By Vedika Mandapati
If you were born in India between 1950 and 1987, then you’re automatically considered an Indian Citizen – unless of course, you were born in Assam. In that case, you’re subject to Citizenship Tribunals and investigations that will most likely deem you an ‘illegal immigrant’ and throw you in jail. Let me tell you why:
Post the Bangladeshi War, which commenced on March 4th, 1971, Assam was faced with an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants and refugees. By the 1980s, local Assamese residents felt their power in the state was weakening, with many claiming that foreigners had been accepted into the Electoral Roll. This agitation (led by the All Assam Students Union) finally came to an end when the Assam Accord was signed. The accord, among other things, stated that any person who entered the state on or post-March 4th, 1971, would be declared illegal and deported. Since 2013, upon orders from the Supreme Court, the NRC has begun a process of updation, as the 1951 document was deemed inaccurate. Now, the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) uses the same definition to declare someone an illegal immigrant- if you cannot prove that you/your ancestors moved to Assam before March 4th, 1971, you can be detained.
There doesn’t seem to be much wrong with the explanation in the last paragraph, it sounds like just another immigration policy - but that’s because it features heavy bias by omission. For one, Assam is the only state that does not adhere to the 1950-1987 citizenship timeline. If you were born in any other state within that timeline, you are automatically considered an Indian citizen, but in Assam, not so much.
For another, the establishment of this citizenship favours non-Muslim, non-Bengali residents. These groups are often looped in with the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. In 2017, the governing bodies of the NRC introduced the ‘Original Inhabitants (OI)’ category. This category marked those residents believed to have been in Assam for long durations of time, often going back generations. This category also included no Muslims. Prateek Hajela, one of the state coordinators of the NRC, admitted that those people identified as OI faced much less scrutiny than others. Measures to increase document credibility excluded rural women, although they were eventually overturned.
Finally, what happens to those people who were declared illegal immigrants (which by the way, included a former Assamese Chief Minister) is an extremely flawed evaluation process. Detainees must go up in front of the Foreigner’s Tribunal (which was set up by a law that has now been overturned, yet the Tribunal still exists) and prove within 15 days that they are citizens of India. Yet it takes 2-3 months to receive necessary documents from district offices. The Tribunal, which is not fully judicial, by the way, does not give one the right to legal representation - so anyone who cannot afford a lawyer must represent themselves. After this extensive and draining process, anyone left out of the final NRC can neither live in India nor be deported to Bangladesh, so they are left in jail for indefinite periods of time.
What reads on paper as an efficient measure to remove illegal immigrants from the Assamese state truthfully is a drawn-out process that results in nothing more than indefinite detention. Most are punished for the crimes of their parents, and others simply because of the backlog at district offices. India is now holding 19 lakh ‘illegal immigrants’ in jail for an unspecified amount of time. Essentially, we have committed lakhs of people to prison for no fault of their own, while broadcasting our successes in tidying up long-standing issues in the North-East.
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