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Citizenship, Nationality, Discord, Accord, and Assam

Vol. 58, Issue No. 23, 10 Jun, 2023
Prarthana Saikia

The appearance of the Assam Accord in the recent citizenship debates in India has a historical significance. Providing a critique of liberal citizenship, Assam’s journey shows how citizenship in a culturally diverse nation state like India evolved distinctively along with different identity questions. Assam, through a popular movement against “illegal” migrants, under the leadership of the educated (middle) class, asserted this identity question and tangled the Assamese nationality in the legal framework of Indian citizenship. The accord, which ended the protest, led to the first amendment of the Citizenship Act, 1955 in 1985, specifically addressing Assam’s case. Drawing from vernacular literature and archival records, this paper offers a fresh perspective on the political history of citizenship in Assam from pre-independence until the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985 and its immediate implementation.

What Can the Shifting Meaning of Refugees Tell Us about Nationhood, Belonging and Citizenship in India?

Vol. 57, Issue No. 38, 17 Sep, 2022
Noel George

Making Refugees in India by Ria Kapoor, Oxford University Press, 2021; pp 272, price not mentioned.

Anatomy of ‘Alt-Right’ Politics

Vol. 57, Issue No. 36, 03 Sep, 2022
S Irfan Habib

Ipsita Chatterjee has gone through an arduous task by documenting the painful and divisive politics of the United States

How to Become a Good Public Intellectual?

Vol. 57, Issue No. 14, 02 Apr, 2022
This essay is an attempt to ruminate on Romila Thapar’s writings on and as a public intellectual in today’s India. Edward Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures, titled ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ are taken together as a springboard for stimulating a conversation around Romila Thapar’s ideas on syndicated Hinduism, citizenship, nationalism, technocracy, dissent, and democracy. Rabindranath Tagore, D.D. Kosambi, A.K. Ramanujam, Amartya Sen, and Giorgio Agamben enter this conversation too, but on Thapar’s terms and with Said as the interlocutor. This essay asks a series of questions including ‘Who is a public intellectual?’, ‘What is her role in the society?’, ‘Why is Romila Thapar’s voice as a public intellectual so important?’, to argue that the public intellectual is a political being, a societal necessity, and the quintessential ‘anti-national’, all qualities exemplified in the life and works of Romila Thapar.

Dent in the Credibility of the Election Commission

Vol. 57, Issue No. 11, 12 Mar, 2022
Kavya Gupta, Neha Gupta

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Electoral Rolls and Aadhaar

Vol. 57, Issue No. 1, 01 Jan, 2022

By linking Aadhaar with electoral roll data, the constitutional essence of universal adult franchise is vitiated.

 

Navigating through Democracy

Vol. 56, Issue No. 31, 31 Jul, 2021
Satyajit Singh

Politics of the Poor: Negotiating Democracy in Contemporary India by Indrajit Roy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, New York, US, Melbourne, Australia; New Delhi and Singapore: 2018; pp xxi + 521, price not indicated.

Citizenship and Women’s Agency

Vol. 56, Issue No. 17, 24 Apr, 2021
Aardra Surendran

Gendered Citizenship: Understanding Gendered Violence in Democratic India by Natasha Behl, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019; pp xi + 172, price not indicated.

 

Reinventing the Commons

Vol. 56, Issue No. 8, 20 Feb, 2021
Shiv Visvanathan

The article makes a case for the reinvention of the commons in the social sciences. The individual treatment of rights reduces the collective to a mass of persons. Instead the commons acknowledges the inviolate place of humans as part of the cosmos. The marginal and dissenting imagination must invoke the poetry of nature as it engages the current politics and economics. The commons, in its diversity, seeks wisdom through a dialogue of knowledges, moving beyond traditional “publics,” and “time.”

 

Assam and the NRC

Vol. 55, Issue No. 39, 26 Sep, 2020
Akhil Ranjan Dutta

Deepankar Basu and Debarshi Das, in their article “Assam’s Politics and the NRC” (EPW, 1 February 2020), have raised a few critical issues regarding the fundamental flaws in the National Register of Citizens (NRC) updating process in Assam and emphasised building an alternative narrative.

Discussion: 'Linking Excesses in NRC Process to Assamese Xenophobia Is Unwarranted'

Vol. 55, Issue No. 9, 29 Feb, 2020
The false narrative of Assamese "xenophobia" stinks, and today, except the Hindutva camp, no mainstream Assamese organisation propagates racist or communal agenda in the state.

Revisiting the City–Capital Symbiosis

Vol. 54, Issue No. 50, 21 Dec, 2019
Apala Saha

The urban is related to the capital through the very notion of accumulation. What goes into building the urban, both materially and perceptively is the accumulated capital, which in turn gets both (re)produced and consumed within the same set-up. The present circulation and accumulation of global capital has resulted in the creation of First World spaces within Third World cities, heterotopias which complicate claims to urban “city”zenships. The emergence of capital-infected cities and heterotopias is explored along with differential claims to urban “city”zenship using an interface with the Indian city as a context.

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