They will welcome everyone. Welcome to the first of the modern South Asian studies seminars at the University of Oxford.
My name is Danica Amata. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme,
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.
Made me sort of senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Western Sydney.
She's an environmental and social cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia.
Many of you might have seen her very, very exciting recent granule book Actually Jungle Passports, Fences,
Mobility and Citizenship of the Northeast India-Bangladesh border that has
been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press just earlier this year.
I believe Dr Seward is going to be speaking from this book.
And the title of a dog today is borders and identities. Who is a Bangladeshi in a song?
So this could not be a more sort of contemporary sort of topic at this point.
Just a couple of points on housekeeping, Dr Seuss will speak for about 40 minutes, and after that, we'll have a Q&A.
Please either you can write your question in the Q&A box or in the or you could just raise
your hand and we'll handle what the sort of the mike do you to ask your question after that?
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.
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.
So we going to put this up on our podcast website subsequent to the dog.
So OK with that, without further ado, over to your Maleny.
Thank you so much for being here and thank you for being willing to speak to us at like midnight your time.
We're really excited to have you here, and we're really excited to have you actually beginning the niceties for us.
Good evening, everyone, thank you for your very kind introduction and your invitation.
It's really an honour to be presenting my work to all of you.
Today, I'm speaking to you from the lens of the Arab nation in New South Wales.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.
These lands have never been seised, and they never will.
I'm going to speak to you about borders and identities, and my talk today is titled who the Bangladesh team is.
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
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.
The frequent stopping of the overcrowded buses by Indian security forces ensured that
the usual return journey to this far flung border town took another four hours.
The troops collected passengers asking them to produce identity cards,
suspecting them to be either unauthorised from the Vichy migrants or political dissidents in the border town.
Most expressed gratitude for travellers visiting India.
Announcing the end of Indian territory even before visitors could enter the town's bureaucratic chief,
the English was at a short distance from the much deeper.
Inside the enclave of foreigners tribunals, X1 and X2, two of the tribunals adjudicating the bodies of Indian citizenship and Bangladeshi migrants,
illegality in assault from the Narrow Corridors Tribunal explained situated on the ground floor.
Family members who accompanied the petitioners could be inside the trial chamber.
They could also see police escorting handcuffed men into the narrow landing behind the tribunals that led to the district prison.
All the mundane bureaucratic allotments had ensured the tribunal's proximity to the prison.
This kind of handcuffed prisoner widows who had been summoned to the tribunal even more nervous.
Judicial trials aim to deport Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived and resettled
in Assam without authorisation after the legal cut-off date of 21st March 1971.
The Soviets conducted by a specially constituted border police until since 2015,
the updating of the National Register for Citizens have set this process into motion.
The police scrutinised new names on the electoral register of the new arrivals, especially in districts of concern that border Bangladesh.
Once the constables submit a report to the Tribunals Tribunal, someone the accused will appeal the documents for citizenship.
They arrived with their lawyers and submit petitions to perform Indian citizenship through people with parentage,
education residents and property documents. While state prosecutors, the original document scrutinise them and interrogate the suspects.
When the identity papers finally reached the judge, he publicly scrutinised the scene once the trial concludes,
the judge sits alone in this chamber reviewing the paperwork and the testimonies
before finally deciding the terms on which Indian citizenship can be affected.
As I started observing and noting the judicial proceedings in the two story house,
the committee the tribunal takes one and explore the borders between Indian citizens and unauthorised one is constant.
Sometimes silence defendants and the summons suspect mysteriously did not turn up.
Neither police interrogation nor illegal settlements from the tribunals could have been impel people to attend.
They're going to elaborate on how what the commotions and silences generate
doubt about people's relationships to places and people identities in the south.
Let me tell you a little bit about the specific history and politics that guide these trials and
then make the concerns of Indian citizenship even more shadowy in the state there has been.
Now, as you know, Indian sources estimate that over 20 million Bangladeshis suspected to have resettled in India without official documentation,
of which six million are said to reside in a cell.
Now this, you know, there's no there's no scientific basis for this kind of investigation now.
Although both India and Bangladesh consider migration of 25th March 1971 without official authorisation to be illegal.
Neither diplomacy nor the implementation of a legal cut-off date has resulted the issuance of divided household controls legal migration.
Well, legally, as we know, citizenship and gender and Indian citizenship in particular is defined by exclusions,
and Obama tries states that the legal locus of the migrant outsider has been indispensable to the crossing of the Indian system.
The different configurations of migrants and refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh have informed
the ideological premises and the institutional manifestations of Indian citizenship in India.
Muslims are suspected to be perennially immigrants, non-citizens and outsiders.
New Zealand giants have shown how over the years,
Indian citizenship also came to be ascribed with qualifications that entail constitutional classifications as well as exceptions.
These exceptions, she argues,
operates in the sphere of the political sphere and closely follows the religious difference between between Hindus and Muslims in India.
In December 2019, the long shadow of religious forced lines of Indian citizenship was further reinforced to the citizenship amendment.
Obviously, this will put Indian citizenship the Hindu six games first,
even Christians who had legally migrated to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, or on or before 30 first before 2014.
This legislation, as we know, has led to widespread fear that with one broad stroke,
the government machinery puts many Muslims of very interesting consistency.
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,
who has argued that migrant illegality operates in a space for her relations
rather than in a precise distinction between the legal and illegal migration.
We have shown how ambiguity is defined, the life flows of migrant labourers and what it's equally difficult for migrants,
employers or law enforcers to implement the classification of the nation's.
And many nation states, especially Panopto, once this complex ruling family is explained through the logic of migrant protection,
political membership and citizenship remains fuzzy as unauthorised migrants easily procure citizenship documents.
Now in India, the procurement of identity mediates this in-between space.
Now, those who occupy these zones of elusiveness are, however,
embedded in a constant struggle for legitimacy and claims for political membership in the
absence of official policies to regulate legal migration between India and Bangladesh.
India's security centric discourse and electoral politics have linked undocumented
Bangladeshi migration with threats of infiltration and Islamic terrorism.
Such claims are fraught with uncertainties.
Indian political parties continue to vacillate between enabling Bangladeshi immigrants to fraudulently acquire
identity documents to work in Indian elections and demanding speedy deportation of the Muslim illegal immigrants.
Noting that this the main concern surrounding unauthorised Bangladeshi migration relates to the long standing history
of the planet and conflicts over ethno linguistic ethno linguistic identity and precisely for these reasons,
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.
For those familiar with the, you know, the shifting wetlands,
the landscapes that today are divided between parts of Bangladesh and some in northeast India,
you may recall that these wetlands were settled by Buddhist administrators,
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,
and who laboriously reclaimed this land and cultivated silk produce food and whose production was absolutely essential in Yiddish.
Because remember, the plantation economy relied on these migrants.
They were not plantation plantation labourers, but Bengali Muslim migrants of Bengali origin were the primary food producers.
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,
you know, food producers of Muslim Muslim food producers of Bengali origin from Eastern Bengal came to Albany,
came to be seen as either, you know, helpless parents who needed things recovery or,
as you know, foot soldiers who would take over some land budgeting.
And you know, the anxieties surrounding landlords questions of language or Bengali words.
Evacuees continued through the post-production period when the plan became a state in the newly independent India,
and what was then Eastern Bengal became the territory of East Pakistan.
And starting in the 1960s,
there was a political discourse of infiltration from Bangladesh that led Azam to develop to demand the construction of a border fence.
And in 1964, you know, a special law was enacted and mobile courts were set up next to police stations.
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.
You know, from 1979 to 1985 that a large anti-foreigner anti Bangladeshi agitation occurred in a known as big as our movement.
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.
Now, the on Assam Students Union of the US, whose members had led the movement,
could demanded that the names of all unauthorised Bangladeshi foreigners could be deleted from the electoral rolls.
And you know, at this point in time, they were very unsatisfied with the low rate of deportations of the IMDb's tribunals,
and they said that the Foreigners Tribunals Order, which drew from the Foreigners Act of 1946,
which was passed just after World War Two, you know, under its control.
It demanded the complete control of foreigners to be far more stringent and productive and.
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
litigation that the Supreme Court of India held that large scale Bangladeshi immigration threatened will the fate,
the professor and the rest of India in extending the meaning of external aggression to include economic aggression.
And in 2016, several numbers turn around at the Bharatiya Janata Party to form the state government.
Now, three decades after the Assam movement, the rise of Hindu nationalist politics has affected the political field by further sharpening ethnic,
linguistic and religious differences and hatred towards undocumented Bangladeshi.
Now, in 2015, under the BJP led government in New Delhi, the then started updating the National Register for Citizens,
which aimed at detecting unauthorised Bangladeshi and in the process.
In 2015 included 1.9 million people from the citizens list, and in this process,
it rendered large sections of the Muslim population, especially lowland in Lower Assam stateless.
Now, scholars such as Honjo, Bora-Bora and others.
Initially suggested that, you know, in 2015, the National Register of Citizens peaceful for legal and political avenues,
approval to resolve contentious issues of autonomy and social justice that shaped political mobilisation in the form since the mid-20th century.
In contrast,
Mora suggests that the Indian Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 reaffirmed India's colonial relationship with dissent from the rest of India,
demonstrating a clear disregard for the political assertion of refugees and indigenous peoples.
Now, the Saudis opposition to India's Citizenship Amendment Act emphasises the importance of Hindu Bengali refugees from Bangladesh,
some of whom were also excluded from the National Register for Citizens would destabilise the demographic, language and culture.
Now, today, both religion and ethnicity framed public debate on Indian citizen ship in Islamic religion,
which for a very long time was on the backburner and the Senate has now been brought to the forefront.
Political parties, civil society groups and the public at large have mobilised these categories
to provoke demands for inclusion and exclusion of certain groups of people.
It's all it's fluid boundaries with Bangladesh, as well as its complex boundaries with India and contemporary electoral politics generally
bureaucratic practises that specifically drive people into foreigners tribunals.
The Police Service verifiable forms, judicial deliberations and the finality of court orders that seek to identify illegal boundary
issues and deport them manufactured sufficient in ways that unsettles familial and familial ones.
In a sense, as the borders of legality and the legality of transplanted into the judicial domain,
police service and judicial trials generate and perpetrate bills by leaving unclassified the contentious issues of land laws and identity.
The judicial processes makes suspicion rather than legal and procedural certainty fundamental to manifest Indian citizenship in the South.
And now I'm going to take you to little foreigners tribunals X1 and X2 and where I was sitting,
conducting participant observation and various Border Police walks in and out of the offices.
Keeping interrogation reports on the desks of the tribunals should allow for trouble
when they were the custodians of the most important documents of the Tribunal.
The Registrar of Records that contain the dates for the court hearings.
The loading then the district still would set into motion the judicial proceedings that would decide the fate of 19 different suspects online.
Call me whose location was on the first floor of the building and will handle the first model number of cases.
The first method blue is still always open for to police reports.
These entries were constantly interrupted by people who gathered around the table for an allotment of hearing booths,
thus attended to the case once she intentionally ignored the people who gathered around till she maintained a cautious distance from her colleague,
keeping her to widowhood and the location of service rooms, and will keep a secret less.
Being engaged in clinical trials comprised interrogation reports.
If there is good summons and petitions submitted by both, the assemblies are accused of being illegally arrested in foreigners.
The order sheets that covered each case and chronicle the summons hearings in.
The petitioners. The petition was draughted by lawyers and copies of identity documents that were subsequently added.
Meet these friends! The petitions were standardised, mostly typed in English.
Without exception, the petitioners submitted that they could, neither, he nor write, had not received.
The notices from the police requested more time to procure documents.
No proof of Indian citizenship rested on being able to fulfil a range of identity papers in a tourist property paper citizens registration paper,
but marriage and school leaving certificates.
Writing, filing forms and the creation of its files was central to adjudicating the borders of citizenship in X one,
and still they were far more than repetitive and routine bureaucratic acts and practises that makes the
political the bureaucratic actions and paper documents that state agents and people provide a client to submit,
classified, manage and retrieve or recall the sensuality of state machinery and their influence
on democratic functioning and practises in generating complex paper economies.
These not only support state actions, but are themselves constitutive of the state.
As medical matter emphasises official papers and interviews that come into being for bureaucratic purposes,
the issue of youth are both uncertain and violent and yet have life giving properties a sense of dual indeterminacy shapes,
identity documents and enormous flaws and conflicting forces that produce the
legality of identity documents and the thought that all of these documents.
Kelly reminds us how to be linked to people who mediate their political subjectivity, official documents and science.
As Matthew Hoh has stated, move between local governments and population in ways that shape the force of politics,
as well as that of development and project, now what remains very critical is to be able to invoke Immortals Advocate to freeze.
There's not so much what they can do about rules and procedures, but what they reveal about people's relationships to these rules.
The petitioner constantly interrupted another looks and pleaded for more time to
procure identity documents when lawyers urged her to provide a hearing date.
Thus, put on an expression of self-importance.
He took longer to draw the columns and draws on distance, stretching out her hand to retrieve the small green diary.
She opened it and shook her head, so I stopped them from the trial chamber, regularly interrupted her dance and performances in the tribunal.
The necklace that I sent to the.
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,
the final in the Thornaby Tribunal X-1 had someone given to the court on the suspicion
that she was a dubious member based reporter who was illegally residing in the South.
Thus becomes a heavy case to the judge. Bigelow's petition was detailed.
She stated that she'd been married for 10 years, who was a local politician.
She had relocated from her village to Aspen's village with Bangladesh.
I spoke with bigger machine needed for the judge, for someone who took the courtroom.
She emphasised the police harassment and delayed and delays had disrupted her life for several years.
During this period, she traversed several times to her father's village to retrieve her school, leaving certificates.
He also conveyed that the label Bangladeshi.
And Broken Hill family had brought the family into disrepute and impaired her position as a local politicians both.
Rumours about Meghan being in the lead in Bolivia,
she had reached the village school in which her two sons studied while her eldest son, who attended secondary school in New York.
His friends don't let. His mother was a Bangladeshi foreigner.
The younger son was more curious. He asked her, Why are you being called a Bangladeshi?
Are you really from Bangladesh? What does that country look like?
Will we be sent to rubbish? Please, will you take me there?
Like the insults that her native to southeast, her younger son's persistent village influence curiosity anguished father.
Now begins trial actually animated versus case final. And this is we're writing about land documents in Islamabad.
Matthew Hoh makes a compelling point about reading the Sun as a complex graphic John as artefacts whose histories are repeatedly inscribed them.
Then lines are confronted with event like quality, not broken.
Not only does this attribution define the role that finds play and the unique graphic artefacts,
but it also demonstrates their relationship to people space and time,
eliminating the finest possible material properties in the Indian context of the book.
That draws a similar analogy for grounding fires as objects that retain a life of their
own larger than the people who act on them as soon as they have made an appearance.
The papers came nice to the performances of Indian citizenship, transcending their prior containment in as aspects in the films.
In the trial, Shamima Begum faced the judge and the prosecutor brought her high school education
and her identity as the wife of a local politician gave her enormous confidence.
He answered all the questions that the prosecutor asked her.
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.
The state prosecutor theatrically bit his tongue in embarrassment.
The silence in which Begum's identity documents were retrieved from the plastic folder
verified had reflected the consensus that her case was one of police misidentification.
Now, I'm like big blue ribbon of modest means with few or no identity papers, and it's fast paced, aggressive cross examination.
The frail Nihar baby was completely oblivious that the police had identified her the village
teacher after seeing a notice pasted in English on the walls of the Village Primary School.
Someone. When her name was announced, Vivi entered the courtroom,
wiping the face with a green handkerchief exhausted from fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.
It slowly grabbed the arm of the plastic chair by the door with her bony hands.
She made an attempt at once felonious to go.
Typekit glared at her from under his glasses. In the absence of the state prosecutor who was late, the judge asked BP to present.
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.
It was only during his testimony to the court that the state prosecutor launched into the trial room,
profusely apologising to the judge holding his hands that baby theatrically, he bowed in an obvious display of respect.
He requested that does it matter? She she should forgive him for the question.
He was obliged to us with this apology. He heard a torrent of questions and body Bibi's witness to compensate for his own.
And, you know, his only two rival. Now, it was completely theatrical during his cross-examination of BP.
You know, he confused her, the legal questioning was very aggressive and at the end of that cross-examination,
theatrically and loudly announced You need to the you've come to India after the March 5th,
1971 you have entered illegally and you're a Bangladeshi,
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.
Now, it is not surprising that so many of these trials should follow completely opposite trajectories because of their socioeconomic distinctions,
their differing political affiliations, their unequal access to identity papers.
You know what would to be given Bibi's appearances before the court and the paediatrics that accompanied the court trial?
The Ngubeni papers and performances reinforce one another.
The final official paper of the judgement, this alleged affair with Bibi, said the judge.
Instead of taking note of the state prosecutor, Patrick took note of Bibi statements about her father's compulsions to constantly migrate,
able to seek work and her relocation to her husband's health.
Upon marriage, he recorded that she submitted her father and husband electoral documents.
The judgement stated that although the state prosecutor doubted whether Bibi was the daughter of the father and the wife of her husband,
he was unable to provide any evidence to the contrary.
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,
Bibi's begins neatly Typekit judgement, which had only one minor handwritten correction.
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.
By contrast, the typewritten judgements of Bibi's case only asserted that she was not a foreigner in the final version.
Handwritten correction stated that Bibi was an Indian citizen under Indian citizenship.
Now this was before the two years since. No, because and Bibi's troubles,
religious be further testified to the gender traditions of Indian and fishermen from the Border Police routinely
accuse Muslim women of being Bernardeschi migrants who marry the Indian men to fervently acquire Indian citizenship.
The hunt for illegal Bangladeshi Muslim women exposes the contradictory use of official documents such as this.
But they've given Bibi's judgements, also established the legality of their resistance in their marriages,
their Indian citizenship on the basis of paternity by prevented Muslim women from voting and promoting in elections for extended periods.
Police actions such as this ensure that their names for struggle to resolve their actions and show up the women became infantile.
Political subjects and their marital relationships and mobility also came to be de-legitimize
for an extended period as they waited for the tribunals to reinstate them as legal subjects.
Now, the tribunals were usually places where there was constant commotion,
but occasionally the din died down when they identified suspects who the tribunal had failed to appeal.
Silence replaced the frenzied draughting of petitions and trials, as well as the clamour to avoid the empty offices and trial chambers,
which enabled the regional assistance and feelings to take long enough to know who wanted attention.
The hunt for the elusive Bangladeshi foreigner, in a sense,
and the desperation to look at the state's invisible population, the people who went missing.
So of those filed cases of lifting people under the level of UTI, the acronym for entrees treatable.
A lot of those who failed to arrive at the tribunal were Mumtaz Bakam and Asma Bibi,
suspected to be Bangladeshi women against whom the police had accused of illegal residents in the South.
Both of them mysteriously disappeared in October.
Bibi's case when the police and any rental verification.
They located a young man with her husband's name, but his identity did not match the documentary details.
The police report provided other untraceable cases in the Bush family would come to resettle in a village near multivalent.
The police identified the family as a Bangladeshi Hindu migrant family who had arrived in Assam in nineteen ninety two,
and the investigation report stated that they had fled Bangladesh on account of religious persecution
against Hindu minorities during retaliation for widespread communal violence against Muslims in India,
which was prompted by the demolition of biodiversity.
Now, what I found particularly interesting about the unfixable pieces was the FAMs Border Police constable,
who call investigated zero one two after the esoteric manner in which he classified his report.
Now, like other students, he had the daunting task of identifying suspects.
You know, in a large jurisdiction of many. His field reports in particular were extremely well,
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.
The homes of the suspected Bangladeshi arriving at exactly 1:00 in the afternoon were not.
He employed various interrogation techniques and gathered intelligence about the suspects from their neighbour.
By 3:00 in the afternoon, the expedition was complete.
Shipbuilder that is believed to be from left for the police station at 6:00 in the evening, 012 police constable ended his.
Well, the six months that he investigated a suspected Bangladeshi farmer in the village,
012 reported travelling three times to the same homes and beating several suspects belonging to the same family.
Now, when people don't, you know, people who go missing, when people go missing and they don't arrive at the tribunals,
it full for senior delegations of the Afghan Border Police to arrive at the tribunals.
Now, their seniority demanded that they travel by jeeps with flashing red lights and sirens.
Although the offices of the assembled, the police were just around the corner from the tribunal during such meetings
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,
nodding vigorously at the issues that the police commissioner listed in every meeting and quickly took a.
Quickly took out delicate porcelain teacups from a cupboard, efficiently beauty and handed a to everyone,
including the stenographer, who was busy typing the proceedings during these occasions.
This genographic quickly got busy forgetting his high-cost identity, which prevented him on other days from accessing to someone the.
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.
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
legal operation that could be reopened if the police provided the tribunal with more information.
However, such information was not forthcoming.
Now, despite this inability to deport those deemed to be a legal obligation to report the police
constables continually heaped on such generous people said goodbye to her electoral politics.
The time was driven by illegal Bangladeshis.
And this is where, you know, secret sources continue to leap out from the pages of police interrogation reports they're anonymously making them.
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
and unaffordable populations wedded to the dominant political imagination that illegal Bangladeshis in the Senate were elusive and criminal subjects.
Sometimes, suspects who lacked identity papers such as Bibi stormed into Indian citizens at other times.
Even when petitioners produced identity papers and certifications to prove their Indian citizenship claims, they were kept in limbo.
So what are the rights of citizens and suspects who have been made stateless in the film?
How do marital and property rights, including the value addition of neighbour?
And here I'm talking about, you know, oral history of labour, of reclaiming land for food production, fit into citizenship rights.
You know,
some people with documentary evidence of Indian citizenship have been rendered stateless on the grounds that their paper identities are fraudulent,
sometimes just on the basis that it is easy to procure documents.
Others who is not that they are Indian citizens do not have the necessary papers to prove their claims to land as property,
the marital relationships and by extension, their claims to the membership of the nation itself.
Instead of resolving issues on unauthorised migration and Latinos,
the real presence of Bangladeshis in law and life accentuates the sounds a dire predicament
as a perennially repositioned internal and external frontier of Indian democracy.
Even judgements at the Tribunal do not necessarily obliterate conspiracy and suspicion.
For the Muslim parents of Bengali origin, the partition of the Indian subcontinent.
India's aggressive evictions and deported deportations.
And there's a long post-colonial history of deportations, but we need to reckon with the entire movement.
You have to push many. Many peasantry who came to settle in the centre back into Pakistan and later in Bangladesh.
Yet.
Attempts to decipher citizens from suspect did not generate the intended outcome of slotting London night identities and notions of loss across the
riverine islands that have witnessed a long history of raids continue to unfold through the surveillance of unauthorised Bangladeshis in the South.
The imposition of judicial bodies to police service from photos and detentions and
now digital surveillance of night cameras and drones generates Panopto picture.
The Indian state has a plethora of identity cards, property papers and more recently, biometrics to prove citizenship.
But rather than research questions of national identity end up further confusing.
These suspicions shape the politics of membership and belonging,
rather than precisely determining the legal threshold of either Indian citizenship or Bangladeshi migrant illegality.
Laws encourage vigilance, suspicion within and out of intimate spaces and family, friends and neighbours.
The policing and judicial systems of modern states presuppose suspicion in ways that continually foreground
uncertainties and ambiguities suspicion becomes a device to decipher the boundaries of citizens by harassing people,
extorting money, manipulating papers and settling school.
In a the label, Bangladeshi Malawians ridicules and dispossessed the speaker in the name of Indian citizenship.
It polarises society by stoking fears of being swamped by undocumented migrants.
Thank you.