National Register of Citizens Assam, India: The Tangled Logic of Documentary Evidence.

This article reveals the incoherent nature of state machinery as well as the overpoweringly humiliating effects of using identity documents as a tool of state power and identification, putting any citizen's legal position in jeopardy. Study of the National Register of Citizens in Assam indicates that any exercise in abstract documentation and its implementation through technology dependent network creates "liminal statelessness" for many people whose citizenship status remained undocumented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]