How Land, Climate & Digital Hate Redefine Citizenship in Assam | Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie

In the complex political landscape of Assam, a crisis is unfolding that sits at the intersection of environmental catastrophe, legal exclusion, and digital hate. In this episode of the Nous podcast, Dr. Ritumbra Manuvie, a human rights defender and Professor of Law at the University of Groningen, unpacked how these seemingly distinct forces are converging to strip the most vulnerable of their rights.

Dr. Manuvie, whose work spans climate migration, digital governance, and hate speech, argues that the state is effectively "manufacturing foreigners out of floods."

The Climate-Citizenship Nexus

One of the most striking insights from the discussion was the direct link between climate change and the crisis of citizenship in Assam. Dr. Manuvie highlighted that nearly 7% of Assam’s landmass has been lost to river erosion. When entire villages are washed away by the Brahmaputra, families are forced to migrate to new chars (river islands) or roadside settlements to survive.

However, in the current political climate, this survival migration is criminalized. "When a flood victim builds a new hut in a different area, the administration doesn't see a climate refugee; they see a potential Bangladeshi infiltrator," Dr. Manuvie explained. The very act of rebuilding a life after an environmental disaster becomes a trigger for suspicion.

For the poor and uneducated, maintaining a pristine paper trail of lineage while fleeing floods is nearly impossible. Yet, the burden of proof lies entirely on them. Dr. Manuvie pointed out that the "D-Voter" (Doubtful Voter) lists often geographically correlate with erosion-prone areas, suggesting that those displaced by nature are being systematically targeted by the state’s bureaucracy.

The "State of Exception"

Dr. Manuvie invoked the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the "State of Exception" to explain the situation in Assam. By creating a permanent narrative of emergency—an "invasion" of illegal immigrants—the state justifies the suspension of normal legal rights for a specific group of people.

This exception allows for draconian measures like the NRC (National Register of Citizens) and the arbitrary marking of citizens as D-Voters based on anonymous complaints. "The state has created a system where a piece of paper determines your humanity," she noted, highlighting how bureaucratic violence reduces complex human lives to "bare life," stripped of political agency and protection.

Digital Hate and Algorithmic Complicity

The conversation also delved into the digital dimension of this exclusion. As a co-founder of The London Story Foundation, Dr. Manuvie has extensively studied hate speech in the Indian digital ecosystem. She shared findings from a study on OpIndia, a right-wing news portal, which revealed a stark disparity in how religious communities are framed.

Using computational analysis, her team found that articles mentioning "Muslims" consistently carried a high negative sentiment, correlating with keywords like "invader," "terrorist," and "criminal," whereas articles mentioning "Hindus" were associated with "victimhood." This digital narrative reinforces the on-ground politics of exclusion.

Dr. Manuvie also critiqued the impunity of big tech platforms, quoting a chilling observation: "If Facebook were a sovereign state, it would be North Korea." She argued that platforms like Meta have effectively become unaccountable sovereigns that regulate speech—and silence dissent—based on opaque algorithms that often amplify hate for engagement.

Conclusion

The crisis in Assam is often viewed in isolation as a regional ethnic conflict. However, Dr. Manuvie’s analysis reveals it as a testing ground for a modern machinery of exclusion that combines colonial-era land laws with 21st-century digital surveillance.

As India pushes for greater digitization of governance and citizenship (through Aadhaar and proposed nationwide NRCs), the lessons from Assam are a warning. When technology and law are weaponized against the marginalized, the result is not just a loss of rights, but a loss of the right to have rights.