More and more is written about this crisis in the making, the impact it is having on the Muslim population of Assam Province in India, and how the actions of the Assam and Indian government are creating a statelessness problem that did not need to exist.
In this blog I look at what it means for an individual to be excluded from Assam’s Register. Detention, deportation and more individuals will be targeted as other regions in India seek to repeat the exercise.
What has happened so far?
In 2017 the Indian Government announced that the Assam National Register of Citizens of 1951 would be updated. The Register was updated once in December 2017. A deadline of July 2018 was set to complete the update. For individuals to keep their names on the Register, their names have to appear on the 1951 Register or in any pre-1971 electoral roll documents. If this was not the case, individuals could produce admissible documents to establish entitlement to being on the Register.
The first draft of the Register published on 1 January 2018 listed 19 million people as citizens of Assam. Left out were 13.9 million people. Many, though not all, are Muslim. Reassurances were given that more than 7 million records were to be added after that first draft. A further draft was produced in December 2018. An appeals process was instituted for those who were left out. The positive news was that with each iteration of the Register, the number of individuals excluded decreased. By the July 2018 version four million people were excluded. By the final version released on 31 August 2019, the total was down to around 2 million 1.
The Government maintains that the process is statutory, transparent and legal. The update is not of their own initiative but from a requirement imposed on the government by India’s Supreme Court 2. As far as India is concerned, there are no minority rights implications. This is despite the fact that it is largely Assam’s Muslim population which has been affected by the update and is being excluded from the Register.
Background to the updates of Assam’s Register
In brief, after the annexation of Assam in 1826 into British India and the Partition of Bengal by the British along religious lines in 1905, many Bengali Muslims, encouraged by the British colonial regime, moved to what was then the province of ‘East Bengal and Assam’.
Between 1947 and the creation of the State of Bangladesh in 1971 political and civil unrest drove many Hindus from then East Pakistan into India. Many Muslims from India went into East Pakistan. It was in this context that the first National Register of Citizens was prepared in 1950.
The updating of the National Register of Citizens is an attempt to limit the tolerated population exchanges to the period of unrest: to 1971. Anyone who came into a much-shrunk post-partition Assam after 1971 should have remained in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.
The signs were all there
The warning signs about the negative effects of the update exercise were present from the beginning. The Muslim population, which has been the most impacted by the update, continues to be alienated. Many are now treated as foreigners without full citizenship rights. Not only that, but they face deportation, potentially to Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has described the recent events as India and Assam’s ‘internal issue’ 3. Bangladesh is certainly not interested in taking anyone back. In fact, there is no ‘back’ for generations of families that were not born there and have no connection with the country.
Despite assurances that no ‘coercive’ action would be taken against the excluded, individuals are no longer treated as citizens. Instead they are subject to the Foreigner’s Act of 1946. Anyone who wishes to challenge exclusion from the final list only has recourse to the new Foreigner’s Tribunals. If the Tribunal and subsequent appeals do not result in the Register being amended, citizenship is lost for good.
The Foreigner’s Act gives wide discretionary powers to the state. Those powers include detention and deportation. And it seems that the Assam government is planning to use those powers, just as it has done in the past for declared ‘foreigners’. As well as the six detention camps already in existence in Assam Province, ten more camps are reportedly being built to house anticipated detainees 4. It is hard to see how moving from citizen to a foreign detainee against one’s will is not ‘coercive’ action.
Recent events and further warnings
The government maintains that those left off the Register are not stateless 5.
But the remedies for those left off Assam’s Register are not adequate. The infrastructure to provide assistance and an objective review of the evidence is lacking. Tribunals have been set up, but judicial training is lacking. Often people have to travel a long way, with little notice of their citizenship hearing 6. Little adequate legal representation is available to those affected by the exclusion 7. Third parties – it is unclear who – are allowed to raise objections to inclusion in the Register as part of the appeal.
The misery of those excluded is palpable, with reports of many people driven to suicide over their precarious position 8. And it is not clear where, other than in detention camps, these newly created ‘foreigners’ are supposed to go.
The start of something bigger (and scarier)?
The ‘success’ of the Assam exercise has encouraged other Provinces and states to update their own registers and find ‘illegal immigrants’. Nagaland and Manipur are looking to weed out migrants from Myanmar. They are also looking to protect themselves from what they anticipate will be an influx of Assam residents excluded from Assam’s Register. The language of fear and danger is being used to justify disenfranchising and marginalising groups of (formerly) Indian citizens.
And they are learning to be tougher than the Assam authorities when it comes to pushing out individuals and families who have lived in India for generations. Where Assam decided to look back for proof as far back from 1971 onwards, Manipur wants to stop the clock to 1952 and Nagaland to 1963 as the cut off for citizenship 9.
More pain to come
The ‘success’ of Assam’s Register update to marginalise a population has clearly emboldened those who speak the language of ‘infiltration’ to describe families that have lived in India, as Indians, for generations and who are more concerned with fostering an atmosphere of fear and division.
Despite the flawed process, and the pain it is causing to so many, it is likely that we will see the same exercise repeated in other Indian states. It’s hard to fully judge the likely impact, but we can safely say that inclusivity won’t be the watchword.
Notes:
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-un-refugees-stateless/u-n-refugee-agency-takes-up-case-of-potential-stateless-in-india-idUSKBN1WH1CJ ↩
- https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/disappointed-nrc-being-wrongly-linked-with-minority-rights-issue-india-at-un-2121911 ↩
- https://time.com/5665262/india-national-register-of-citizens-stateless-assam/ and http://www.newagebd.net/article/91405/a-worrying-surge-in-indians-intruding-into-bangladesh ↩
- https://time.com/5665262/india-national-register-of-citizens-stateless-assam/ and https://www.arabnews.com/node/1551156/world ↩
- https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/process-to-decide-fate-of-those-excluded-from-nrc-fairly-long-govt/story-h28dVFT3yIuRpPdwMNhpLK.html ↩
- https://observers.france24.com/en/20191120-volunteers-india-assam-state-help-two-million-residents-fight-citizenship-NRC ↩
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/the-nrc-in-ignorance-of-international-covenants-and-human-misery/ ↩
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48754802 ↩
- https://www.theweek.in/theweek/current/2019/10/04/states-and-the-stateless.html ↩
