31st July 2019 is the deadline for the completion of the National Register of Citizens (‘NRC’) in Assam, after which, millions of people, mostly from the poorest and marginalized backgrounds, are expected to be stateless if their names are excluded from the final NRC list.

Most of them have been staying in Assam for three to four decades, but do not have the documents to prove their citizenship. The horror of the process is evident to all, who are invested in protecting the basic ethos of the constitution, but not to our executive, and more importantly, to our judiciary.

On 4th July, 2019, independent experts of the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Ahmed Shaheed (freedom of religion or belief), Fernand de Varennes (minority issues) and E. Tendayi Achiume (contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance), expressed huge concerns about the implementation of NRC, and its devastating effect on the people of Assam, particularly the Muslims, who face several risks of violence, detention, or even deportation. They were also extremely concerned about the ‘replication’ of NRC in other parts of India, with consequent horrific results, and stated that the “process may exacerbate the xenophobic climate while fuelling religious intolerance and discrimination in the country.” The UN Special Rapporteurs had written to the Indian Government in June 2018 and in December 2018 also stating their concerns about the NRC process, but received no response from the Government.

As the deadline is looming large, every week is witnessing series of distressing cases of people being on the verge of detention or deportation. In one case, Azizul Hoque, who was suffering from lower limb paralysis was declared a foreigner by the Foreigner Tribunal, owing to his inability to attend the proceedings at the Tribunal, and was in the detention centre since March 2017, which was upheld by the Guwahati High Court in an ex-parte order.

Only last week, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Centre and the Assam Government on his plea. In another case that shook the whole country, Mohammad Sanaullah, a 53 years’ old retired Indian Army soldier who had fought in Kargil War in 1999, was declared a foreigner by the Foreigner’s Tribunal, and was arrested on 29th May 2019, and after 10 days, he was released on bail by the Guwahati High Court on June 2019.  There are several similar cases of residents being detained for years in the detention centres, after being declared a ‘foreigner’ by the Foreigner’s Tribunal.  

In July 2018, the draft NRC list was made public, which excluded 40 lakhs of people, amidst several reports of irregularities in the submission of documents. Another exclusion list of one lakh persons was released last month.

The monstrosity of the NRC process is evident from the fact that it is led by the Supreme Court of India under the aegis of the current Chief Justice, Ranjan Gogoi, who is hellbent on finalizing the NRC list, irrespective of the human cost of the project. If the highest Constitutional Court is out to strip the most marginalized populations of its citizenship rights, then where is the judicial recourse? The Court, in fact, asked the Government why the deportations were so few in number, thereby indicating that more and more deportations should happen.

It is true that NRC was a long-standing demand in Assam, but it was never framed along religious lines, which is the case in the present situation. The BJP, along with certain elements in Assam have completely communalized the issue of NRC, with the aim of disenfranchising the entire Muslim community in Assam, by terming as ‘illegal immigrants’.

To all those Hindu families whose names were excluded from the draft NRC list, the BJP had promised them inclusion, as part of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. Thus, a dangerous xenophobic game is being played by the Government under the guidance of the Supreme Court to strip people of their citizenship rights, and the plans to replicate it in the whole of India.

In fact, the burden of proof has been shifted in the NRC. Generally, under the Citizenship Act, 1955, a person is assumed to be a citizen of India, if one is born in India after July 1950, or one of her parents is an Indian citizen. But under the NRC, there exists no presumption of citizenship, but one has to prove one’s citizenship, through two sets of documents known as ‘legacy documents’, in order to prove that either she or her family had entered Assam before 25th March 1971.

In recent history, no democratic State has been engaged in a concerted effort, aided by the Judiciary, to disposes of millions of people of the citizenship rights, and to render them ‘stateless’. Every basic tenet of human rights principles and constitutional guarantees are being violated in the NRC process. It is inhuman and incomprehensible to throw people in detention centres for years on end, on the farcical basis that they could not prove their citizenship, through some arbitrary process of documentation.