| Summary/Abstract |
This paper reveals the racialisation of India’s post-colonial citizenship regime by following the history of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Assam’s NRC shows how political elites at both the subnational and national level have excluded minority populations through multivalent racialised nationalist imaginations. I show how racialisation is an important analytic to understand how ethnic, linguistic and religious groups are essentialised in relation to one another, and I contend that citizenship is embedded within these historical and social processes. I conclude that challenging the NRC must go beyond critiquing the process as a bureaucratic nightmare to contend with borders that entrench exclusionary ideas of citizenship towards imagining emancipatory futures.
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