Journal of Migration Affairs 20 | ©author(s) Journal of Migration Affairs Vol. IV(1): 20-35, September 2021 DOI: 10.36931/jma.2021.4.1.20-35 Partition’s Long Shadow: Post-Partition Migration and the Citizenship Conundrum in Postcolonial Assam Binayak Dutta The Antecedents Citizenship is a critical issue of concern for any nation-state. When India became independent, the framers of the Constitution gathered together to determine the basic structure of the new Indian state that was born out of a violent partition. The Partition of India gave rise to displacement, migration and settlement of people across the new borders, which had enormous repercussions on the question of citizenship. All this was especially crucial for the state of Assam as the region was affected not only by religious conflict but also by ethno-linguistic communalism, reflected in the Sylhet referendum. 1 Both these variants of communal politics – religious and ethno-linguistic – impacted the citizenship question for this reorganized province. By 1949, debates in the Constituent Assembly began to engage with the process of citizenship through a discussion on electoral rolls for the first general election in independent India and the question of citizenship and its concomitant conditions. In the debates on the citizenship question in the Constituent Assembly, members expressed extreme concern about the idea of citizenship and the fate of the migrants who had come to India from areas within East Pakistan before and after Partition. Colonial Assam (in the form of Sylhet), the princely state of Tripura (Chakla Roshnabad), and Meghalaya (some Khasi chiefdoms) had also been partitioned, along with Punjab and Bengal. These partition experiences brought northeast India well within the Partition discourse of 1947. During these years, the entire subcontinent was in flux, especially in the east and the west of India, bordering the two wings of Pakistan. ‘The situation became critical as the initial trickle of people wanting to migrate to India from East Pakistan became a flood by 1949 as the political atmosphere in East Pakistan became increasingly hostile to the minority communities’ (Dutta 2019). There was a steady exodus of Hindus who constituted 31 per cent of the total population of East Pakistan in 1947 and were reduced to 22 per cent in 1951 (Barkat et al. 2008). One of the epicentres of intense activity in the east was Assam, which shared a border of more than 885 km with East Pakistan. In his letter to the chief ministers of all states on 1 April 1948, Nehru observed that ‘the exodus of non-Muslims from East Bengal Binayak Dutta (binayakdutta18@gmail.com) teaches modern Indian history in the Department of History, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong.