Assam ground report: NRC has sparked fear and foreboding

DHEKIAJULI(ASSAM): On the morning the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam was released, Mohibul Hoque would not leave his house. He would not turn the television on. He kept his smartphone in the other room, and let it ring incessantly. “I am afraid to find out,” he told his wife. “What if we are excluded?”

The NRC is a list of people who have been able to prove that they were in India before the midnight of March 24, 1971, when neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence. It is a list of genuine Indian citizens, determined by laws unique to the state of Assam.

Hoque, who is in his forties, grows rice and vegetables in the fertile Brahmaputra riverbank in Dhekiajuli district. He has no doubt he is a son of the soil, the child of a father who voted in 1965, and the descendant of grandfather who had land deeds from 1942. And he has the paperwork to prove it. “Bharpoor kaagzaat,” the Bengalispeaker said in Hindi — an abundance of documents.

There is a reason poor semi-literate Hoque, unlike many such farmers outside Assam, has carefully preserved a shelf-full of paperwork. The same reason informed Hoque’s fear on the day the NRC list was released.


As Bengali-speakers, and Muslim at that, Hoque and his ancestors have often been conflated with Bangladeshi immigrants. “The more questions you’re asked, the more answers you keep ready,” said Hoque. The insecurity made him insist that his children speak Assamese. He avoided wearing a lungi (often mistaken as a Bangladeshi outfit) outside home; he did not grow a beard. He hoped the NRC would finally rid him of the fear. “All the doubts will be cleared once the list comes out,” he said when this reporter met Hoque a day before the NRC final draft was released. “You think they’ll give us a card or something, saying ‘bonafide citizen’? I’d wear that on my chest with pride.”

The NRC, however, was born of an agreement devised to address the flipside of Hoque’s insecurity: Assamese anxiety about Bengalis. The resentment dates back to the colonial time, when the British wooed Bengalis through land and jobs to the largely Bodo and Assamesespeaking region. There was resource competition. Riots and state-run anti-immigration programmes have often targeted Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus who have lived in the region for generations. More recently, there is palpable alarm about the growing Muslim population in the state, often wrongly ascribed to illegal migration from Bangladesh, while it is actually due to illiteracy and poverty.

An enormous bureaucratic exercise, the NRC doesn’t claim to resolve all these contentious issues, but it is the hope Assam has saddled it with.


Sammujjal Bhattacharya, advisor to the Assamese nationalist AASU, sees the NRC as dealing with “the threat to the identity of indigenous people of Assam”. Hoque too believed that once his name was on the NRC, he would never again be accused of being a Bangladeshi. On July 30, 2018, however, Hoque was left out of the NRC. So were his three children, and all siblings. Of the over 3.29 crore applicants, he’s among the over 40 lakh people to be excluded.

Among these are 2.48 lakh doubtful voters, declared foreigners and their descendants. The NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela clarified that those left out (except the doubtful voters and foreigners) could appeal with further proof from August 7, 2018.

Hoque will not be detained or deported – but what will happen is uncertain. A few days before the NRC list was released, the outsider-insider debate was all that Assam seemed to be talking about. Ankush Deka, a waiter at a Café Coffee Day outlet in Guwahati, was confident he would make it. “Why will they exclude me?” he asked. “I’m Khilonjia”—loosely translated as indigenous. In Durrung district, a 25-year-old Assamese Muslim, Aporia Ali, searched for his application number in the NRC website on his phone. “I knew I would get in — I’m Khilonjia, after all. But since it is a BJP government, I had a small worry,” he said.

Both were included in the NRC. Their confidence, in sharp contrast to Hoque’s anxiety, is telling. The NRC process, monitored by the Supreme Court, seeks to be identity-neutral. “It’s not about religious denomination,” said Prateek Hajela, the NRC’s tech-savvy state coordinator. “It is only about a cut-off date. Anyone who came before 1971 is an Indian citizen, and anyone who came after is not.”

But identity keeps rearing its head. Since May 2015, the NRC has reopened old wounds, and drawn fresh battle lines. When the central BJP-led government tried to propose a Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016, to enfranchise only non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries, most of Assam protested heavily. Former Assam chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, from Asom Gana Parishad, the ruling state BJP’s ally, said, “Such a law will reduce the people of Assam to a minority in our own homeland. We are equally opposed to granting citizenship to Bangladeshi Hindu and Muslim migrants.”

The registry is a mammoth exercise. It can boast of a budget of `1,200 crore, original software, a corruption-free process, and pioneering ideas like the digitised legacy data available to crores of people. It sifted through reams of yellowing, fraying, moth-eaten documents in Assamese, English and Bengali. It held over nine lakh hearings with large families to identify, and thus verify, each other as descendants of the same ancestor.


It had consensus from all communities in the state — nearly everyone had a reason, given their own place in Assamese society, to back the NRC. So, they cooperated, lining up, filling forms, drawing hope. But when one looks closely at the NRC on the ground, it seems torn between the political craving to exclude immigrants, and the democratic impulse to leave no true Indian out.

At Kakdhua village in Barpeta district, 35-year-old Jahanara Begum had only one document to prove her Indian legacy to the NRC: a village headman’s certificate indicating that she was her father’s daughter, and had moved to her husband’s village after marriage. She had to get this verified by the gram panchayat secretary. “I did, but my name is missing from NRC,” she said.

While her three brothers are in, all three sisters are out. “We all gave the panchayat link certificate,” she said. First included by the cabinet as an acceptable document for married women who may not have birth certificates or school admit cards, it was later declared a “weak document” by the NRC. Hajela called such a document “often unreliable”. “Immigrants can easily get a headman certificate and say they’re citizens,” he said.

But Dhubri-based academic Parveen Sultana believes inordinate numbers of women will lose citizenship if the document isn’t accepted.

Shankar Barman, a teacher in Barpeta district, has found that his daughter and son are not on the list. His wife is excluded too. Her father, a Bengali Hindu refugee, was granted Indian citizenship in West Bengal — she herself was born in Cooch Behar district in West Bengal. “I don’t understand. Will Assam not accept Indian citizenship granted in another state?” asked Barman.


Oddly, many children have been left out of the NRC too. Tamanna Parveen in Kakdhua village, who is four years old, is not on the list. “Why am I the only one left out in my family?” she asked. Two-year-old Shabana Begum and her paternal grandmother are not on the list, while her father and brothers made it.

The most brutal exclusions are those of applicants whose parents or siblings are socalled “doubtful voters”, disenfranchised by the Election Commission in 1997 and 2005, and referred to Foreigners Tribunals by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office and Assam border police. “This process is entirely outside the NRC, and given to gross political interference,” says Hafiz Rashid Ahmed Choudhury, a senior advocate in the Gauhati High Court. Until these people prove their citizenship in the tribunals, the NRC will put their entire family’s application on hold.

Mohammed Nawaz Ali is 70 years old — a “legacy man” who can prove citizenship before 1971. His documents are the basis for his descendants to apply to the NRC. “It was a matter of pride to me, until I got a notice as doubtful voter,” says Ali. The NRC has put on hold his four sisters, five sons and their families. “I don’t understand it,” says Ali, his voice catching in his throat.

His grandson hugs him, and asks, “For the officials who do this to us, I have a question: what do you plan to do with us now? Did you even think about that before you put us all through this grand process?”

Explainer: What is the NRC Uproar About?

What is the NRC?
The National Register of Citizens is a list of Indian citizens in Assam. These are people who have proved that they or their ancestors entered Assam before March 24, 1971, when neighbouring Bangladesh declared independence. It is considered a way to identify illegal migrants from Bangladesh and adjoining areas.

Does the NRC exist only in Assam?
Yes. The law on citizenship in Assam is different from all other Indian states. In the 1980s, there was an anti-foreigner agitation in Assam, especially against Bengalispeakers, who were deemed illegal immigrants. It was led by the All Assam Students Union (AASU), which wanted Assamese primacy. To end the violence, AASU, the Assam state government and then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi signed the Assam Accord in 1985. They agreed on this 1971 cut-off date to protect the social and cultural identity of the Assamese people.

Why is the NRC list being prepared now?
A first draft of the NRC was made in 1951 in Assam, after the 1951 Census. It is being updated as per a Supreme Court directive in 2013. Applications were accepted from May 2015. A first draft was published in December 31, 2017.

How does someone get on the NRC?
The NRC lists 14 documents called legacy data that can be submitted as proof of citizenship, provided they were issued before March 24, 1971. These include the 1951 NRC, electoral rolls, land records, passports, birth certificates and educational certificates. At least one more document must be able to link the applicant to the ancestor.

How many made it to the NRC?
The final draft was released on July 30, 2018. Of 3.29 crore applicants, 40.07 lakh were excluded. Of those left out, 2.48 lakh applicants have been kept on hold.

What happens to people who aren’t on the NRC?
As of now, nothing. The Supreme Court has directed the Central government not to take any coercive action against people who don’t feature in the NRC list.

The Assam Accord states that identified foreigners will be ‘expelled’. However, India and Bangladesh do not have a treaty covering the deportation of migrants.

Assam is planning to build a detention centre to hold ‘foreigners’ identified through the NRC. If people are stripped of Indian citizenship, they are likely to become stateless, a condition the UN refugee agency UNHCR describes as ‘inhumane’, and is running a campaign to end.