India: 4 million excluded from Assam's draft list of citizens.

Pedro_P

Plan to identify ‘foreigners’ living in state of Assam creates panic among those who could be left without citizenship rights.
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Villagers wait outside the National Register of Citizens centre to get their documents verified by government officials, at Mayong Village in Morigaon district, Assam. Photograph: Reuters

▼ About 4 million people who live in the Indian border state of Assam have been excluded from a draft list of citizens, as Bengali-speaking Muslims fear they will  be sent to detention centres or  deported.
The state government has put stringent security in place while the chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, has told Indian media that those finding themselves stateless overnight should not worry. Sonowal said they would be given a chance to prove their claim of citizenship, that none of the 4 million would be sent to a detention camp, and that “no one will be treated as a foreigner”. Sonowal told the Hindustan Times that “ample opportunity will be given to applicants to prove their eligibility”.
Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Indiaduring Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s. Most of them settled in Assam, which has a near-165-mile (270km) border with Bangladesh.
The list aims to identify every resident who can demonstrate roots in the state before March 1971. The mammoth three-year-long exercise to prove the identities of 33 million people across the hills, valleys and plains of this verdant state began two years ago. It has been overseen by the supreme court.
There have been longstanding social and communal tensions in the state, with locals campaigning against illegal immigrants. Critics see the citizenship test as a measure – supported by Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist-led government – aimed at driving out minority Muslims.
“They are trying to isolate Muslims, the number that has come out is high and it is surprising,” said Ripun Bora, the state chief of the opposition Congress party. “We are going to fight it out.”
In 1983, scores of people were killed by machete-armed mobs intent on hounding out Muslim immigrants.
Some residents say the demography of the state has been altered by illegal Muslim migrants and resent this. Many Muslim residents angrily reject the charge of being illegal, saying that not only they, but their grandparents, were born in Assam and they know of no other place.
Every resident’s papers and antecedents have been checked. The first draft of the list was published on 1 January, listing 19m names. Since then, more claims have been verified and more names added to the register.
However, the final register will only be complete once the 4 million people have appealed against their exclusion from the list and had a chance to prove their claims to citizenship.
The Guardian reported in  Februarythat Assam was building a new detention centre to process the “foreigners” who will be evicted in the coming years.
The human rights activist Harsh Mander, a member of the National Human Rights Commission in New Delhi, visited a detention centre in January. He said he was devastated to see families separated and people kept in “jails” indefinitely, some of them over many years.
“There was a mounting sense of fear of the future among those I met. My own trepidation is that if thousands of people deemed to be ‘stateless’ can be kept like this, what’s going to happen when its millions? Will we see concentration camps?” asked Mander.
On Wednesday, the federal home minister, Rajnath Singh, said he had ordered the Assam government not to take any action against those whose names do not appear on the register. In parliament on Monday, Singh told MPs there would be no deportations based on the register and said there was no need to create “unnecessary panic”.
For its part, the Assam government has been publicising what steps the 4 million not on the list need to take to rectify the situation. But the fundamental issue for many is that they simply do not have documents dating back decades.
“Many are poor illiterate families who do not have relevant papers to prove how long they have lived in the state. Saying they will be a given a chance to prove their citizenship is easy but doing so isn’t so easy for them,” said social activist Prashant Bora from Guwahati, the capital of Assam.
Meanwhile, the neighbouring states of Meghalaya, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland have strengthened their security with Assam out of fear that panic-stricken residents not on the list may cross over to them.

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soothsayer

It is a tricky situation. Sounds bad to hear of basic human right violations but the problem of immigrants who are illegal is harrowing. Stats have it that crime figures shot up  multi fold after the Balkan wars.

Nabs

This is about the right of indigenous people of Assam. NRC will ensure a illegal immigrants free Assam. I think other states also seriously think about the problem of illegal immigrants

sraamin

These are all Bangladeshis,illegal immigrants playing HAVOC in India.

Bhuvan73

Illegals from Bangladesh and Pakistan should not be allowed to stay. They already got their country in 1947.

bsk

we in kerala have lot of Bengalis, but god know if they are really from Bengal or illegal immigrants

subscraxme

This is surely going to be a difficult decision to implement. Not easily digestible, but , absolutely is required. This is happening with most of the countries - Europe is also facing a huge issue with refugees. The same is with the US/ Australia, etc.

In india, verification/ ID is pretty rudimentary. People can get by with minimal or no identification for years together and this makes it a haven for all sort of illegals to settle down there. There will be no doubt many innocents who will also get caught in the dragnet, but the govt. should not have any loopholes which can be misused by anti-nationals and terrorists

uae2007

This is a tricky task. Even though there will be problem for many genuine Indian Nationals it's a long pending matter made worse by vote bank politics of India.

agambhasin

i believe this identification must lead to proper sorting out of our people from other intruders and not only such intruders must be thrown out but even punished appropriately

agambhasin

bsk 2-8-2018 10:14 AM
we in kerala have lot of Bengalis, but god know if they are really from Bengal or illegal immigrants

we in delhi too have a lot of bengalis, and most of them are labourers and workers, none of them has any id, or verification done whatsoever and are just causing lots of crime and other anomalies for the residents, they are mostly suspected to be illegal immigrants from bangladesh and must be thrown out at all costs