Search Results

Some 91 leaders, both original inhabitants and immigrants, were interviewed using a standard questionnaire over a period of nine months in 1969. There were clear differences between village-based leaders and those representing immigrant groups. The gulf between the two kinds of leaders resulted from a colonial policy of granting political access to village representatives and their Rural Committee, which continued in a context that was industrial and much changed from the immediate post-war world when the system of access to government had been created. The gulf between the two populations suggested a need for political change. The ability to mobilize both groups and cooperate for political action was marked by a dispute and its resolution when changes were made to ferry schedules from Hong Kong to Tsuen Wan.

Tsuen Wan offered an appropriate, although politically challenging, research site to social scientists interested in the social effects of economic transformation. The process of refining their methods and specific locations took some months, during which the authors explored the town and its surroundings, studied district office records, and learned about the complexities of land ownership in this industrial town in the New Territories. Elizabeth focused primarily on one village, studying the effects of industrialization on families and the demographic transition as well as the survival of lineages, while Graham focused on the adaptation of immigrants through the formation of associations and questions of leadership overall.

This chapter traces the institutional, juridical, and documentary practices associated with the preparation of the NRC in Assam. It maps the debates on the NRC in the political domain, the arduous contests over legal delineation of categories such as ‘original inhabitants’ and ‘married migrated women’ in the Gauhati High Court and the Supreme Court of India, and the specific cases in which these contests played out. The citizenship amendment act of 2003 and the rules framed under it gave the Central government the responsibility to establish and maintain a National Register of Indian Citizens and issue national identity cards. This required the government to carry out ‘house-to-house enumeration’ and collect particulars of individuals and families, including their citizenship status. Making an exception to this procedure, the NRC in Assam was prepared by inviting applications from all residents with particulars relating to each family and individual, including their citizenship status, which was based on NRC 1951, and the electoral rolls up to the midnight of 24 March 1971. By tracing the pedigree of Indian citizenship to an Assamese legacy, the citizenship act opened up the possibility of a hyphenated citizenship for Assam, hitherto alien to the legal vocabulary of citizenship in India. In an inversion of the relationship between documents and citizenship, the evidentiary paradigm invoked in the preparation of the NRC in Assam listed legacy documents that would under specified conditions become proof of citizenship.