State power and identification schemes in Rakhine 89 all other citizens of Burma. One elderly gentleman, for example, reminisced about independence day as follows: I studied at the Deoband University in India. When I heard that independence was coming, I hurried back to Maungdaw from university. I remember that day very clearly—I felt so happy and overjoyed when I attended the independence celebrations. So happy. I remember very clearly that the Rohingya became citizens of Burma at that time.67 Muslim independence leaders were frequently referred to as providing further evidence of equal citizenship. Abdul Razak68 and Raschid69 were most frequently mentioned. In such narratives, participants positioned themselves in relation to their broader religious rather than ethnic affiliations, within which Rohingya were part of a broader marginalised group. For example, ‘So, Abdul Razak asked Aung San, “where is our (Muslim) state?” Aung San replied, “Burma and Muslim are the same. We are one. There is no need to separate it.”’70 Participants often noted that Aung San and Abdul Razak, a Muslim member of his pre-independence cabinet, were killed in the same incident along with other members of the cabinet almost six months before independence. As such, inferences were often drawn between the joint fate of Aung San and Abdul Razak, and the later fate of Rohingya citizenship and ethnic recognition under Ne Win’s military rule. Narratives on Aung San/U Razak’s assassinations sometimes turned abruptly towards the later cleansing of Muslims and non-Buddhists from the armed forces and the country’s leadership.71 It was not until 1955 that ID documents were made mandatory and rolled out across the country, although the penetration of this scheme remained incomplete. These ID cards were called ‘National Registration Certificates’ (NRCs). They provided everyone with the same access to rights and in that respect gave a material form to the equalising aspects of citizenship that were described as a feature of post-WWII citizenships (see Marshall 1950). Issuing the same card to all was a calculated departure from the British system of classed and raced categorisation schemes. Many Rohingya were issued these NRCs from the 1950s onwards. It was the most frequently referred to proof of state recognition of their citizenship in fieldwork narratives. Although the cards were not officially proof of citizenship, they were de facto citizenship cards since anyone who was not a citizen was not entitled to it—instead noncitizens had to register and were issued FRCs. They were the only individual identity documents used within the country to access citizenship rights (European Network on Statelessness and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2019). As I will examine in the following chapter, it was this non-differentiated ID scheme that Rohingya research participants spoke about with nostalgia, loss, and longing—as a promise of peace that