At a time when the threat of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is looming large on the state, a Durga Puja committee in Kasba has taken up as its theme the plight of stateless citizens.

The Puja of Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha is held in an area that is home to people who had gone through stateless existence after they were forced to move to India from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in the aftermath of the Partition.

The theme will showcase the struggle of these people to piece together their lives and how several years later they find themselves in a situation where state power threatens to render them homeless one more time.

A throne, which represents state power, has been fixed on a globe at the entrance to the pandal. Though no figure sits on it, a crown and guns fitted to the throne will convey the brutal power of the state.

A structure similar to the arm of a crane emerges from the throne to hit a gigantic shuttlecock, tearing apart the feathers that are stitched together to form it. “The shuttlecock symbolises those who had once lived the life of a refugee. Their well stitched lives are disintegrated when the state strikes. This is exactly what happens to stateless citizens,” said Sushanta Kumar Ghosh, the president of Rajdanga Naba Uday Sangha and Trinamul councillor from ward No. 107.

Ghosh said the theme was decided almost a year back. “NRC will make many people refugees, but then it is not the only trigger for our theme. Thousands of people across the world are becoming refugees because of brutal state power,” said Ghosh.

Ghosh added that the shuttlecock had been chosen to represent the refugees because it keeps travelling throughout the game. “Like a shuttlecock, refugees, too, keeps moving from one place to another in search of an address,” said Ghosh.

The Narendra Modi government wants to extend the NRC beyond Assam. The NRC, published in Assam on August 31, has left out lakhs of people. The government is building detention centres to house those whose names do not feature in the NRC.

South Asia is witnessing one of the largest refugee crisis in human history. Religious persecution has forced thousands of Rohingya Muslims out of Myanmar, a country where they have lived for years.

Subrata Banerjee, who is the artist for the Puja, said they would install badminton rackets in the pandal. “The rackets are instruments of state power that turns citizens into refugees,” he said.

An Kasba veteran said the theme of the plight of refugees gained more significance because the Puja was being held in an area where thousands of people from East Pakistan had come and settled.