2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) that had historically been united for at least the better part of two centuries. 17 In doing so, well-settled patterns of migration between and within provinces were now imbued with a deep political significance. Wafer-thin majorities often (but not always) determined the future of districts or their subdivisions, tehsils. Even after the actual boundary was drawn, paranoia around minority populations persisted. In the border areas of Bengal, the Punjab and Assam in the 1940s and 1950s, a sudden ‘influx’, or even the continued existence of minority populations, started to be perceived as a security threat in both dominions. 18 Necessarily, the fixed ‘territorialisation’ that Partition entailed in both nascent states catapulted questions around national belonging and citizenship to the fore of national consciousness. This, I argue, was significantly different than earlier ‘divisions’, such as British Burma’s separation from India in 1937, or even India’s fraught relationship with Ceylon. As Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov demonstrate, Partition as the ‘simultaneous division and devolution of power’ 19 ‘[to] regulate … conflict’ 20 should be distinguished from earlier territorial separations for administrative or political convenience. 21 The contemporaneity of political division and wide-scale migration meant that legislators in India and Pakistan viewed questions around national minority status very differently from concerns, say, around ethnic Indians in Ceylon and Burma. At Partition, the question of minority citizenship had not been adequately explored. Most available evidence, including the quotation with which this paper opens, suggests that votaries of Pakistan neither believed in the possibility or efficacy of complete population transfers. 22 Even though Pakistan was conceived as a ‘Muslim Zion’, 23 there was little clarity on what this entailed — different votaries had different opinions on what role Islam would serve in the country after Independence. 24 In part, the mixed nature of the subcontinent’s population meant it would be impossible to create a state populated only with and by all of South 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 This was particularly acute in the Punjab and Bengal, where both provinces were divided by what was later called the Radcliffe Line. An account of how this played out in the Punjab was given in Lucy Payne, ‘Drawing the Indo–Pakistan Boundary in the Partition of India’ (DPhil Thesis, Yale University, 2002). A comparable account for Bengal was given in Willem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (Anthem Press 2005) 39. On both sides, the border did not always follow a Hindu–Muslim division. In both the Punjab (around Kasur and at Amritsar) and Bengal (Murshidabad–Rajshahi and around Khulna), there were places where Muslim-majority Tehsils or Thanas were given to India, which abutted on Hindu-majority Thanas now in Pakistan. As Part C of this paper shows, this would bedevil community relations in Assam after Independence. In 1950, Members of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan would argue that an ‘unintended by-product of the recent regrettable violence’ in Khulna, East Bengal, was that the district now had a Muslim majority: see Pakistan, Constituent Assembly Debates, 18 January 1950, vol IV, 91 (Dhirendra Nath Dutta). Laura Robson and Arie Dubnov (eds), Partitions: A Transnational History of 20th Century National Separation (Stanford University Press 2019) 4 citing Robert Schaeffer, Warpaths: The Politics of Partition (Hill and Wang 1990) 7. Robson and Dubnov (n 19) 4 citing Brendan O’Leary, ‘Analysing Partition: Definition, Classification and Explanation’ (2007) 26 Political Geography 886, 888. Robson and Dubnov (n 19). For a contentious and revisionist exception see Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India (Cambridge University Press 2014). Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion (Harvard University Press 2009). Faisal Devji, ‘The Minority as Political Form’ in Chakraborty et al (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Oxford University Press 2007) 85–96. See especially 91, wherein Devji shows us how Muslim nationality ‘was a thin, even negative ... juridical and temporary category’. 212