untraceable cases in the Bush family would come to resettle in a village near multivalent. 283 00:33:36,280 --> 00:33:44,110 The police identified the family as a Bangladeshi Hindu migrant family who had arrived in Assam in nineteen ninety two, 284 00:33:44,110 --> 00:33:50,650 and the investigation report stated that they had fled Bangladesh on account of religious persecution 285 00:33:50,650 --> 00:33:57,400 against Hindu minorities during retaliation for widespread communal violence against Muslims in India, 286 00:33:57,400 --> 00:34:01,890 which was prompted by the demolition of biodiversity. 287 00:34:01,890 --> 00:34:09,540 Now, what I found particularly interesting about the unfixable pieces was the FAMs Border Police constable, 288 00:34:09,540 --> 00:34:18,360 who call investigated zero one two after the esoteric manner in which he classified his report. 289 00:34:18,360 --> 00:34:26,170 Now, like other students, he had the daunting task of identifying suspects. 290 00:34:26,170 --> 00:34:36,060 You know, in a large jurisdiction of many. His field reports in particular were extremely well, 291 00:34:36,060 --> 00:34:46,650 with six one zero one two reported arriving in village custody at precisely 9:15 every morning since he left for his pre-selected destination. 292 00:34:46,650 --> 00:34:52,380 The homes of the suspected Bangladeshi arriving at exactly 1:00 in the afternoon were not. 293 00:34:52,380 --> 00:34:59,340 He employed various interrogation techniques and gathered intelligence about the suspects from their neighbour. 294 00:34:59,340 --> 00:35:02,590 By 3:00 in the afternoon, the expedition was complete. 295 00:35:02,590 --> 00:35:10,590 Shipbuilder that is believed to be from left for the police station at 6:00 in the evening, 012 police constable ended his. 296 00:35:10,590 --> 00:35:16,110 Well, the six months that he investigated a suspected Bangladeshi farmer in the village, 297 00:35:16,110 --> 00:35:24,870 012 reported travelling three times to the same homes and beating several suspects belonging to the same family. 298 00:35:24,870 --> 00:35:36,490 Now, when people don't, you know, people who go missing, when people go missing and they don't arrive at the tribunals, 299 00:35:36,490 --> 00:35:43,150 it full for senior delegations of the Afghan Border Police to arrive at the tribunals. 300 00:35:43,150 --> 00:35:48,750 Now, their seniority demanded that they travel by jeeps with flashing red lights and sirens. 301 00:35:48,750 --> 00:35:56,100 Although the offices of the assembled, the police were just around the corner from the tribunal during such meetings 302 00:35:56,100 --> 00:36:04,380 to armed police constable who stood at the entrance of the trial chamber. The Border Police said the agenda everyone said upright shook their heads, 303 00:36:04,380 --> 00:36:12,350 nodding vigorously at the issues that the police commissioner listed in every meeting and quickly took a. 304 00:36:12,350 --> 00:36:20,000 Quickly took out delicate porcelain teacups from a cupboard, efficiently beauty and handed a to everyone, 305 00:36:20,000 --> 00:36:25,040 including the stenographer, who was busy typing the proceedings during these occasions. 306 00:36:25,040 --> 00:36:34,190 This genographic quickly got busy forgetting his high-cost identity, which prevented him on other days from accessing to someone the. 307 00:36:34,190 --> 00:36:43,730 Each time doesn't go make the case, it's funny, though, that they tied them together in one compressed bundle with middle flips and tricks. 308 00:36:43,730 --> 00:36:53,480 Given the large number of cases to handle, that's compressed for an increasingly large number of the act of file compression created a temporary 309 00:36:53,480 --> 00:37:01,310 legal operation that could be reopened if the police provided the tribunal with more information. 310 00:37:01,310 --> 00:37:05,720 However, such information was not forthcoming. 311 00:37:05,720 --> 00:37:12,680 Now, despite this inability to deport those deemed to be a legal obligation to report the police 312 00:37:12,680 --> 00:37:19,300 constables continually heaped on such generous people said goodbye to her electoral politics. 313 00:37:19,300 --> 00:37:23,690 The time was driven by illegal Bangladeshis. 314 00:37:23,690 --> 00:37:33,440 And this is where, you know, secret sources continue to leap out from the pages of police interrogation reports they're anonymously making them. 315 00:37:33,440 --> 00:37:46,430 As far as the uniformed police come to believe that these secret sources had supported the case of missing suspects as a mob of floating unidentified 316 00:37:46,430 --> 00:37:58,130 and unaffordable populations wedded to the dominant political imagination that illegal Bangladeshis in the Senate were elusive and criminal subjects. 317 00:37:58,130 --> 00:38:05,690 Sometimes, suspects who lacked identity papers such as Bibi stormed into Indian citizens at other times. 318 00:38:05,690 --> 00:38:15,830 Even when petitioners produced identity papers and certifications to prove their Indian citizenship claims, they were kept in limbo. 319 00:38:15,830 --> 00:38:21,650 So what are the rights of citizens and suspects who have been made stateless in the film? 320 00:38:21,650 --> 00:38:27,170 How do marital and property rights, including the value addition of neighbour? 321 00:38:27,170 --> 00:38:38,530 And here I'm talking about, you know, oral history of labour, of reclaiming land for food production, fit into citizenship rights. 322 00:38:38,530 --> 00:38:38,800 You know, 323 00:38:38,800 --> 00:38:47,650 some people with documentary evidence of Indian citizenship have been rendered stateless on the grounds that their paper identities are fraudulent, 324 00:38:47,650 --> 00:38:53,360 sometimes just on the basis that it is easy to procure documents. 325 00:38:53,360 --> 00:39:01,630 Others who is not that they are Indian citizens do not have the necessary papers to prove their claims to land as property, 326 00:39:01,630 --> 00:39:09,030 the marital relationships and by extension, their claims to the membership of the nation itself. 327 00:39:09,030 --> 00:39:14,790 Instead of resolving issues on unauthorised migration and Latinos, 328 00:39:14,790 --> 00:39:22,860 the real presence of Bangladeshis in law and life accentuates the sounds a dire predicament 329 00:39:22,860 --> 00:39:29,880 as a perennially repositioned internal and external frontier of Indian democracy. 330 00:39:29,880 --> 00:39:38,040 Even judgements at the Tribunal do not necessarily obliterate conspiracy and suspicion. 331 00:39:38,040 --> 00:39:43,260 For the Muslim parents of Bengali origin, the partition of the Indian subcontinent. 332 00:39:43,260 --> 00:39:47,130 India's aggressive evictions and deported deportations. 333 00:39:47,130 --> 00:39:55,440 And there's a long post-colonial history of deportations, but we need to reckon with the entire movement. 334 00:39:55,440 --> 00:40:05,570 You have to push many. Many peasantry who came to settle in the centre back into Pakistan and later in Bangladesh. 335 00:40:05,570 --> 00:40:07,510 Yet. 336 00:40:07,510 --> 00:40:18,520 Attempts to decipher citizens from suspect did not generate the intended outcome of slotting London night identities and notions of loss across the 337 00:40:18,520 --> 00:40:30,380 riverine islands that have witnessed a long history of raids continue to unfold through the surveillance of unauthorised Bangladeshis in the South. 338 00:40:30,380 --> 00:40:37,430 The imposition of judicial bodies to police service from photos and detentions and 339 00:40:37,430 --> 00:40:44,070 now digital surveillance of night cameras and drones generates Panopto picture. 340 00:40:44,070 --> 00:40:52,560 The Indian state has a plethora of identity cards, property papers and more recently, biometrics to prove citizenship. 341 00:40:52,560 --> 00:40:57,960 But rather than research questions of national identity end up further confusing. 342 00:40:57,960 --> 00:41:03,270 These suspicions shape the politics of membership and belonging, 343 00:41:03,270 --> 00:41:12,150 rather than precisely determining the legal threshold of either Indian citizenship or Bangladeshi migrant illegality. 344 00:41:12,150 --> 00:41:23,440 Laws encourage vigilance, suspicion within and out of intimate spaces and family, friends and neighbours. 345 00:41:23,440 --> 00:41:31,030 The policing and judicial systems of modern states presuppose suspicion in ways that continually foreground 346 00:41:31,030 --> 00:41:39,700 uncertainties and ambiguities suspicion becomes a device to decipher the boundaries of citizens by harassing people, 347 00:41:39,700 --> 00:41:44,730 extorting money, manipulating papers and settling school. 348 00:41:44,730 --> 00:41:54,300 In a the label, Bangladeshi Malawians ridicules and dispossessed the speaker in the name of Indian citizenship. 349 00:41:54,300 --> 00:42:01,770 It polarises society by stoking fears of being swamped by undocumented migrants. 350 00:42:01,770 --> 00:42:04,521 Thank you.