‘Untrustworthy and Unbelievable’ 2 Post-Colonial Era and the Development of the Legal Regime The Partition of the subcontinent created nearly 12,000,000 refugees without having a proper law in place to resettle them.!°° Since the Partition was based on religious difference, it escalated tensions between the two new nations. !°! The year 1950 saw the genesis of the Jmmigrant (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950 (Immigrant Act’), which created a vague category of immigrants who ordinarily reside outside of India, who came into Assam and whose stay was ‘detrimental to the interests of the general public of India’.'°” This was seen as a clear attempt to drive out Muslims from certain districts of Assam. In the wake of such expulsion, and Partition-related violence, the Nehru-Liaqat Ali Agreement was formulated in 1950, which, among others, gave minority migrants the right to freedom of movement and entrenched ‘protection in transit’.!°° Thus, those expelled were legally allowed to return. The turmoil of the Partition era was the impetus behind the creation of the first National Register of Citizens in 1951.1! This was a secret document generated from the Census, outlining the names of households comprising Indian nationals. It was not publicly available and was prepared by the census enumerators.!°° There was no space for objections to be filed in the case of exclusions; indeed, most people did not even know whether their names were included. This document identified those eligible to vote in the upcoming elections. !°° The ‘50s and ‘60s were also the era of the Bongal Kheda (Chase Bengalis) movement, which aimed to oust Bengali residents of the state, culminating in the displacement of nearly half a million Bengalis from the Brahmaputra Valley. '°’ The Bengali community thus continued to be the target of resentment in the Assamese discourse. In 1971, the war for the creation of Bangladesh led to the flow of a massive refugee population into the state.'°’ This set the stage for the events of the Assam Agitation. In 1978, India’s highest electoral authority, the Chief Electoral Commissioner, cautioned against the inclusion of foreign nationals in the electoral rolls, issuing ominous warnings about the large-scale takeover of the population by foreigners. 1° The six-year long Assam Agitation, which broke out in 1979, was fuelled by these sentiments. That year, protests were sparked over an alleged inclusion of the 100 101 102 103 104 105° 106 107 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, ‘A Rite of Passage: The Partition of History and the Dawn of Pakistan’ (1999) 1(1) /nterventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 183, 185. Sanjib Baruah, ‘The Partition’s Long Shadow: The Ambiguities of Citizenship in Assam, India’ (2009) 13(6) Citizenship Studies 593, 596, 601. Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, Act No 10 of 1950, s 2 (India). Agreement between the Governments of India and Pakistan Regarding Security and Rights of Minorities (Nehru—Liaquat Agreement), India—Pakistan, 1 India BTA 243 (signed and entered into force 8 April 1950). Tpsita Chakravarty, ‘Why Did Assam Prepare the 1951 NRC, Which Has Become a Touchstone for Citizenship Today?’, Scroll.in (online, 27 July 2019) <https://scroll.in/article/93 1879/why-did-assam-prepare-the- 195 1-nrc-which-has-become-atouchstone-for-citizenship-today>. Anil Roychoudhury, ‘National Register of Citizens, 1951’ (1981) 16(8) Economic and Political Weekly 267, 267. Regina Menachery Paulose, “A New Dawn? Statelessness and Assam’ (2019) 7(1) Groningen Journal of International Law 99, 99. Subir Bhaumik ‘Challenges Ahead’ in Samir Kumar Das (ed), Blisters on their Feet: Tales of Internally Displaced Persons in India’s North East (SAGE Publications 2008) 298, 303. 108 Murshid (n 94) 593. 109 Baruah (n 99) 599. 247