-The Hindu Can India manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution...

-Scroll.in Of late, the BJP had done well to attract Dalit Bengali refugees with its promise of citizenship for Hindu Bangladeshis. But the NRC might harm that narrative. On Wednesday, the All India Matua Mahasangha held protests in West Bengal against the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens in Assam to identify undocumented migrants from Bangladesh. Its supporters organised rail blockades at various points in the North 24 Parganas...

-The New Indian Express Over 40 lakh people were left out of Assam’s draft citizenship list. India is a land of immigrants. Inclusion, not exclusion, has been our motto The second draft of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been published with 40 lakh people not finding their names in it. They are on the verge of becoming stateless. There are apprehensions of ethnic cleansing or disenfranchisement now due to the...

-The Indian Express Can a democracy permit so many to be in a state of liminal legality? NRC poses a political and moral question The possibility — whether immediate or somewhat remote — that at the end of the process as many as 4 million people may lose their legal status as citizens should not be a cause of celebration in a democracy. Nor should it generate a mad rush among...

-The Tribune Assam is tense; internet services have been suspended and security forces on standby with the final draft list of the controversial NRC out. Sanjoy Hazarika, a specialist on the north-east, explains why it is sitting on a powder keg I’M not getting into the numbers game for Assam and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process which is a draft in progress. The first draft, published last December had 19...