[Assam, a hilly green state near the borders of Myanmar and Bangladesh, has been haunted for decades by conflict between locals and migrants. In the 1980s, after hundreds were slaughtered in an anti-immigrant pogrom, Assamese leaders signed an agreement with India’s central government that was meant to bring peace. Under that deal, there would be a mass citizenship check to ferret out illegal migrants, whom the indigenous Assamese blamed for all sorts of problems.]
By
Suhasini Raj and Jeffrey Gettleman
 |
|
Farid
Ali, center, a farmer in the state of Assam, looked in vain for his name on a
list
of verified citizens on Saturday.CreditCreditSamyukta Lakshmi
for
The New York Times
|
DARRANG
DISTRICT, Assam, India — On
Saturday morning, Farid Ali, a farmer dressed in his best sky-blue kurta and a
white prayer cap, walked quietly into his village headquarters and received
devastating news.
His name wasn’t on the list.
He looked, he waited, his legs began to
shake, his dry lips began to move and he prayed there had been a mistake. But
his name wasn’t anywhere.
Mr. Ali’s citizenship in India, where he has
lived all his life, was now in question, and he could soon be separated from
his family and hauled off to a prison camp.
He is one of nearly two million people in
northeast India who were told Saturday that they could soon be declared
stateless in a mass citizenship check that critics say is anti-Muslim. The news
arrived in small, sunlit offices across the state of Assam, where citizenship
lists were posted that drew huge crowds. Many walked away shocked and
demoralized; others were joyous.
Just about all of those excluded from the
list were ethnic Bengalis, whose families have migrated to Assam during various
periods over the past 100 years. The majority are Muslim, said several lawyers
and human rights activists.
Along with India’s recent decision to revoke
the autonomy of its only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, the Assam citizenship
check has intensified a sense of despair among India’s minority Muslims, as the
Hindu nationalist wave led by Prime Minister Narenda Modi surges ever higher.
“I am more Indian than you,” Mr. Ali told an
Indian journalist. “I am more Indian than these soldiers standing guard.”
But it didn’t matter now, he said. And he
began to cry.
Assam, a hilly green state near the borders
of Myanmar and Bangladesh, has been haunted for decades by conflict between
locals and migrants. In the 1980s, after hundreds were slaughtered in an
anti-immigrant pogrom, Assamese leaders signed an agreement with India’s
central government that was meant to bring peace. Under that deal, there would
be a mass citizenship check to ferret out illegal migrants, whom the indigenous
Assamese blamed for all sorts of problems.
Only now, decades later, is that being done.
And in Mr. Modi’s India, increasingly polarized between Hindus and Muslims, it
has taken on a religious cast.
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which has
been pushing a Hindu supremacist agenda for all of India, has eagerly jumped
into this citizenship debate, stirring up anti-immigrant feelings and doing it
with a clear anti-Muslim bent.
Party officials have demonized migrants much
as right-wing groups have across the world. India’s home minister, Amit Shah,
has repeatedly referred to migrants from Bangladesh, an overwhelmingly Muslim
country, as “termites.”
The Indian authorities are now racing to
build new prisons in Assam, including an enormous one to house thousands of
people they expect to round up for deportation — though how many will actually
be deported, and how many will be marooned in an indefinite state of limbo, is
far from clear. In any case, the walls are already going up.
A preliminary Assam citizenship list
published last year left off four million of Assam’s 33 million residents. Most
applied for reconsideration, and the lists published Saturday showed that about
half of them had made the citizenship cut.
The 1.9 million who did not can appeal to
Foreigners Tribunals — opaque, quasi-judicial courts with a record of
discrimination.
Anas Tanwir, a lawyer who has handled more
than 50 appeals of Foreigner Tribunals’ rulings before the Supreme Court, said
many of the Muslims he represented had not gotten a fair shot.
“For years there has been propaganda against
Bengali Muslims,” he said. “People say Bengali Muslims will steal your kids,
they’ll steal your jobs. They are taking over your land and destroying your
culture. That they even eat human meat.
“It’s xenophobia at its best,” he said.
Earlier this year, he said, a tribunal
official offhandedly said of a Muslim Bengali mother whose citizenship was
being questioned: “She has gifted seven children to India. It’s time now to
send her off.”
Many ethnic Bengalis in Assam have lived in
India since birth. They don’t consider themselves to be from Bangladesh, and
they have no documents linking them to that country, which is why they could
become stateless if India denies them citizenship.
It is not as if Bangladesh, a densely
populated and poor nation, is champing at the bit to absorb nearly two million
more people.
Many of the potentially stateless come from
families who settled in Assam before India became independent in 1947. Back
then, there were no borders between India and Bangladesh; it was all one
British-controlled territory.
Mr. Ali, for example, traces his roots in
India to 1931. He has tried to meet the criteria that all of Assam’s residents
were told to meet: providing documents that showed he or his ancestors had
lived in India before midnight on March 24, 1971, when Bangladesh split from
Pakistan and became its own nation.
But vast numbers of people here, amid the
rice paddies, dirt roads and flimsy, bamboo-walled houses, are poor and
illiterate. They would have problems reading old property deeds or fraying
birth certificates, let alone finding them.
In many cases, perhaps because of clerical
errors or name changes, some people have been deemed citizens while their
siblings or parents have not. For some reason, Mr. Ali and his seven children
were excluded, while his wife was considered a citizen. Mr. Ali doesn’t know
why; he can’t read.
The Home Ministry has granted everyone
excluded from the list four months to appeal. Indian officials have tried to
reassure an increasingly anxious public that the process will be fair.
But critics say the government’s anti-Muslim
bias was revealed when it tried to pass a bill this year offering citizenship
to migrants from neighboring countries — if they were Hindus, Christians,
Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsees or Jains. It was clear to everyone which of South
Asia’s major religions had been left off that list.
The government said it was trying to help
religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. To critics, it
looked like another anti-Muslim campaign.
In the past year, lawyers and human rights
defenders say, anxiety over Assam’s citizenship checks has driven dozens of
people in the state to suicide, both Muslims and Hindus.
But over all, Hindus excluded from the list
appear to be more confident that they won’t actually be deported. Several
politicians have said they will make sure that Hindu Bengalis can stay.
“We are banking on the word from the central
and state government,” said Shrichand Pareek, an upper-caste Hindu.
Many Muslims feel they have no one to turn
to. This process has left them feeling frightened, helpless, alone and confused
— especially children, whose heads have been filled with visions of being
pulled away.
“Sometimes I imagine detention camps to be
like these big tarpaulin tents set amid a vast field where my family will never
be able to meet me, see me,” said Noor Jahan Begum, a 13-year-old girl who had
been worried about making the list. “I think the detention camp is like a
monster that will eat me up.”
But on Saturday, she proved to be one of the
lucky ones. She made it.
”We are going to buy a big chicken and
prepare fish curry from the best variety of fish available to us,’’ said her
jubilant father, Najrul Islam. “It is the biggest relief of our lives.’’
Suhasini Raj reported from Darrang District,
and Jeffrey Gettleman from New Delhi. Shajid Khan contributed reporting from
Darrang District.
