Shikha Nehra

SHIKHA NEHRA, then a graduate student at Stanford University, Stanford, California, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “The (im)possibility of Being an Indian: Muslim Political Belonging in Assam,” supervised by Dr. Thomas B. Hansen. During the one year of fieldwork, the ethnographic and archival research centered on understanding how various Muslim communities in Assam, construe, perform, and embody “being Assamese” amidst the looming threat to their citizenship. In 2019, the amendment to citizenship laws confirms that India’s Hindu nationalist government has laid the foundation toward making it a Hindu homeland by offering a pathway to citizenship to only non-Muslim persecuted minorities. Assam is the only Indian state where the groundwork for implementing these prejudicial laws has been completed by creating a verified list of citizens fraught with discriminatory logics. While across the world undocumented immigrants are being identified, detained, and deported, Muslim communities in Assam are being perceived as “illegal immigrants” despite being legal citizens.