Millions at Risk of Becoming Stateless in India

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NEW DELHI—India’s efforts to create a citizen registry in a volatile northeastern state could lead to the world’s largest population of stateless people without citizenship in any country starting this Saturday. That’s when Indian authorities plan to release the final list of Indian citizens in the state of Assam. The list is part of the government’s policy to address long-simmering public discontent in the state over the influx of migrants, mainly Muslims who came from neighboring Bangladesh decades ago during and after the war that brought that country into existence.

A preliminary version of the list released by the government just over a year ago didn’t include the names of about four million of Assam’s 33 million residents. Most of those left off the list have lived in the state for decades, received government benefits such as food subsidies, voted in elections and even been elected to public office. Residents whose names aren’t included in the registry will likely be summoned to appear before special courts empowered to make a final determination on whether they should be denied citizenship. Those denied citizenship could be forced into detention camps, deported or subjected to public persecution.

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The Hindu-nationalist-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party, which currently rules both the country and Assam, has long raised the issue of illegal immigration from Bangladesh and has accused past Congress governments of not doing enough. BJP also stated in its latest policy document that the government will work to prepare citizen registries in other parts of India to check “infiltration,” while ensuring citizenship to non-Muslim immigrants. Amit Shah, a senior BJP leader and India’s home minister, has referred to Muslim immigrants as “termites” that need to be removed from India.

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Human-rights groups also worry the effort could result in large-scale persecution of those left off the registry, especially Muslims. United Nations human-rights experts have cautioned India about potential violations of international law, saying they are concerned about the potential exclusion of “a great number of Muslims and persons of Bengali descent.” Some say developments in Assam resemble moves made by the government of Myanmar in the early 1980s, when the Buddhist-majority country implemented a citizenship law that left almost one million of its Rohingya people—most of them Muslims—stateless.

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The effort to create a citizen registry in Assam comes to completion after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose political career is deeply rooted in a Hindu-nationalist movement long seen as hostile to India’s Muslims, won a second term with a dominant showing by the BJP in recent national elections. Since then, the party has launched several policy initiatives that critics say are fundamentally altering the situation of India’s Muslim population, which numbers more than 170 million and constitutes about 14% of the population.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-muslims-in-indias-assam-at-risk-of-becoming-stateless-11567071000 (paid subscription)

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1. Assam NRC: What next for 1.9 million 'stateless' Indians? (BBC)

India has published the final version of a list which effectively strips about 1.9 million people in the north-eastern state of Assam of their citizenship. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a list of people who can prove they came to the state by 24 March 1971, the day before neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan...

... Assam is one of India's most multi-ethnic states. Questions of identity and citizenship have long vexed a vast number of people living there. Among its residents are Bengali and Assamese-speaking Hindus, as well as a medley of tribespeople. A third of the state's 32 million residents are Muslims, the second-highest number after Indian-administered Kashmir. Many of them are descendants of immigrants who settled there under British rule. But illegal migration from neighbouring Bangladesh, which shares a 4,000-km long border with India, has been a concern there for decades now. The government said in 2016 that an estimated 20 million illegal immigrants were living in India...

... The special courts were first set up in 1964, and since then they have declared more than 100,000 people foreigners. They regularly identify "doubtful voters" or "illegal infiltrators" as foreigners to be deported. But the workings of the specially formed Foreigners Tribunals, which have been hearing the contested cases, have been mired in controversy.

There are more than 200 such courts in Assam today, and their numbers are expected to go up to 1,000 by October. The majority of these tribunals were set up after the BJP came to power in 2014. The courts have been accused of bias and their workings have often been opaque and riddled with inconsistencies. For one thing, the burden of proof is on the accused or the alleged foreigner. For another, many families are unable to produce documents due to poor record-keeping, illiteracy or because they lack the money to file a legal claim. People have been declared foreigners by the courts because of differences in spellings of names or ages in voter rolls, and problems in getting identity documents certified by authorities.

Amnesty International has described the work by the special courts as "shoddy and lackadaisical". Journalist Rohini Mohan analysed more than 500 judgements by these courts in one district and found 82% of the people on trial had been declared foreigners. She also found more Muslims had been declared foreigners, and 78% of the orders were delivered without the accused being ever heard - the police said they were "absconding", but Mohan found many of them living in their villages and unaware they had been declared foreigners...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-49520593

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It is hard to accept that this is not a main story, that no one is doing or saying anything.