Fighting Imagined Invasions with Administrative Violence been shaped throughout the years and has produced the statelessness of the largest ethnic minority on the island. 129 Finally, those individuals who did not fulfil the requirements for naturalisation under the National Regularisation Plan, becoming at risk of statelessness, have faced a potential risk of deportations since 2015. However, much has been done by both the UN and civil society to ensure that this does not happen. Indeed, those unregistered persons are not illegal migrants, but persons at risk of statelessness who continue to seek their Dominican nationality. 130 IV ASSAM As in Myanmar and the Dominican Republic, in the Assam region of north-eastern India, the process of nation-building was characterised by a rejection of the ‘other’, identified in this case as the Bengali Muslim and, to a lesser extent, Hindu Bengali communities. These groups, considered by their detractors to be mainly comprised of illegal migrants from Bangladesh (a high proportion of them have some degree of ancestry in the territory of the country), were henceforward marked as a target for denationalisation. The important cultural, religious and linguistic commonalities between those coming (or allegedly coming) from across the border, their descendants and the more ‘indigenous’ population of Assam made such an otherisation process highly problematic administratively. The government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’) has, since 2014, exacerbated such trends by proactively promoting an exclusive form of Hindu nationalism. 131 A Citizenship and Nativism in Assam and Wider India Citizenship in India has been deeply influenced by its colonial past and the partition of 1948. The British Empire sought to identify, classify and map all communities throughout its dominions (including present day India and Myanmar). It also made hierarchies of ethnic groups (according to how they evaluated their development). These colonial racist taxonomies continued in different forms in the postcolonial era and had an important influence on local politics and conflicts. 132 During and after independence, the objective of defining who is an Indian citizen has been marked by the tension between the two main religions (Hindus make up 80 per cent of the population and Muslims 14 per cent according to the 2011 Census of India) 133 and the territorial division, first with Pakistan in 1948 and later on, in 1971, the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. Underlying such tensions is a confrontation between (at least) two visions of the Indian nation: a secular and a nationalist one. The intensity of such opposition 129 Report on Citizenship Law (n 94) 16. 130 ‘“Personas Ilegales” Haitianos y Domínico-Haitianos en la República Dominicana’, Human Rights Watch (Web Page, 4 April 2002) <https://www.hrw.org/es/report/2002/04/04/personas-ilegales/haitianos-y-dominicohaitianos-en-la-republica-dominicana>. 131 Nitasha Kaul, ‘Rise of the Political Right in India: Hindutva-Development Mix, Modi Myth, and Dualities’ (2017) 20(4) Journal of Labor and Society 523. 132 Nel Vandekerckhove ‘“We Are Sons of this Soil”’ (2009) 41(4) Critical Asian Studies 523, 528. 133 See ‘2011 Census Data’ Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India (Web Page, 2011) <https://censusindia.gov.in/2011-common/censusdata2011.html>. 213