State power and identification schemes in Rakhine 81 Nadu. In some rural areas of Burma, the chettias had amassed as much as 25% of the land from debt recovery in the 1930s, as Burma struggled with the impact of the 1929 Great Depression and the collapse of global rice prices (The Riot Inquiry Committee 1939). As such Indian economic migration into Burma was often construed as the ‘Indian Peril’ within the early independence movement (Zarni and Brinham 2017). After the coup of 1962, as the myths of Burma as a bounded and stable state that pre-existed British colonialism was mobilised, notions of ‘the Indian Peril’ as a threat to Burma’s sovereignty were reworked within state discourses. Rohingya, as a long-standing community in the border areas of Rakhine, were wrongly subsumed with these perceptions of the threat of colonial-era migrations on Burmese sovereignty (ibid.). This section has considered the identification and categorisation system as Britain attempted to assert authority and administrative and economic control over India and Burma. It has established some of the legacies of the categories and the tiered and hierarchical ID systems implemented in the colonial era. The following section builds on this and explores the significance of registration and IDs in Burma’s attempts to forge an independent and sovereign state from the ruins of colonial rule and WWII. Burma’s struggle for independence and the registration of foreigners In the 1920s and 1930s, an independence movement in Burma emerged out of the Buddhist Sangha and the student movements in Rangoon. This nationalist movement grew in momentum, with increasing rebellions amongst both the urban and rural working classes, such as the Hsaya San rebellion and the port and prison rebellions in Rangoon (Government of Burma 1931; The Riot Inquiry Committee 1939; Than Tun 2012). The rising consciousness around both labour organising and nationalism sometimes pitted migrant Indian and Burmese groups against one another, leading to demands regarding the curbing of migration from elsewhere in British India and the registration of Indian labour (Mohan 1955). For example, the port uprising on 1930 was triggered by Burmese labourers crossing the Indian picket lines (The Riot Inquiry Committee 1939). It was estimated that net Indian immigration to Burma was only approximately 10,000 per year between 1918 and 1938. Despite this decrease in immigration levels to Burma post-WWI, anti-Indian sentiments grew based on increased land ownership by Indians and their dominance of key sectors of the economy, coupled with the economic hardships resulting from the Great Depression (The Riot Inquiry Committee 1939). By the 1930s, the press in Burma and some sections of the Thakin33 independence movement were harnessing popular suspicions of undocumented Indian populations to mobilise the urban and rural working classes towards the purpose of building the independence movement. Along with the call for internal borders came demands to better register and document labourers and other classes of Indians (The Riot Inquiry Committee 1939; Mohan 1955). The