Popular Articles by Mridugunjan Deka
The Sentinel, Jan 6, 2023
This article discusses the context of the CAA, still unimplemented after three years of its passi... more This article discusses the context of the CAA, still unimplemented after three years of its passing drawing examples from citizenship history, parliamentary debates, and an implicitly driven policy.
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The Diplomat, 2022
"Implementation of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 is being advanced incremental... more "Implementation of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 is being advanced incrementally and in a non-dynamic fashion."
The article argues that incremental advancement and anxieties, in a historical context, have marked the 3 years since the CAA's passing and its non-implementation.
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Critical Edges, 2021
This essay explores two central ideas of B.R. Ambedkar and puts them in the context of India’s co... more This essay explores two central ideas of B.R. Ambedkar and puts them in the context of India’s contemporary political reality. These two tenets viz. liberalism and secularism figure as constitutive elements among Ambedkar’s contribution to Indian social and political thought. One often loses sight of this aspect even as his role in the drafting of the Constitution of India is celebrated in a mechanistic fashion like a ritual. In India’s highly charged political atmosphere of today, rife with a majoritarian view of how political and social life ought to be ordered, it is ironic to observe these two words becoming political slurs. They are often deployed to discredit dissent, and this eventually leads to an erosion of their significance themselves. It is a paradoxical situation when Ambedkar is sought to be appropriated by the proponents of political Hinduism within a sanitised Constitutional framework. The reason arguably lies in the bonds existing firstly between liberation and politics, and secondly the idea of religion as a reformist concept with secularism as a non-negotiable aspect.
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East Mojo, 2021
With the recent incident of a young YouTuber from Punjab uttering racist opinions on a provincial... more With the recent incident of a young YouTuber from Punjab uttering racist opinions on a provincial legislator from Arunachal Pradesh, one is reminded of a flurry of similar incidents occurring not too long ago. As the novel Coronavirus stealthily made its way into India in the first quarter of 2020, it did not take very long for racist violence to occur against a section of India’s own people. The violence, limited to verbal in some instances, was directly attributed to a fear of contracting the virus from persons standing apart on account of their appearances.
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Raiot.in, Thma U Rangli-Juki (TUR) Meghalaya, 2020
The unrelenting movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) reveals that the wound... more The unrelenting movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) reveals that the wounds of the past remain unhealed. While the CAA is an attempt at settling, to quote Sanjib Baruah, the “unfinished business” of partition, it has flared up what the indigenous people of the Northeast dread the most- the fear of being reduced to a minority. That fear is often labelled as a mere myth by some and the persistence of that myth is often ascribed to the Assamese middle class’s political agenda. However, in the case of the CAA protests, the spontaneity and intensity and consistency of the current movement signal a contrary view. It is in this light that Assam’s politics can be explained in terms of a ‘politics of resentment’, a term given by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in his own analyses of identity politics.This resentment is against the Centre which continues to belittle the identity concerns of the indigenous people. The former and now scrapped IMDT Act and the current CAA, in their own ways, can be seen as the materialization of such an apathetic attitude of the centre towards Assam.
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Youth Ki Awaaz, 2018
It was a quiet morning on February 21, 2018. The TISS campus at Guwahati was just preparing itsel... more It was a quiet morning on February 21, 2018. The TISS campus at Guwahati was just preparing itself for its first round of campus placements. A small crowd was starting to gather in front of the main administrative building. It swelled by and by, and the campus reverberated with the sound of “Awaaz do hum ek hain” (everybody say that we’re one).
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Papers by Mridugunjan Deka
Salesian: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022
The paper juxtaposes the constitutionally and legally endowed citizenship in India, and the disco... more The paper juxtaposes the constitutionally and legally endowed citizenship in India, and the discourse of belonging in Assam, in the context of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019. Taking the concept of ascriptive identity, it is argued that even as the CAA 2019 shifts citizenship in India towards ascriptive criteria, the incorporation of ascriptive identities has been a tendency since the Partition of the sub-continent. The reactions against the CAA provide a vantage point to understand the contestations between the ascriptive tendencies hidden in the legal-formal category of the eligible Indian citizen and the socially prevalent ascriptive qualification of who belongs (or does not belong) to Assam. The paper concludes by observing that identifying and locating ascriptive markers in citizenship discourses and indigeneity questions is important to understand them and critique their excesses.
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Social Change and Development , 2021
Most ethnic conflicts in Northeast India are fallout of colonial era policies and contesting vers... more Most ethnic conflicts in Northeast India are fallout of colonial era policies and contesting versions of indigeneity, but their lesser researched impact on the human realm of survivors hold important hints for the future. The paper as a contextual background theoretically explores the role of indigeneity and territory in producing political violence in Bodoland in Assam and reproduces narratives of resilience of a community of Adivasis who had been displaced in the regional militant led violence. The paper has tried to show how resilience is a complex quality that entail attributes like, among others, refusal to surrender, putting faith in prayers, holding onto identity cards with original address, ways of coexistence with the conflicting community through church based dialogues or anti-alcohol campaigns. These narratives of resilience point towards hopeful possibilities in the Northeast, a space popularly viewed through the optics of chaotic violence, when conflict is also characterised by survivors as external and a disruption of life worlds.
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Refugee Watch Online, Calcutta Research Group (CRG), 2020
In Assam, for those who perhaps do not directly suffer, floods and erosion are an annual affair t... more In Assam, for those who perhaps do not directly suffer, floods and erosion are an annual affair that come and leave with the monsoon. Every coming year is equally or more devastating than the earlier one. Mridugunjan Deka makes a case on the seriousness of the issue, using publicly available and accessible government data sources.
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Book Chapter by Mridugunjan Deka
Purbayon Publication, Guwahati, 2020
Human displacement is a complicated phenomenon with varied factors. Responsibilities lie at the d... more Human displacement is a complicated phenomenon with varied factors. Responsibilities lie at the door of state policy, international law, identity politics, humanitarian interventions, and political exigencies of sovereign nation-states. Identity politics takes the form of ethnic strife, and the response of the state could become a deciding factor for displacement of people. The ambiguity surrounding refugee policy and state law, and the international law’s limited enforceability is another factor. Humanitarianism, despite its well meaning intentions, has its own detractors in the debate on accountability as far as war and its repercussions are concerned. Development induced displacement is an emerging problem in the broad area of displacement studies, bringing new challenges to the state and its justice mechanism. In extensively surveying, although at a surface level, the factors (not exhaustive) involved in the displacement of people, an attempt has been made to mention the theoretical views involved in the analysis of the tragic issue of human displacement. Examples have been cited for substantiating as well as clarifying the overall, extensive factors cited.
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Book Reviews by Mridugunjan Deka
The Book Review, 2021
Arkotong Longkumer’s latest book speaks from India’s North East, the quintessential postcolonial ... more Arkotong Longkumer’s latest book speaks from India’s North East, the quintessential postcolonial frontier, and grapples with an elusive question not previously explored with such depth or precision: how did Hindutva rise in a region falling outside the ambit of primary tropes commonly deployed to describe and comprehend the Indian nation? The book takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through Assam, Nagaland, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh, viewing these spaces through the eyes of Hindu nationalism’s most determined workers based in North East India, mapping their lives and stakes in the process.
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Drafts by Mridugunjan Deka
Unpublished draft, 2020
Mapping Citizenship in India by Prof Anupama Roy is a timely read in the context of India today.... more Mapping Citizenship in India by Prof Anupama Roy is a timely read in the context of India today. Although the book was published in 2010, the contests over citizenship laws and amendments and the conflicting passions they have unfolded in the context of the recent Act....
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Popular Articles by Mridugunjan Deka
The article argues that incremental advancement and anxieties, in a historical context, have marked the 3 years since the CAA's passing and its non-implementation.
Papers by Mridugunjan Deka
Book Chapter by Mridugunjan Deka
Book Reviews by Mridugunjan Deka
Drafts by Mridugunjan Deka
The article argues that incremental advancement and anxieties, in a historical context, have marked the 3 years since the CAA's passing and its non-implementation.