August 20, 2018
ASIA / PACIFIC
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 5
Millions in limbo as nativist
anger roils Indian state
By Rishi Lekhi
The Associated Press
AYONG, India — The rice
farmer doesn’t know how it
happened. Abdul Mannan just
knows a mistake was made somewhere.
But what can you say when the authorities
suddenly insist one of your five children
isn’t an Indian? What do you do when your
wife and daughter-in-law are suddenly
viewed as illegal immigrants?
“We are genuine Indians. We are not
foreigners,” said Mannan, 50, adding his
family has lived in India’s northeastern
Assam state since the 1930s. “I can’t
understand where the mistake is.”
Neither can nearly 4 million other peo-
ple who insist they are Indian but who now
must prove their nationality as the politics
of citizenship — overlaid with questions of
religion, ethnicity, and illegal immigration
— swirls in a state where such questions
have a long and bloody past.
Today, nativist anger churns through
the hills and plains of Assam state, just
across the border from Bangladesh, with
many here believing the state is overrun
with illegal migrants.
“India is for Indians. Assam is for
Indians,” said Sammujjal Bhattachariya,
a top official with the All Assam Students
Union, which has been in the forefront of
pushing for the citizenship survey. “Assam
is not for illegal Bangladeshis.”
“We need a permanent solution,” he
added.
Some of the 3.9 million residents left off
Assam’s draft list of citizens began picking
up forms to file their appeals, wading into
a byzantine legal and bureaucratic process
that many fear could lead to detention,
expulsion, or years in limbo.
Mannan, his two daughters, and two of
his sons were all listed on the citizenship
list released in July. But his wife, a
17-year-old son, and his daughter-in-law
were nowhere to be seen. No explanation
was given.
“We are worried that the names are not
there,” said Mannan, who lives with his
family in a bamboo-walled hut, supporting
them on about $150 a month in farming
income. “How will we live? What will we
do? How will we stay in Assam?”
For decades, fears of widespread
movement across the porous border with
Bangladesh have triggered tensions
between the state’s majority ethnic group,
Assamese-speaking Hindus, and its
Bengali-speaking Muslims.
In the 1980s, that erupted into violence,
with hundreds of people killed in Assam
amid waves of anti-migrant attacks. New
Delhi eventually ruled that anyone who
could prove their family had lived in India
before Bangladesh’s 1971 war of
independence, which drove millions of
Bangladeshis to flee across the border,
would be considered an Indian citizen.
But proving that can be deeply compli-
cated in a region where basic paperwork —
birth certificates, marriage certificates,
leases — has only recently become
commonplace in many rural villages.
State officials insist they have done
everything possible to make the procedure
fair.
“It’s been an extremely exhaustive
process,” said Prateek Hajela, the
coordinator of the citizenship project that
involves 52,000 officials, visits to 6.8
million families, and countless hearings to
examine the details of family trees.
But the politics of religion and ethnicity
have been on the rise in India since 2014,
when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party was swept to power in
national elections. The party quickly
pushed to update the citizenship registry
in Assam, where politicians have eagerly
M
PROVING NATIONALITY. People whose
names were left off the draft of the National Register
of Citizens (NRC) stand in a queue to collect forms
to file appeals near a NRC center on the outskirts
of Gauhati, India. The draft list of citizens in Assam,
released in July, put nearly 4 million people on edge
to prove their Indian nationality. (AP Photo/Anupam
Nath)
grabbed hold of the issue.
“First our target is to segregate the
foreigners. What steps we will take
against them will come next,” Assam’s top
elected official, Sarbananda Sonowal, told
the Times of India in an interview early
this year. “They will have only one right —
human rights as guaranteed by the U.N.
that include food, shelter, and clothing.”
“For almost 40 years our people have
been living in a state of confusion and
uncertainty,” he told the newspaper.
Today, hundreds of Bengali-speaking
Muslims with suspect nationality are
already living in a half-dozen detention
camps in Assam.
Assam has a population of roughly 33
million, with a little over one-third of them
Muslims.
“The concern over illegal migration is
indeed genuine,” said Akhil Ranjan Dutta,
a political analyst and professor at
Gauhati University in Assam. “But
unfortunately, political parties have
always tried to score brownie points on the
issue purely to gain votes.”
Few deny there has been widespread
illegal migration into Assam, often by poor
Bangladeshis in search of work as farm
laborers. The state’s demographics have
shifted dramatically in recent decades,
with the percentage of Bengali-speakers
jumping from 22 percent in 1991 to 29
percent in 2011, and the percentage of
Assamese-speakers
declining.
Many
analysts, however, say those numbers in
part reflect the higher birth rates among
Muslims. Estimates on the number of
illegal immigrants vary wildly, from a few
hundred thousand to many millions.
While Muslims appear to dominate the
3.9 million people left off the citizenship
rolls, they aren’t the only people now
facing a bureaucratic gauntlet.
“I don’t know about politics. I am a poor
man. I work all day, eat and sleep at night.
I don’t go anywhere else,” said Khitish
Namo Das, 50, a rail-thin Hindu farmer
who insists he was born in India and whose
family of eight — except for one daughter-
in-law — are now considered illegal.
“When the names did not appear on the
list, it made me worry,” he said, then
reassured himself: “I have the documents
so I don’t think I need to worry too much.”
It’s not clear what will happen to people
who, once their appeals are used up, are
still not listed as citizens. Detention is a
strong
possibility
for
some,
but
impoverished Bangladesh insists it will
not accept mass expulsions back into its
territory. Activists worry many could be
left in limbo for years, perhaps decades,
stateless wanderers like Myanmar’s
Rohingya Muslims.
Even some of those who support the
citizenship survey say the migrants are a
significant part of the economy.
“Those immigrants play a very impor-
tant role in supplying your labor economy.
Continued on page 8
WORKSPACE WRECKED. Workers dismantle pipes (top photo) near artworks in Chinese artist Ai
Weiwei’s studio, which was demolished (bottom photo) in Beijing in early August. The frequent government
critic said on his Instagram account that the demolition began without prior notice and posted videos of an
excavator smashing the windows of his “Zuoyou” studio. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Ai Weiwei says Chinese
authorities razed his Beijing studio
BEIJING (AP) — Chinese artist Ai
Weiwei says authorities razed his Beijing
studio.
The frequent government critic said on
his Instagram account the demolition
began without prior notice and posted
videos of an excavator smashing the
windows of his “Zuoyou” studio.
The studio in the northeast Beijing
suburbs had been Ai’s primary work space
since 2006, although he has mostly been
It’s not always easy to manage
diabetes, but I keep trying by
taking it one day at a time.
For more information, please
call 1-800-860-8747 or
visit www.ndep.nih.gov.
The staff at
The Asian
Reporter
wish you
and your
family
a happy
and safe
Labor Day!
based in Europe in recent years.
It’s unclear whether the demolition is
targeting Ai. Beijing authorities have
demolished large swaths of the suburbs in
the past year in a building safety
campaign, typically giving at least several
days notice.
Ai, who has called attention to human-
rights violations and government cor-
ruption in China, was held for more than
two months in 2011 on alleged tax evasion.