 Hello, welcome everyone and thank you for being with us for this evening's event. On behalf of everyone that's speaking Tiger NewsClick, I thank you all and thank you especially as partners to NewsClick for making this possible despite the extreme and terrible attention of the regime at the moment. The same regime which has given us the trinity of the CAA, NRC, NPR which is the subject of the anthology. This land is mine. I am not of this land, the writings on the CAA, NRC and the manufacturer of statelessness. It is a book of immense importance, especially for everyone who has any commitment to India as a democracy, indeed to India as a humane civilization. It is a book on this trinity of law, act and procedure that is designed to destroy or at least to alter fundamentally the foundations of the Indian Democratic Republic. Many people say not just alter fundamentally but also irreversibly, but I don't say that only because times pass, things change and times of extreme events, acts and ideologies pass relatively sooner and when we are out of this darkness it will be important to rebuild our democracy and until then it is important to resist what is happening and to challenge it. But neither the resistance nor the rebuilding later is going to be possible unless we truly understand the nature of what is being done, which is why this book is so significant. As a lay reader and as a citizen I hadn't found any book or document before this which explained everything, the different aspects of what is happening with such scholarship insight and also passionate and informed scholarly opinion. So very grateful to Harsh and Afsharan to everyone at the Center for Equity Studies for choosing us as the publishers for this book and thank you also to all the contributors whose work is included in the anthology. Some of them are on the panel, grateful to them Geeta, Abdul, Yasmin, Nizam and of course Harsh and Bosin and grateful particularly to Mr. Rajmohan Gandhi, one of our foremost thinkers and defenders of democracy and justice for accepting the invitation to give the keynote address. Thanks very much Mr. Gandhi and if I could now request you to deliver the keynote to us. Thank you Ravi. Thank you very much. This new book edited by Harsh Mandir and Afsharan Singh is of pressing importance. More than two dozen analysts, lawyers, poets, activists address the question of citizenship, focus on the CAA and the citizens register and bring out the traumas of the many in Assam who have faced detention, threats of deportation and other hardships over the citizenship question. These traumas are the result of a deliberate drive led by the current government in Delhi to change the meaning of the word Indian. Throughout the 20th century, the world and most Indians took for granted the principle that all Indians have equal rights. You could say that this principle was written in large unmistakable letters by our constitution makers. Today, however, an asterisk, clear yet concealed, stands next to that sacred promise. If you follow the asterisk to the footnote, you will find this comment. Indian equals Hindu. And you will find this additional explanation. If Muslims and Christians wish to be accepted as Indians, they must prove that their ancestors for several generations were Indian citizens. For most Indians, providing proof that their ancestors for several generations were Indian citizens would be almost impossible and crushingly expensive. Moreover, such a requirement makes Indian nationality a matter of the bloodline, a question of one's race. It makes nationality racist. There was a time where nationality and race indeed went together in much of the world. Being British or Japanese or German or Italian was a matter of race, of genes. Not in India, however. And Indian was an Indian. We were not required to prove our genealogy even during British rule. With time, countries like Britain and the US changed. This could be Brits, even if their ancestors were from Barbados or Jamaica or Silhett or Punjab, Gujarat or wherever. Americans were Americans, even if both parents and all four grandparents were born and raised thousands of miles away. Today in countries including the US and Canada, countries to which Indians have moved in vast numbers, discrimination on grounds of race, religion or national origin is illegal and is punished. In India, however, more than 70 years after freedom, discrimination has been legally introduced. Now the mother of the current American vice president was born in India. The vice president calls herself Kamala Harris. We may like to call her Kamala, but her preference should be respected. Kamala Harris can become the president of the United States. No one asked her to prove that her parents and grandparents were born in the US. India equals Hindu is the doctrine that the CIA and the NRC were designed to enthrone, no matter the suffering caused to large numbers of human beings, no matter the violation caused to the Indian constitution or the injury caused to India's reputation. This was a doctrine that millions of Indians opposed. I too was among them and took part in rallies against the CIA and the NRC in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi. Prove your citizenship was a demand from people annoyed that Muslims were sharing India's space. It was born from hate and from frustration. From frustration that partition did not make India Muslim free. Partition came in 1947, but the great bulk of India's leaders and people had never accepted the two-nation theory. For them, India belonged equally to all its people. In 1909, 40 years before our constitution enshrined equality, this is what Gandhi had written in Hind Swaraj. It's a longish passage, but it's worth absorbing. Quote, India cannot cease to be one nation because people belonging to different religions live in it. In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals, but those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another's religion. If Hindus believe that India should be people only by Hindus, they are living in dreamland. The Hindus, the Muslims, the Parsees, the Christians who have made India their country are our fellow countrymen and they will have to live in unity if only for their own interest. He continues, In no part of the world are one nationality and one religion synonymous, terms, nor has it ever been so in India. Hindus flourished under Muslim sovereigns and Muslims under the Hindu. Each party recognized that mutual fighting was suicidal, that neither party would abandon its religion by force of arms. Both parties, therefore, decided to live in peace. He continues, is the God of the Muslim different from the God of the Hindu? There are deadly proverbs as between the followers of Shiva and those of Vishnu, yet nobody suggests that these two do not belong to the same nation. It is said that the Vedic religion is different from Jainism, but the followers of the respective faiths are not different nations. Now, the government of India is celebrating 75 years of India's independence in special ways. One of these special ways is the distinctive poster, presenting the heroes of the freedom movement. Now, there is no woman on this poster. There is no Muslim on it, no Sarajeen Naidu, no Aruna Asafali, no Abdul Ghaffar Khan, never mind his 30 years in prison for liberty, no Abdul Kalam Azad, never mind his life-long struggle, powerful voice, courageous pen. Anyone who can portray India's freedom movement from 1857 to 1947 without showing a single Muslim face, without showing a single female face, is obviously mastered the signs and the art of exclusion and elimination. In 1939, Ghaffar Khan, or Bacha Khan, invited Gandhi to the town of Abbottabad in what then was the Northwest Frontier Problems. Now it is Pakistan's Khaibar-Bakhtundwok Problems. Some will remember that Abbottabad was where Osama bin Laden was found with Americans and killed. Now, here is a sentence from what Gandhi said in Abbottabad in July 1939, quote, If you dissect my heart, you will find that the prayer and spiritual striving for the attainment of Hindu-Muslim unity goes on there unceasingly, all the 24 hours, without even a moment's interruption, whether I am awake or asleep, unquote. If we ask who today is striving for equality for all and harmony among all, striving unceasingly, all the 24 hours, without even a moment's interruption, whether awake or asleep, one name will at once occur to us, Harsh Mandar. We are lucky in this hour to have a friend, inspirer and mentor like Harsh and lucky also to have as our comrades, Navsharan Singh and the analysts, lawyers, poets and activists contributing to this book. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Raj Mohan Gandhi for those really inspiring words and for pointing out the stakes of what all our struggles are really about. My name is Mohan. I will be moderating the rest of the session. Just to start with a few words on this rather remarkable volume. In many ways, it is an unprecedented collection that elegantly brings together many different aspects of the question of citizenship in contemporary India. It has powerful and poignant poetry and narrative. It has philosophical reflections on citizenship, Indian history of citizenship and its constitutional ethos, nuanced legal analyses of deeply troubling policies that threaten to dismantle this ethos and most stunningly, insurgent prose of resistance and dreams of better future. I must start with my heartfelt congratulations to the whole team, all the contributors and most of all, of course, the editors, Harsh Mandar and Navsharan Singh who were assisted by Varna Balakrishnan and Mehika Chanchani. I will move on by inviting Dr. Navsharan Singh who is a co-editor of this volume. Navsharan is an intellectual of wide interests and a writer of repute. Important work includes gender and violence, impunity and justice and of course most recently as this book reflects questions of citizenship and exclusion. So over to you, Navsharan, please go ahead. Thank you, Mohsin. Thank you. And let me begin by thanking Dr. Gandhi for very illuminating remarks in the beginning. My heartfelt thanks also to Speaking Tigers and NewsClick who also wanted to thank Harsh on behalf of Harsh and IR2 researchers, Varna Balakrishnan and Mehika Chanchani without whose help we would not have been able to produce this volume. I would just like to take two, three minutes to share with everyone that this book is a result of Karwai Mohabbat's multiple journeys to the troubled land of Assam and then standing with the movement that sprang after this EA was passed. Karwai Mohabbat began as a civil society initiative to the varying silence of the majority community on increasing incidents of lynchings in the name of cow across the country. And we began as Karwai Mohabbat, our journey from Assam in September 2017. That was the first journey Karwai Mohabbat undertook to meet with the families of Muslim men killed by violent Hindutva mobs in the name of cow. Karwai Mohabbat returned to Assam in 2018 and then in 2019 more than once. And now to meet with communities which were braving the stigma of being illegal Guzpakia's illegal migrants or termites as they were called by none other than the home minister of the country. We met with Mia community, we met with debauteurs, we met with families of those who committed suicides not being able to endure the trauma of proving their citizenship to India through the list of documents which this process required. We met the families of men and women who ended their lives because they were dejected and they thought they were fighting a losing battle against the mighty state bureaucracy and the prospects of being sent to the detention centers and of becoming stateless people. The Indian state we could see was constructing a notion of citizenship that was both majoritarian and patriarchal to the core and we were sitting at the risk of creating a large pool of disenfranchised citizens women and men against whom the system and the processes were stacked. So in following our multiple journeys in collaboration with other civil society initiatives in the country Karwai Mohabbath organized a two-day people's tribunal in September 19 to understand the process which was creating this hierarchies of citizenship. So we wanted to hear from the experts if the NRC process was in conformity with the Constitution, we wanted to explore threadbare the implications if the NRC is replicated in the rest of the country and the human costs and if they could be avoided. Many authors who are contributors to this volume were also present at the tribunal as expert people giving testimonies as members of jury who were hearing all the testimonies and the discussion and who were in the end able to say that the tribunal and all the other engagement that NRC is inhuman and immoral and this is what we wanted to document and that's why in my mind that's why this volume. So the contributors included are not only legal experts they're also barefoot researchers from ASAM who collected testimonies who collected what people were going through in this process. We bring together poets, we bring together the work of activists, human rights defenders and women's rights defenders and scholars. So I just want to thank once again each one of our contributors and our publishers and our partners and have looking forward to the discussion that follows. Thank you. Thank you so much Narshan and congratulations again for this remarkable collaborative project. I would like to now move on to our friend Ashraful for a poetry recitation. A very quick introduction for Ashraful. I first discovered Ashraful through his stunningly powerful, angry yet poignant poetry. Since then Ashraful has continued on his path of giving a voice to the most vulnerable people in ASAM. He's currently the youngest member of ASAM's legislative assembly, represents the constituency of Chenga and of course continues his work as an activist, as a poet, as an artist. Ashraful please go ahead. Thank you everyone. This is Ashraful Hussain from ASAM. Earlier I worked for a community in the field of citizenship. Now it has become an MLA of ASAM legislative assembly. I'm going to recite my poem, I'm a woman, I'm a devotee. That means my mother is a devotee. I would like to share two lines. This is an incident of two years back. Me and my other colleague book for four numbers of police cases. Because of this poetry, yet today I stand with my words and if you shall all carry in my standing favor of citizenship victim. Now I'm going to recite my poetry. I'm a man, I'm a devotee. I'm a man, a devotee. I'm a devotee. Thank you so much Ashraful. I'm sure all of you will read the book if you've not gone through it already and one of the most striking features of the book for me while I was going through it is how it brings together, wells together the breadth of the prose, the analysis, but also the poetry of such longing and courage and Ashraful's poem is one remarkable example of that. I also wanted to, you know, over the next few minutes while I'm moderating the session, I would also like to draw out some of these beautiful poems from the book. One of them is Rena Sultan's deeply touching poem. It's called My Mother and it captures the ache of exclusion and really brings out the stakes of citizenship and you'll know what she means by her mother when I start reading the poem. Just a few sentences from her book before I move on to the panel. This is Rena Sultan as my mother. I was dropped on your lap, my mother, just as my father, grandfather, great grandfather and yet you detest me, my mother, for who I am. Yes, I was dropped on your lap as a cursed Mia, my mother. You can't trust me because I have somehow grown this beard, somehow slipped into a lungi. I'm tired, tired of introducing myself to you. I bear all your insults and still shout, mother, I'm yours. Open your eyes once, mother, open your lips. Tell these sons of the earth that we are all brothers. That's Rena Sultan as my mother. On that note, I would like us to move on to our wonderful panelists. We have an excellent panel for all of us who will be reflecting on the various themes and aspects of this volume. I will introduce each one of them and then request them to join. First is Dr. Harsh Mandir. Harsh is of course one of the co-editors of this volume. Harsh is a humanist activist who has had a long dedicated career, first as an IS officer and then as a researcher, writer and teacher to the values of solidarity and justice. Professor Yasmeen Saikir is a well-known historian who has written extensively on the histories, identities and memories of the communities of South Asia, especially in India's northeast and Bengal. Her work both inside and outside the academy really reflects her deep compassion towards the issues of Assam from where she belongs. Ms. Geeta Hariharan is a well-regarded author of an impressive breadth. Perhaps like many of you, I discovered her through her fiction writing, her remarkable novel, The Thousand Faces of Night and then being a law student, I also discovered her through a fight for gender justice and gender equality. Mr. Abdul Kalam Azad is a human rights researcher, an ethnographer and chronicler of Assam's vulnerable communities, a remarkable voice of the MIA community. His essays in numerous languages have appeared nationally and internationally and I dare say he is at the forefront of making visible the tragedies that are currently unfolding in Assam through his very nuanced and touching prose. And finally, Mr. Misam Pasha is an advocate in the Supreme Court. He has emerged as an important voice both inside and outside the court to explain the intricacies and complexities of these citizenship policies but also become a voice of critique regarding their legal character and consequences on Indian constitution and Indian citizenship and Indian constitutional identity. Welcome to all of you for being here. I would also request Navsharan to join us. I have already introduced her to participate in the conversation. So let me start with asking Yasmin to share her thoughts, particularly around the question of the histories and memories of belonging in Assam because Assam is such a central part of this volume. Particularly, I would be curious to know from you what your assessment of the politicization of citizenship over a period of time is and how do you understand the present moment in that larger history of belonging? You're on mute Yasmin. I got it. Thank you. I want to thank everybody today assembled here, particularly Harsh Mandirji and Navsharan Singh, Professor Raj Mohan Gandhi, Mohsin and everybody else. It's an unusual moment actually to be talking about this book because this collective as I read it, I found it to be the most poignant and incisive and perhaps the most well researched digest that has been put together in this very evocative title called The Land is Mine, but I'm not of this land. I'm from here, but I'm not from here. And for me as an immigrant in America, this makes a lot of sense, this uncertainty, this belonging not belonging and who decides this. Personally, as I was reading this book as a historian of Assam and a historian of South Asia, I immediately thought this would be an excellent primary source for my students to engage with not just a question of NRC and citizenship in Assam and India, but generally citizenship as a problem worldwide as we are seeing huge transfers of people as refugees and becoming stateless with no end in sight. But more certainly, as Mohsin you pointed out, this book actually shows us the very tangled problem of how settled residents in Assam have been made into foreigners because they are Muslims and are Bangla speaking. For me, the narrative that emerged from this book from all the poetry and the first and the grounds, the legal discussions, the philosophical reflections, it is very dark and it shows a very dark time. And it's a very hard reading because tyranny that I see in front of me is comprehensively disabling. I suspect that most people in Assam do not know what is really going on in broad daylight in clear sight as I had not known many things until I read this book because they do not care to know or have been lulled into disbelief by lies heaped on lies. They're living like outsiders, the land they claim to be theirs. The horror describing this book is intimate and repugnant, yet I'm glad I had the opportunity to read and think about it because it dispels the gorgon-like effect of the dehumanizing politics in Assam. I know my bafflement and fear is miniscule compared to the everyday condition of living in a state of vulnerability and precarity that the Bangla speaking me has experienced. The trenchant voice of concern expressed by various authors in this digest makes us think not only of the politics of identity, but it shows us that those denied citizenship are simultaneously denied their humanity. Assam that I knew when I was growing up there was not a cruel place. There were divisions between communities and groups, particularly after the Assam vegetation when I was a high school student, but when the Assam that I read about in this compendium is a foreign place to me. I cannot recognize the excess of inhumanity yet we have to look at the face of violence, call it by its name and recover our humanity as fellow humans. For plexities and indulgence we cannot afford is the most important lesson I learned from reading this compendium. What impressed me is that even when discussing dry legal issues the vex question of citizenship, the thorny political ideologies, Harsh Mandarji and Navsharan Singh who edited this volume never lost sight of the human face of the people who are marked for extinction. It is not a small act, but a major effort that eloquently demonstrates the spirit of concern, camaraderie and the courage to speak truth to power and stand with the vulnerable and the disenfranchised. There are a couple of things I would learn to learn a little more about. I'm interested in the middle voice such as the jailers and the human responses when they're dealing with the detainees, the relationships the people develop in the detention camps and perhaps some more about the courage and fortitude of the Mia families. Another voice that I would also would have liked to hear and would like to learn more about from the panelists particularly Harsh Mandarji and Navsharan Singh who have put it together is the local voice of history of Assam. How do Muslims of Assam deal with this matter? How do they see themselves becoming outsiders? The story of course is told in legal terms. The complexity of the Assamese people, particularly the Assamese Muslims is missing. What do the Ahamya Muslims have to say about the denial of citizenship to Mia Muslims? The Ahamya Muslims are small perhaps even an insignificant group if we go by numbers, no more than 5% of the 35% Muslims of Assam. This group has played a decisive role in Assam's politics in the colonial and early post-colonial period. Despite the invisibility of this group in current day politics, they are a critical community in Assam. How is this group responding and accommodating to the insecurities created by the NRC and the car? Exploring their fears and concerns can offer a fruitful site to question the lame assurances made by the Prime Minister and Home Minister that genuine Indians should not harbor any fear. Even though the majority of the Assamese Muslims were included in the NRC as citizens, I know members of this community are extremely anxious and concerned about the future. Will the children and grandchildren have unequivocal rights and safety of life and livelihood in Assam? Indeed, the Ahamya Muslims had little or no interaction with the Mia community socially. They encountered one and other only during election campaigns. However, I have to also add here that the Mia community never created an affinity with the Ahamya Muslims because they were not seen as powerful enough. The Mia communities tried to cultivate relationship with the upper class and upper class Hindu communities in Assam in the hope they will not be harangued and discriminated. Today, that equation is not working. The gap between the Ahamya Muslims and Mias has widened as the BJP government seduces the Ahamya Muslim with public recognition and benefits as an indigenous group. The Assamese Hindus have no love lost for the Mias. While I admire the legal suggestion for redress offered in this book, I do not believe it will happen. I know an economic solution such as giving Mias work permit is suggested by others not included in this volume. This is highly problematic because without citizenship, the Mias will be relegated to a permanent state of uncertainty and non belonging in Assam. As a historian of Assam and an Assamese, I understand the conditions in Assam today are abnormal and we need a different kind of imagination to make each individual aware and responsible of the choices they make. We have the historical resource of Hanmi Holy that the Assamese take great pride in. As a working system, Hanmi Holy was created by the Ahum kings to weave the multiple different communities went into a we group in Assam. The Mias did not experience this because it came to Assam during colonialism when Hanmi Holy was carefully dismantled by the colonial divide and rule policy. However, being a local resource, its revival is possible. The iconic Bhupan Hazarika invokes it in almost all his musical compositions, as well as well. It is evocatively articulated by a variety of writers like Sayed Abdul Malik, Imran Shah, Medini Chaudhry, Khoben Soikia and many others. Hanmi Holy is both good politics and a humane culture that weaves the Assamese of many hues into one community without one group dominating the composition. Hanmi Holy in the present has allowed the people communities to be recognized as an Adibasi group. The Sikhs have become Assamese Punjabis and the Marwaris Assamese Marwari. I have witnessed Hanmi Holy at work during the COVID lockdown last year in Assam when Mia boatmen and Assamese middlemen vendors agreed to support one another. These men recognized one another, however briefly, as fellow humans. These fugitive softening suggests possibilities that are beyond ideological obsession. Adaptability and inclusivity is a human virtue, requiring its own brand of courage. Indeed, the moral existence of the majority of the Assamese depends on invoking this courage of Hanmi Holy. We cannot look at oppression and the ideology of Hindutva whose political and social structure is to divide and eliminate groups of people in Assam to enlighten the Assamese. The capacity to be humane is in the culture of Assam which the Assamese can claim if they choose autonomy over civility and courage over fear of known and unknown outsiders. I hope your team and collective will explore such possibilities in your future publications. Thank you once again for letting me part of this panel. Thank you so much Yasmin and two things in particular I would like to point out in Yasmin's remarkable comments. One was the long history and the complexity of cultural diversity in the state which we should never forget and what she brings out from that is the historical and cultural resources of pluralism and solidarity which I hope we also get to talk about on this panel. One of the other things which Yasmin mentioned was what are the sort of the local voices, local experiences of exclusion? How do people deal with forms of exclusion and I think it'll be appropriate to bring Abdul into the discussion who of course is not only a very active member of the community but also an ethnographer with the keen academic eye. So may I invite you Abdul to reflect a bit about your own experiences and observations of what citizenship deprivation policies are leading to and how that is shaping the lives of ordinary people. Thank you Mohsin. Thank you for asking this, especially this personal experience but yeah I will try to bring in both history, my research inputs and my personal experience. So and also it's not only the you know the official contestation of citizenship, there are many other forms of contestation of citizenship so I will try to bring in like in one context. So the citizenship crisis in Assam is not just contesting someone's legal status, it actually contests the right to belong to this place where you know several generations of our ancestors have the lives have been vented. In one of the chapter of this book I have actually written how the NRC, the citizenship national register of citizens and other citizenship contestation mechanisms have weaponized our identity against ourselves. In Assam as Yasmin Baidu was saying that the MIA community, the MIA-Mosulmane term which is actually used as a derogatory term for several decades. Now we have reclaimed it, we are trying to rehumanize the term. Though the abuse using the term has substantially been minimized in the last few years, however we are still continue to be seen as others, aliens, subordinates and sometimes as less than human. We hardly official in the mainstream imagination of as a misidentity. We have been brought to this place through a series of violence events throughout the colonial and post-colonial history of Assam. After annexing Assam, British realized that without exploiting the natural resources their purpose of maximizing their profit was not possible. So they first brought the Adivasis from Central India to work in tea garden areas and then our ancestors to work in agricultural field to meet the growing demand of food. But the local upper caste, upper class, dominant groups, they failed the minds of common people with xenophobia and they kept this newly transferred Adivasis and Muslim peasants in the permanent category of others. As Yasmin Baidu was saying that British also played the divide and role policy to maintain this otherness by bringing dehumanizing terms and allocations like our people were land hungry, they were in a mission to invade Assam whereas it was their policy to bring Muslim peasants from other populated Bengal province to grow more food, to mitigate the situations like food riots in Assam. There are actually recorded histories of food riots in Assam. The divide which was created during that period only got cemented in post-colonial era. Our community was suspected, subjected to post-partition riots in 1950 is not recorded, not discussed widely. Draconian acts like Immigration Expulsion Act 1950 was used against our community. Several lakhs people were deported, forcefully deported to Pakistan using a scheme like PIP. So everything is this, I'm talking about this, you know, 1960s, 70s. We all know what happened after that. We know the Assam agitation, the Nellie, Chaukhua, Nagavanda and many other places of massacres and the state violence mechanisms like NRC, Rebooters, Border Police, Foreigner's Avenue, Detention Centers, Evictions and so on. But what I wanted to focus is another aspect of contestation of our belonging and citizenship that is our forefathers when they came to Assam from Bengal province in early 20th century. They tried everything to be good at terms with the local community. They believed that learning and respecting local norms and culture and being at peace with the local community was an obligatory part of their belief systems. They accepted Assamese as their official language, they learned and imbibed socio-cultural tenets of Assamese cultures like Bihau. So I somehow, a little bit disagreement with Yasmin, by the way, we also have very good, you know, in societal level, there were a transaction with Assamese Muslims as well. You know, we, our community member, they accustomed with many, you know, local food habits. And this was done, the thought was that this would help to minimize the violent attacks on our lives and properties. But our ancestors, our forefathers were wrong. Violence remained every day part of our lives throughout colonial and post-colonial history of Assam. The most important thing is that while trying to evade the violence, our forefathers had to hide some of our, you know, marker of our identities. For example, they didn't wear a lungi in the poem. You know, if you read the text, if you read the poems, you will find often these terms are coming up, lungi, tupi, daari. So these markers of identities were hidden from public space. The dialect you speak was, was somehow hidden from public forum. We don't speak our mere dialect in public forum. And we must understand that this practice is involuntary. This is to evade the violence. The public display of our difference of a marker of identities is, is, is not acceptable to the hegemonic, dominant and genophobic groups in Assam. As young, educated, and most importantly, being a true believer and practitioner of our constitutional values and ethos, we see this contestation, this contest, this social contestation, this, you know, unexpectedness of our, of our differences is akin to official contestation of our citizenship. Let me bring in one recent example where one of our MLAs, Sherman Ali Ahmed, he shared a photograph in his social media wearing a lungi and that created a huge controversy. Why? Because the, you know, that the hegemonic and dominant genophobic groups in, in, in our state, they cannot accept this marker of our identity. They, you know, they cannot accept our existence as we are. This is not acceptable to them. And this is the cultural basis of the official contestation of our citizenship. As Hannah and explained that citizenship is not just, you know, having the identity card, but it is our capacity and courage to show our differences in public spaces, which we are not being able to do. So today, as someone who is the target of the contestation mechanism of NRC, of the voter of, of reference cases, as someone who tried to understand the experience through the experience of my fellow community member, I believe that, I believe that some of the chapters in this book actually, actually give us the tools, the frames to and interrogate these aspects of citizenship contestation, contestation of our belonging. So thank you, thank you for publishing this, this book, especially the editors, Harsh sir, and, and Narshan ma'am, and also the publisher. And thank you most in by for giving me this opportunity. Thank you, Abdul. I may come back to you later with a couple of questions. I wanted to move on to Nizam. But before that, just wanted to invite Harsh, just for a couple of minutes to share some memories and reflections on the detention camps he visited, because that's another very important issue which Abdul talks about or talked about, but the volume also records that and Harsh's contribution to the volume also talks about that in detail. So just to give our audience a sense of some of your memories from the place and what we should keep in mind while thinking about the question of citizenship. Thank you, Mohsin. Yes, I'll just leap right in. See, I think the important thing that, you know, that once if people are unable to prove their citizenship by an extremely flawed process that we've talked about, what happens to you at the end of this? And that question, you know, in political rhetoric, you know, from our prime minister downwards, people will be basically packed off and deported. But the situation really is that they claim that they're not Bangladeshis and Bangladesh doesn't accept them. So how are you going to deport them? We are not even negotiating an extradition treaty with Bangladesh. Bangladesh is repeatedly, the government is assured this is an internal matter of India. So in that case, what will happen to people, you know, at the end of the NRC process and indeed, you know, with its reopening, what happens to people who will be ultimately deemed to be foreigners in this country, simply because of the flawed legal process. So the detention center is very, very critical because that is the image of and the symbol and for some people, the reality of what happens to you. These were places that very few of us from civil society knew what was happening there. As it happened, I was invited by the National Human Rights Commission to be their special monitor on minorities. And I insisted that my first mission will be to the detention centers in Assam. There's a great deal of problem, but I insisted. And that is how I entered these detention centers. In fact, I took along with me two members of this panel to assist me, Abdul Kalam and Mohsin Bhatt. And what we saw inside those detention centers, I will carry in my heart till the end of my life. I mean, these were hellish places. These were places where, you know, they're jails within jails. And jails in any case are, you know, but at least in a jail, you have some courtyard, you mix with other people. But here they are confined for all the years they are in a small space carved out of a prison. I mean, we had so 170 women, for instance, in a space just not larger than maybe most of our courtyards, where they've spent many years of their life. When they realized after a little while that I was somebody who they sounded sympathetic to them, they all bent down and started veering, you know, like in a mass morning that we saw. The situation, I mean, I could go on, I'll just very briefly say three or four things. One was that they kept in jail and in jails within jails, which goes against all international law. The families are separated. And so you have, you know, typical Bengali matriarchs, both Muslim and Hindu separated from their spouses, you know, suddenly overnight, but they can't even communicate with them. No one is able to, you know, the husband is somewhere in another detention center. Their children, if they're older than six are out probably, you know, in the community somewhere. And they just trapped there for years. The men are equally, you know, in isolation and depression. The third is that, and, you know, even what happens in a jail, you know, a convict still has work, has some recreation, none of that is available to them. There's no legal aid available to them, you know, to fight their cases, to get out. But I think most significantly, this detention was effectively, it was effectively indefinite because, you know, the Bangladesh is not going to accept them. They don't have legal aid to get out. They don't have the opportunity. And so effectively, the state was really locking up them, locking them up in these conditions for the rest of their lives. It was just unbelievably inhuman, apart from being unconstitutional and contrary to international law. Very briefly, I wrote a very strong report for the National Human Rights Commission, asked them to forward it to the government of India. Months passed, they refused to forward it. Finally, I said that if you don't forward it, then I'm going to design my position as special commissioner and make it public, which I did. I thought that the national outrage, it barely created a ripple, our acceptance of injustice, especially against those we see as the other is profound. And then finally, I decided to go in a petition to the Supreme Court, challenging what was patently illegal and unconstitutional, apart from being inhuman. We didn't get relief. The Supreme Court Chief Justice, Justice Gogoi, at some point in the hearing, said something as appalling as, why are there only 1,000 people there in the detention center? 50,000 and this created so much fear. So I decided that I would go in seeking his recusal because he was reflecting open bias. I said, you must recuse yourself from this hearing. I argued myself in the Supreme Court. It was in the end, he recused me from my petition. He removed me from the petition. But I made one point and that's where I'll end. I said that when we come to the highest court in this land, you're looking for justice, but true justice for me is always tempered with compassion. And what I found singularly missing in how you have dealt with this issue is the absence of compassion. But I think that this created enough pressure that ultimately he did pass orders allowing people to be released after three years in these detention centers in very large sureties, having to see the visit the police station every week and so on. But people have started emerging from there. And the grief of their devastated lives when we met the first people who were released again will stay with me for the rest of my life. Thanks Harsh for sharing that. Abdul talked about both official and unofficial contests over citizenship. And I wanted to pivot using that to spend some amount of time now talking about the official contest over citizenship because law is quite central as a mode of dispossessing people of their citizenship. And there's this remarkable poem in the volume by Chanmiah. It's called I don't know my name today. So just read out a few sentences, a few lines from it. Chanmiah says, I don't know my name today. Lost, it's lost in misspellings, taunts, jeers and the quagmire of your office papers, closets, cabinets. A few lines later he says, I have nothing now but an old lungi, a half ripe beard and a photocopied sheet of this 1966 voter's list with my grandfather's name burnt in it. And I think nothing more than this captures the nature of the legal process victimizing people who are being subjected to citizenship contestation processes. On that note, I would like Nizam to step in and share his thoughts about precisely what these legal processes are, his evaluation of them. And also perhaps reflect a bit about how they stand in the context of our constitutional values and constitutional norms. Thank you, Mohsin. I will begin by saying that before Yasmeen spoke, I had actually understood the title of this book very differently. Because when she spoke, she mentioned that, you know, this book with the title of which says that I acknowledge my relationship with this land, but this land doesn't acknowledge its relationship with me. That's not how I had originally read the title. What I thought the title meant was a philosophical question of how citizenship is viewed, which I feel is central to a lot of the emotions that ride on these questions. Because what I understood the title to mean was that citizenship, if you understand it as this land is mine, it's a question of my choice of having chosen this land versus citizenship if you understand it as I belong to this land or I do not belong to this land. You lose agency and you lose that choice. And there, because if we are citizens, then we belong to this land and we have a stake in who else belongs to this land. Versus if it's just my choice of I have chosen this land as my land and therefore I'm a citizen, then nobody else has a stake in it. So I originally thought that that was the philosophical question that the title of the book was referring to. I don't know if I'm right or wrong, but I have to confess that I learned about what the title of the book means or the fact that there is not only one interpretation to what it means only when this discussion started. But moving on from that, so law as an instrument and a player in all of this and the legal institutions, courts as instruments in this narrative, in this story, there is an article that by Gotham in this and where Gotham writes about Gotham Bhatia writes about the question of burden of proof and the judgment of the Supreme Court in Abdul Kudus. Now the question of burden of proof I feel is interesting because aside from Abdul Kudus and aside from that by discussion just on the question of burden, there's a human problem of burden that we have to look at and that problem is that in a country like India where there are a large number of homeless people, there are a large number of orphans, there are a large number of people who have escaped abuse and run away from home and we are talking primarily about a country like about a state like Assam which is which is flood prone. So we have a situation where there are a large number of people who every year when the Brahmaputra floods, lose all their livelihood and then start over again when the water recedes. So the fundamental premise of all of this is that for every person present within the borders of India, there is a loving family maintaining records and that I feel is what goes to the heart of how all of these laws really impact and affect the disenfranchising, the underprivileged and the marginalised more than it does anybody else because the moment that fundamental premise breaks down asking me to prove my connection to anybody automatically you'll realize the bias in it because if I am being asked to prove my relationship to a grandfather it means that my paternity cannot be in dispute. If I'm being asked to produce birth documents it means that I have always had access to parents who preserve those documents. So in a country like India where there are a large number of people who are dealing with the issues of life and livelihood and are not really able to you know are not educated enough are not maintaining records enough. So the question of burden of proof becomes important because if you find a person present in the territory of India under the current state of law you can ask them why don't you prove your citizenship while actually and this is something with the supreme court stuck down the Sarbanandha Subsonuva judgments that we criticize so much or we have now come to criticize so much doesn't get criticized enough otherwise is that it overturns the burden of proof because the illegal immigrants determination by tribunals order 1983 said that the burden will be on the states to prove that you are not a citizen and that is that is the beginning of the process of examination and prosecution but under the foreigner so that was struck down by the supreme court and the foreigners act was relied upon to say that no any person who is found and who is alleged to be a foreigner can be asked to prove that he or she is a citizen. Now that's deeply problematic in itself and that's the part of the law today because now the date of citizenship that we fixed was on 19th of July 1948 under the constitution and 24th March 1971 under section 6 of the citizenship act now even 17 1971 is now more is more than is more than 50 years ago and 1942 1948 of course 73 odd years so either the date that you fix should be such that you fix a date and on the next day you say okay from here on if you were present you are a citizen and I'm issuing you this card because you were present when I fixed the date but when you fail to do that exercise can 73 years later or in the case of 71 50 years later you say okay now you prove that you have a connection to somebody who was here on that date so burden of proof must be linked to when the exercise happened because when the determination of exercise of citizenship happens and say everybody is me everybody who is present in India I think issued a card why because we fixed a date and on the midnight of that day we found you here here's your card I can understand that 50 years later somebody's present you say okay prove your connection to somebody who had such a card but when on that day you did not undertake that exercise how can you today ask anybody walking on the streets of India to say that show your connection with an ancestor who was present in 1948 or 1971 and that's where like somebody mentioned it's it becomes a question of race I think Gita mentioned that it becomes a question of race and race is not what citizenship was supposed to be about but now it's about descent and which is why in my article I've really I've I've compared it to the Nazi laws the Nazi citizenship the Nuremberg laws 1935 which had exactly this that you had to prove your connection to us who quote unquote German ancestor and German was defined to be of somebody of pure Aryan blood and therefore it was only somebody who was Christian and not and excluded the people of Jewish blood but then it becomes about descent it becomes about bloodline and it becomes automatically then about race so we are we are first the first law the problem faces is that we are working on a on a backlog of 73 years in determining who this is freedom now the the second question here is the comparison with criminal law because the attitude the Supreme Court takes in Sarvandana Sarvandana Sonowal one and two and in Abdul Kudus is that legal migration is a great problem and it affects and in Sarvandana Sonowal they say it affects it's the compared to illegal migration otherwise they compare it they compare it to external aggression and they say that people coming in from across the border is like external aggression and so state can take measures accordingly and they strike down provisions of the law which which provide for due process saying that that is too much process for for dealing with someone who's an illegal migrant because they're not supposed to be here now compare that to the CRPC the criminal procedure code where you are dealing with criminals the one way of looking at it is that you're dealing with criminals why you're providing themselves for my due process you know why is there this right of hearing this presumption of innocence because you're dealing with criminals you're dealing with hardened criminals because the fact is that until you determine that they are guilty of an offense they are not criminals that's the fundamental premise there and that's where there's a deep flaw in all our citizenship laws because they and the attitude of the courts because they say they're dealing with this great problem of illegal migration and therefore we can't have so much due process but you're not dealing with illegal migrants you are dealing with citizens until you find that they are illegal migrants so we should we somehow don't seem to approach the question of citizenship with the same kind of kid gloves with which you approach criminal law that you have to begin by presuming you're dealing with an innocent person for a crime and begin by presuming you're dealing with a citizen until you prove otherwise so that's on burden of proof then on the role of the court now honorable home minister in his speech in the Rajasabha had said up chronology something and I think it was also in the election rally to the run up to the 2019 election he said up chronology something and as far as the Supreme Court is concerned like chronology is not understood because the order in which the Supreme Court looks at things and the order in which they take things seems to be really warped I feel that what happens if you are found to be an illegal migrant is the first question you should begin with when you deal with the question of migration of determination of illegal citizenship and what happens if you are found not to be in the NRC there's actually no clarity on that you know return is there going to be a detention center or a deportation Bangladesh will not accept you because most of these people were born in India because they are not able to make out a connection to an ancestor who came before 1971 therefore they are illegal but that doesn't mean they're not born in India that's no longer a question and I'll come back to that what I because there's what I call the download attribution of criminality as far as the citizenship laws are concerned but so there is no determination today on what happens to people who are left out of the NRC then there is no determination of questions which arose which are before the Supreme Court which are referred to larger benches on what is the basis on which the question of citizenship is to be determined like what is the date what is the cutoff date like for instance 24th March 1971 now that date is under challenge saying that for the rest of the country it's 19 July 1948 so can there be a separate date for Assam or is it unconstitutional because it's contrary to a date in the Constitution the Supreme Court is still to decide that question so today we are having an exercise or we have had an exercise in which we have spent hundreds of crawls in which there's been a lot of hard burn elections have been fought on that basis they've been polarization people have been 19 lakh people have been declared stateless today and the question of whether the date which they failed to meet is at all a legal requirement is something Supreme Court will determine hindsight some other time so in terms of chronology again should that not come before we start the exercise of having an NRC and here I'm proceeding entirely on the basis that we can have an NRC I mean that's I'm already on past that question that that I feel that you should start by saying everybody present today is a citizen and now we have you know going forward they can be a determination but fine I'm assuming they can be an NRC but then should not the first question can be to test the legality on the basis of which you're having that NRC can those dates be fixed for instance one of the questions that were referred to a larger bench of five judges in the reference order was what happens to people who have been who don't meet the 24th March 1971 cutoff but who've been present in India for 40 years that order of referral was made about nine years ago and therefore that 40-41 year comes in today it's 70 it's 50 years and so what happens to people who are not able to make that cutoff of 24th March 1971 but who have been in India for up to 50 years now 50 whether it's 50 or 45 so should those questions not be decided before we be going to be plunged into the exercise of having an NRC to determine whether or not you make that cutoff is that cutoff legal instead the Supreme Court has gone into this role of being the executive agency to the exclusion of all other agencies micromanaging the NRC process you know appointing officers determining their SPG protection and deploying CRPC and CISF for the exercise and so very very nuts and bolts executive decision that Supreme Court is taking but the judicial determination it's left for some other time and since I'm running out of time I'll just wrap up very quickly with I think we need to focus a little more on the human problem and the human consequence of the CAA not just on citizens but also on refugees what happens to somebody who is coming into India and when they find out at the border that if I say that I am a Muslim I may or may not be allowed entry I may or may not get visa if I get visa it be a short term be that may or may not be renewed and this will come up renewal every year and I'll have to manage to survive here for 11 years with no work permit and no right to purchase property no right to carry on business and then I'll be eligible to apply for citizenship versus if I just say I am not a Muslim if I whether any other religion I choose whether it's Christian Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism any other religion if I say I belong to that religion I get a long term visa immediately for me the citizenship track is five years I'm allowed to work I'm allowed to purchase property for business and for residence so when we when we pass all these fancy anti-conversion laws which say that you know any incentive to someone to change the religion is something which is contrary to the constitutional ethos assuming that it's we're only talking about people converted to Islam isn't this actually something which is valid or 25 aren't we giving an incentive to people coming into India to disclaim Islam so that they can actually get benefits of all of these things and they get citizenship in five years if you are a Hindu or an Afghan national at standing at our border today if he's Hindu get citizenship in India in five years of coming in versus 11 years for a Muslim is that not incentive to say I'm I'm not a Muslim so there are deep article 25 questions which are involved in the CA challenge itself which I which and that the hearing unfortunately has not come to pass and so I'll I'll leave without all of these thoughts which which honestly I still questions that we are dealing with I mean we don't have answers because Supreme Court really hasn't yet stepped up to the role of answering these questions for us thank you thank you Muslim thank you Nizam um finally I wanted to move on to Geeta uh Geeta one of the most impressive things about this volume is the the poetry and the beautiful narrative prose uh and also that there's a remarkable connection between poetry and slogans and music to forms of resistance both in our Sam obviously but also what we saw just a few months ago uh on on the streets across the country so I wanted you to reflect a bit about the language of resistance and poetry and maybe if we have time maybe you could also bring in the gender question because that is you know the interesting thing about the volume also is that women are victims of the process but they're also protagonist they're also insurgents in the process so maybe combining both of these things together for some reflections thank you uh yeah you're on mute yeah perhaps I should begin by saying that what this uh volume does for all of us is to remind us to not forget to not forget that this happened with the NRC in Assam that there was is stroke is a plan to extend the NRC to an old India NRC to couple it with the CAA and the NPR that is what we are being asked to remember as attention has diverted to the pandemic and and all the other problems that we're facing so that is one I do think that one of the most important things is for us to look at the human stories what are the problems I always think as as lovers of poetry as lovers of literature of music the literature of the streets that we always look at two screens one is what are the terrible things that have happened that continue to happen in detention centers people languishing people not rehabilitated if they have even been allowed to come out of the detention centers and so on so the book has some stories of very real people these are not statistics and perhaps the women and children are the prime examples of the fact that it's not just the obvious examples in the Assam context of of muslims or Bengali speakers so it's not just religious language but you have all kinds of malnourabilities in operation women of course you have transgenders you have migrant workers you have korkas and even the errors of bureaucracy including people who have worked as school teachers and been election officials but are not don't figure as analysis so some of those examples of real lives I think are worth visiting especially when it comes to women and children so obviously a lot of the there is an axis here so you have the poor more vulnerable so class is there there's religion so if you're married at an age where you don't have a voter's ID card you're too poor to have any other documentation such as property and so on and you shift home and all you can depend on is perhaps the a statement in affidavit from the grand panchayat to say that you are so-and-so's daughter and there are a million things can go wrong there maybe the man from the grand panchayat doesn't show up that day at the tribunal you have to go to the tribunal but you've got a little field where you have to work what do you do with your children how do you get there you don't have the money once you go there the the the sun is absolutely blistering hot what do you do some of those stories or your husband is picked up you know what happens to widows what happens to mothers in detention centers there are some stories we can never forget of a woman whose child was 14 days old when she was taken to the detention center the child is now four years old and has never seen the world so you have this variety of problems faced specifically by women there's a language problem you know you might go there you don't even know what this man is asking you so it is you know it would be easy to say it is Kafkaesque but these are real people these are our brothers and sisters these are our fellow citizens regardless of what the law says because there is a contract between every human being in this land and the government that's what the government is there for but you have this terrible terrible picture on the one hand of not only the huge waste of money financial costs but the human cost in terms of real lives what happens to families the complete breaking of lives if you have the mother in the detention center the father has committed suicide out of depression and what happens to the children you know all of us will agree that we have a responsibility towards the children of this country so a lot of them have to drop out of school they have to find some sort of work to support themselves so this is the picture on the one hand but I think it's I'm glad mostly came to me last because I think it's terribly terribly important to not just remember that people suffered people continue to suffer people continue to be afraid of being outcast because they're devotors people continue to be afraid throughout India that despite the example of a psalm that this might happen throughout India victimizing vulnerabilities of different sorts so there is that picture but there is also the amazing human picture of poetry music song slogan and I think you have to look at that both in terms of a psalm and a psalm as this example a little India diverse complex transacting continuously but also through specifically say if we take the example of Mia poetry what are the qualities of both Mia poetry as well as what we saw in 2019 and early 2020 before the pandemic on the streets throughout this country we saw poetry slogans music that asserted somebody's identity not in a way not in a xenophobic way not excluding others but saying I too am here whether it's with my lungi or my beard or you know I too am here and of course this kind of poetry this kind of poetry of the streets in people's language has a universal ancestry so you have the Mia poets looking at Bob Dylan's blowing in the wind they're looking at the the revolution will not be televised they're looking at of course Memo Darwish so there is Darwish saying write down I am an Arab and there is the Mia poet saying write down I'm a Mia and gloriously in 2019 you have somebody in Kerala writing down saying write down I'm a mapla so whether you know this is this is how poetry works this is how culture works there's a memory that we all own so I think that's really really important I just want to also say that we owe the Mia poets something all of us writers because for poets to annoy to frighten the authorities to such an extent that you have to have the police coming after you this is not something that poets and singers and novelists ever expect to happen to them so this is testimony of how powerful the poetry that these people who are writing from the bottom of their hearts who are writing about identity but not excluding others this is what they're doing so let me let me take it to those days of 2019 it's terribly important that we don't forget what the NRC did to Assam that we don't forget what it continues to do but we also don't forget the resistance that it inspired in Assam and then later on against the CA and the NPR and the NRC throughout India just look at some of the again the assertion but also the total resistance the new vocabulary where they are actually defined by saying I'm kagat nahi dikayi yeh so the ridiculousness the cruelty of reducing citizenship to paper of reducing the human relationship of belonging the humane relationship of rights within the place you live in to paper is taken on quite boldly with this sentence which became a kind of slogan a rallying cry there were certain words which made up of a vocabulary across languages you know Azadi you could hear the word Azadi I mean I say it like a 10 million but you could hear it said in a Malayalam fashion you could so what do you want freedom and then this big word was filled up with specific examples of what freedom might be I think also that you know we look at the the the bewildering problems that language differences cause on the one hand but you also have the beauty the riches of multilingualism so that you had you have music from other times vaulting over language language and centuries fairs as hum baking is suddenly people are singing now no donor in Canada hum and I'm performing in Tamil so that becomes something to bring people together which is the way in which diversity can be addressed similarly all the way from 19th century Italy you have Bella chow which women agricultural workers as they were transplanting rice they sang that later it became an anti-fascist song and now you're hearing it in every language in India so I want to say that we have a certain vocabulary which is current Covid has sent it a little underground this book and many other efforts that hopefully we can all initiate will bring those memories back so that we can say again that we have not forgotten that citizens are to be considered fellow human beings difference does not make for enmity that diversity must include difference thank you so much Gita for those powerful words I will unfortunately have to bring the panel to an end because we are completely out of time of course we need to have more of this conversation we'll do it offline and I hope all of you everybody who is watching this will also continue talking amongst each other because this really matters and I hope the the panelists have pointed out the the stakes of this issue and why we should really care about what's happening to citizenship in Assam in India and also as Gita pointed out the languages of resistance across the world I'll then wrap up the panel I'll invite Harsh to share some closing remarks and maybe also tell us while closing maybe some thoughts on the future what he thinks the resistance may look like and what all of us should do and how all of us can contribute to it thank you to all the panelists and thank you of course to all the people who are in the audience thank you Moussin thank you to all my friends in the panel in the few minutes that we have left let me just translate the last stanza first of Ashrafal's poem they say reign it in man no I won't reign it in in the name of my mother who died in a detention camp I swear that this voice in my throat will grow louder and someday rustle in the fools in your ears I swear sir I swear by my death mother you know I thank you for for this very very thoughtful very important conversation what we're seeing today is a very decisive moment in in a much older contestation that goes back at least a hundred years the time when Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa and took leadership of our freedom struggle in his leadership in the three decades of our freedom struggle there was a central idea not just about fighting British colonialism but about the country we would build after the British left and at the core of that idea was this would be a humane and inclusive country where it would it would not matter which god you worship or few worship no god it will not matter what language you speak what dress you wear in this context whether you have a a beard or a lungi or do not matter you would be in every respect an equal citizen and an equal human being with absolutely equal rights to be yourself and yet to belong equally we know that this idea was never accepted by the Hindu Mahasabha which is constituted a little over a hundred years ago by the RSS constituted in 1925 and by the Muslim League we saw partition as an outcome we saw a million lives lost and and we saw you know on the one hand our constitution put down this imagination into a set of promises and and our obligations of the state but also of the larger social contract but we have seen a continuous contestation of this the contestation in Assam was fueled by anxieties of indigenous communities about language culture and land but the contestation at the national level is really fueled by a different imagination for India in which there is unequal citizenship hierarchies of citizenship where particularly Muslims and Christians are second class citizens in this land and and in what we've seen in in Assam is really the manufacture of statelessness but also you know in the end probably of second class citizenship and and and and and this conversation is truly important not just for the people of of Assam but for every Indian and I believe every human being across the world how do we live with diversity how do we live with difference how do we respect and and celebrate our diversities while recognizing our essential humanity now just a word about resistance I think that we are privileged to have witnessed for a hundred days in this country the largest nonviolent uprising in independent India it was sparked off by the citizenship amendment law which created a hierarchy of entitlements based on a religious identity excluding Muslims but it was something much more fundamental than a battle against a 1000 word law it was a battle for what kind of country do we want to live in every second Indian is below the age of 25 what kind of country do we want to grow old in what kind of country do we want to leave to our children and I think it is you know there can be no more important a battle and the answers each of us have to find in in in our minds in imagination in our heart but also in the practice of our lives and and and I think that this book I hope will will stir us to recognize the enormity of that of that question and the choices that we need to make the modes of struggle that we will have to search for I think against an ideology which is founded on hate and division has to be you know there has to be a new grammar of resistance that we create and discover I think the the anti-ca protests really showed us the way when spontaneously students and and working class women Muslim women showed us and you know the constitution became the icon of resistance the national flag and the national anthem and it was beautiful to see this across across India the the struggle brought together you know both Gandhi and Ambedkar in a way that they never were brought together in their in their lives one was a symbol of radical love the other was a symbol of radical equality and and just just lastly just wanted to share you know the slogans that came up I recall many by young people across the country some of my favorites we you divide we multiply and and one young woman had put up two words that break my heart and those two words were except Muslim and I think that the lessons in solidarity that we learned in in Shahin Bagh the women you know we had had a union minister who raised with a crowd as the slogan uh to the traitors of this country addressing India's Muslims shoot them and and the women decided that we will give them a reply a fitting reply and they coined a slogan which was all you beloved people of my land I will shower you with flowers and I think that that act of of you know of fighting with without hate and the farmer struggle has already carried that forward you know this new form of resistance which is built on courage on on on on a completely uncompromising acceptance of of injustice but also of standing together across these divides I was invited you know almost every one of those hundred days to speak in different parts of the country and to see you know crowds of 100,000 people where Muslims wearing their identity markers with Hindus standing together raising the national flag reading the the ramble of the constitution you know the the celebration of what is best in in in in our identity that is the way forward and I am extremely hopeful that that in the end the arc of history bends towards justice as Martin Luther King said I think the arc of justice also equally bends towards uh uh fraternity and solidarity and and shared living uh and equal rights which we will ultimately accomplish thank you