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, RepublicWithout any rightsIf you wish to kill me, drive me from my village, snatch my green fields hire bulldozersTo roll over me,Your bulletsCan 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.‘Nellie 1983’.Shadows of 1983 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 anti-foreigner Assam Movement, a mob systematically slaughtered over 3,000 Bengali Muslims in just six hours across 14 villages in the Nagaon district.The victims were mostly women and children, left behind while the men worked the fields. They were trapped by the geography of the river and cut down with machetes and sickles. The massacre was fuelled by the same “foreigner” rhetoric heard today – the branding of long-term residents as “infiltrators” or “demographic threats.”In the novel Nellie 1983, Diganta Sharma introduces us to characters who represent the resilient but persecuted women of the chars. Sharma explores how the massacre was not just a historical event but a metaphor for an unprosecuted history. The state’s failure to bring the architects of Nellie to justice created a precedent of impunity. For Sharma’s character Rabia Begum, the “serial number” of the NRC matters less than the rising waters of the river, yet it is the “serial number” that the state uses to determine if she has the right to exist.Trujillo’s ParsleyThe rhetoric used to “trouble” the Miya community finds a terrifying historical parallel in the Parsley Massacre of 1937 in the Dominican Republic. Here, the dictator Rafael Trujillo used a deceptively innocent herb as a shibboleth – a linguistic trap designed to separate life from death.Trujillo’s soldiers stood at the border of the Dajabón River, clutching sprigs of parsley. They confronted dark-skinned labourers and asked them to say one word: “Perejil” (Spanish for parsley). For the ethnic Haitians whose mother tongue was Kreyòl, the trilled “r” of Spanish was impossible to pronounce; it came out as a flat “l.” That missing phoneme was a death sentence. An estimated 20,000 to 35,000 people were murdered with machetes and bayonets to save the cost of bullets and hide the sound of genocide.The Farming of Bones.In Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), we follow Amabelle Désir, a Haitian domestic worker. Like Rabia Begum, Amabelle’s life is defined by quiet labour and simple dreams – love for a cane-cutter, a home, and security. The title of the novel refers to the gruelling work of harvesting sugarcane, but it becomes a double entendre for the literal “harvesting” of human bones during the massacre. Amabelle witnesses the transition from casual prejudice to state-sponsored slaughter, where the very water she drinks becomes a conveyor belt for the dead.The game of the elite versus the life of the poorThe common thread between the Dominican borderlands of 1937 and the Brahmaputra valley of 1983 and 2026 is the way elite politics shatters the dreams of the common people. For the elite, language and labor are tools of statecraft. For Amabelle, a word (perejil) becomes a weapon. For Rabia, her labour (the rickshaw or the plow) becomes a site of discrimination. When a chief minister tells the public to “trouble” a worker by paying them less, he is performing a modern “Parsley Test.”Humble people rarely dream of empires. They dream of schooling for their children and a title to a small patch of silt. The NRC-CAA framework in Assam turns these dreams into a nightmare of legacy data. If a Miya cannot produce a document from 1971, they are cast into the D-voter – doubtful voter – category, stripped of their rights, and potentially sent to detention centres. To justify violence, the elite must first other the victim. In 1937, Haitians were “cattle thieves.” In 2026, Miyas are “infiltrators.” As Ahmed’s poem warns, once the state decides you have “no rights,” they can “Snatch my green fields [and] hire bulldozers / To roll over me.”NRC, CAA, and statelessnessThe Miya community today is caught in a legal pincer movement. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) demands ancestral proof that many poor, river-dwelling families simply do not have. Meanwhile, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) offers a shield to non-Muslims who might be excluded from the NRC, but explicitly leaves the Miya community vulnerable.This creates what legal scholars call a perpetual state of suspicion. When the chief minister calls for economic boycotts, he is signalling that these people are legally “suspect” and therefore socially expendable. This violates the very core of the Indian Constitution – specifically Article 14 (equality before the law) and Article 21 (the right to life and liberty). If the state can encourage the devaluation of a person’s labor based on their religion or language, the “secular Republic” mentioned in Ahmed’s poem exists in name only.The harvest of hateThe tragedy of Amabelle Désir and Rabia Begum is that they are the collateral damage of “the farming of bones” – a process where the elite plant seeds of hatred to reap political power, while the common people provide the harvest of corpses and broken lives.Whether it is the “Parsley Test” of 1937 or the “Rickshaw Fare Test” of 2026, the mechanism remains the same: dehumanise the worker, devalue their labour, and eventually, erase the citizen. As we look at the symbiosis between state rhetoric and grassroots violence, we must remember that the bullet that “shatters the breast” of the poet in Hafiz Ahmed’s verses is the final act of a play that begins with a single, discriminatory word.We are currently at a crossroads. Will we allow the “serial number” to replace the soul? Or will we recognise that the “green fields” and the “humble dreams” of the Miya are as integral to the Republic as those of any other citizen? The ghosts of Nellie and the Dominican Republic are watching.Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the government of Kerala. Views are personal.