The stories of Mahesh and Keramat Bhai continue. For they are chapters which do not have full stops, no ad shum, no khatam kahani. As long as destitution and poverty prevail in our neighbourhood, there will be movements of people across borders (which they do not respect), in their hope of securing a better life.

In this process, demographic changes will take place, as we have suggested. Pressures on land will grow. Conflicts will arise. But with access to better information, nutrition, health care and other necessities of life, migrant-receiving communities and regions will be better placed to take care of their own interests without resorting either to violence or to subterfuge. We need to mandate such communities with economic and social powers as well as the detailed legal and constitutional mechanisms to achieve this.

‘Local’ communities which feel that their identities, if not their very existence, are threatened by the ingress of outsiders will find security not in force of arms or numbers but in constitutional safeguards which are imposed and implemented rigorously, even harshly. It has been as much the failure of the Indian state and its subordinate agencies, which have not honoured or kept their word, that is responsible for the fire that has swept Assam and other parts of the North East, as much as anything else. They say that a Constitution is as good or as bad as those who work it; the converse is also true. We need to stop blaming our instruments and start criticizing ourselves for the visible failure of governance around us.

Groups which migrate to seek a decent life will have some rights to work and to decent wages. They cannot have the right to vote and to citizenship. The dos and don’ts have been spelt out in the earlier pages. The Rites of Passage are not rights to passage. They are symbolic of our changed times.

Will Assam perish or will she prosper? I think we will see a combination of both. What Gandhi and Weiner advocate, perhaps more of the former. Let me clarify. In a message to Assam, Mahatma Gandhi, in 1944, said, ‘If the people feel that the present policy of the Government on settlement and immigration is oppressive and anti-national, let them fight it non-violently, or violently, if necessary.’15

Myron Weiner remarked that while it was conceivable by the start of the twenty-first century that the global migration crisis would have abated, there was also the other possibility, that tolerance toward foreigners would have dropped even further and that as the pressure for emigration grew ‘states are more rather than less likely to become restrictive.’

‘What is uncertain is whether states will be effective at halting unwanted entries,’ Weiner said, adding that governments were likely to face ‘increasingly uncomfortable choices, some of which require the balancing of potentially high economic, political and moral costs and uncertain benefits.’