Delay in foreigner tribunal appeals agonising people left out of NRC in Assam further

Atour Ali and Gopal Biswas share almost the same pangs of being pushed into a citizenship crisis in Assam.

Ali, a driver from Chaygaon in Kamrup district, about 50-km west of Guwahati was among the 19.06 lakh people whose names were dropped from the list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is being updated in Assam with a target to solve the state's long foreigner problem. Ali says his name was dropped even though his parents' names were included in the final list of the NRC released in July 2019.

The case of Biswas, a Hindu Bengali living at Bonda in the outskirts of Guwahati is a little murkier. He and his wife, Namita were marked as D (doubtful) voters more than 10 years ago and were barred by the Election Commission from casting votes since then. Their applications for NRC were also not accepted.

Ali is confident that his name would be cleared by the foreigner tribunal as he has documents to prove that his parents lived in Assam before March 24, 1971, the cut-off date decided to detect the foreigners. "But unless I know the exact reason why my name has been left out, how can I move the tribunal? Nearly two years have passed. I don't understand why they are keeping us in such panic for so long," Ali told DH at his rented house at Sijubari in Guwahati, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Read | TMC is spreading lies, NRC won't impact Gorkhas: Amit Shah

A person left out of the NRC is supposed to be given an opportunity to move a foreigner tribunal within 120 days. But the delay in the process has caused much agony among such people.

The NRC exercise has remained in limbo after the ruling BJP in Assam refused to accept the final list saying that many ineligible persons made it to the list while genuine citizens have been dropped. The BJP-led government is now seeking a re-verification of 20 per cent applications in the districts bordering Bangladesh and 10 per cent applications in the rest of Assam.

Many say that Assam has a large number of people who had migrated from neighbouring Bangladesh without any documents. This has created a demographic threat to the identity and culture of the local Assamese and other ethnic communities.

Biswas said he had submitted the refugee certificate issued by the Government of India in 1964 in his father's name, Madan Mohan Biswas, after he had migrated to Assam from Mymansingh district of then East Pakistan and now Bangladesh. His father was allotted land by Assam government and even an Indian citizenship certificate was issued. He had submitted all those in court. Biswas, now 48, a mason who works on daily wage basis and his wife has been making rounds of the court for more than two years.

BJP's manifesto for the 2021 Assembly elections promised a "corrected NRC" to identify the infiltrators and offer protection to genuine Indian citizens. The opposition Congress slammed BJP saying that the ruling party is not willing to complete the NRC exercise. BJP wants to give citizenship to the non-Muslim migrants till 2014 through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and identify the Muslim migrants since March 24, 1971, as the "infiltrators" through the NRC, it said.

This raised fear among many Muslims that they could be lodged in detention camps inside jails, alongside close to 1,000 persons, belonging to both Hindus and Muslims, who were "declared foreigners" by foreigner tribunals. A new detention camp is being constructed at Matia in Western Assam's Goalpara district, where the "declared foreigners" are likely to be transferred from the present camps inside six jails across Assam. The new detention camp can lodge 3,000 persons.

Congress is also in favour of the NRC and says that all migrants who entered the state post-1971 must be detected irrespective of religion and should be deleted from voters list and deported to Bangladesh.