Who Can Be A Citizen?

The Parliament nod to CAB has Assam and Tripura in a fiery churn, as questions are raised about secularism and the final goal for which this is a canny prelude

- Anupam Bordoloi

A line stretches out from Assam and wraps itself around India, like a new Tropic of Cancer or an invisible Radcliffe Line, but changing meaning along its path. To understand it, one must go back to its place of origin. On December 11, 2019, as the Rajya Sabha passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, Assam was being convulsed by a monumental surge of anger. In its history, marked by 600 years of uninterrupted Ahom reign, Badan Barphukan is one of the most reviled men, his name associated with what’s considered the highest treason—in 1817, he invited the Burmese army to help him capture the throne. This led to the fall of the Ahom empire and capture of Assam by the British. Since then, the word ‘Badan’ has become synonymous with ‘traitor’ in Assamese. Cut back to December 2019. Protests had erupted across the state—huge masses of people on streets, smoke billowing out of burning tyres, curfew, the army on standby, and a Kashmir-like internet lockdown, albeit temporary. Among the crowd, denouncing the contentious bill, using the innocuous-sounding shorthand CAB, many are identifying present-day ‘Badans’—politicians seen as having sacrificed the state’s interests at the altar of Hindutva politics. Heading the list are leaders who once led the six-year-long movement against what later gained currency as “illegal migration” (or “illegal infiltration”), especially from Bangladesh.