2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) a return to the Nehru–Liaquat Pact’s attempts to ‘close’ the Eastern border, albeit with a friendlier government in Dacca, rather than Islamabad. Over the 1980s, Pakistani Hindus stopped being significant in popular discourse in India. Instead, migration into India started to be seen from the perspective of illegal infiltration from Bangladesh in West Bengal and Assam. CONCLUSION: IS THE CAA A RETURN TO AN EARLIER PARADIGM? If, as I have argued, the prehistory of the CAA emerges in the practices that were formulated and emerged during the period between 1947–65, what explains their re-emergence now? The resurgence of Hindutva as a political project is one part of the answer. 156 Savarkar’s Hindutva (a term often translated as ‘Hinduness’) was both a religious and nationalistic term and had some commonality with the Indian nationalism of the late 19th Century. In this analysis, ‘Hindu’ was both a geographical and religious term used to denote ‘all those whose religion had grown out of the sacred soil of India’. 157 In this formulation, religions that were specifically excluded included Islam and Christianity, proselytising religions that a ‘tolerant’ and unresisting Hinduism had subverted over the last millennium. As Hindu majoritarianism took an explicitly political turn in the 1980s, ‘aggrandising, reifying and mythologising’ the Muslim threat to an (imagined and ahistorical) Hindu nation was imagined as integral to this process. 158 In Assam, agitations against Bengali Muslim migrants culminated in the Nellie massacre in 1983 and the slaughter of over 2,400 Bengali Muslims. 159 In response, the Central Government passed the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act 1983 which, recognising the dangers of assuming Bengali Muslims as foreigners, shifted the burden of proof onto the accuser rather than the accused, a departure from the Foreigners Act. 160 The Ram Janmabhumi movement, aimed at the destruction of a 16th Century mosque due to a belief that it was built on the birthplace of Rama, culminated in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, sparking off the worst communal riots since the 1960s. In Pakistan, the Zia-Ul-Haq regime led to another wave of Islamisation. New laws prescribed the death sentence for blasphemy, 161 brought in Sharia punishment for sexual offences 162 and started targeting religious minorities, particularly Ahmedis and Christians, but also Hindus. Muhammad Zia-Ul-Haq’s death in 1988 resulted in a restoration of democracy but did not reverse this process. Further west, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban prompted Afghanistan’s small Hindu and Sikh population to flee across the border. 156 While a detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this paper, see Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave (Princeton University Press 1998) 67–89. 157 ibid 79. 158 Richard Davis, ‘The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot’ in David Ludden (ed), Contesting the 159 160 161 162 Nation: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India (University of Pennsylvania 1996) 27–54, see especially 48. Sumanta Sen and Jagannath Dubhashi, ‘Assam: A State Ravaged’, India Today (1983) 23– 31. Sarbananda Sonowal v Union of India (2005) 5 SCC 665; Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act 1983 (India). Pakistani Penal Code (Pakistan) ss 295–295-C, 298–298-C. A set of ordinances, later enacted as legislation, on offences against property, adultery and fornication, called the Hudood ordinance. 232