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Today, February 18, is the anniversary of the Nellie Massacre.

Write. Write down. I am a Miya. My serial number in the NRC is 200543.

Write down. I am a Miya, A citizen of a democratic, secular, Republic Without any rights

If you wish to kill me, drive me from my village, snatch my green fields hire bulldozers To roll over me, Your bullets Can shatter my breast, for no crime.”

– Hafiz Ahmed, I am a Miya.

The poem above is not merely a literary exercise; it is a piece of forensic evidence. In the riverine islands (chars) of the Brahmaputra, the “Miya” identity – a term historically and sometimes pejoratively used for Bengali-speaking Muslims –has been systematically stripped of its dignity and transformed into a target for state-sponsored othering.

In the early months of 2026, the political landscape of Assam has darkened. The rhetoric of the elite has transitioned from abstract debates on “illegal immigration” into a visceral, targeted campaign of economic and physical deprivation.

When Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma recently encouraged citizens to pay Miya rickshaw pullers less – specifically suggesting they be paid Rs 4 if the fare is Rs 5 based solely on their identity – he was not just engaging in political theatre. He was engineering a subclass of “disposables.” This is the modern face of an old hatred: the reduction of a human being to a “serial number” in a ledger, or a body that can be symbolically targeted in “point-blank” rifle imagery. To understand the gravity of this moment, we must look back at the ghosts of 1983 and across the Atlantic to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic.

The current atmosphere in Assam evokes the chilling memory of the 1983 Nellie Massacre, a blood-soaked chapter that remains an unhealed wound in the Indian psyche. On February 18, 1983, during the height of the........

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