India labels 1.9 million Assam residents “foreigners” as prelude to their mass expulsion

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Almost two million residents of Assam, a state in India’s northeast, have been excluded from the Indian state’s reactionary National Register of Citizens (NRC). These de facto “foreigners” are now under threat of being herded into detention centres prior to their mass expulsion.

Moreover, if India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has its way, the process under which all of Assam’s more than 33 million residents have had to provide documentation demonstrating their right to citizenship to the authorities’ satisfaction, or be targeted for deportation, will be extended throughout the country—that is, to all of India’s 1.3 billion people.

Almost all of the 1.9 million people who have been excluded from the NRC—some 6 percent of Assam’s population—are Bengali-speaking, and more than 90 percent of them are impoverished Muslims.

Fearing mass protests against its attempt to declare a substantial fraction of Assam’s Bengali-speaking minority stateless, the BJP central government deployed more than 145 companies of the Central Armed Police Force (CAPF) across the state prior to the publication of the “final” NRC list last Saturday.

A preliminary NRC list published in July 2018 excluded 4.1 million people. The state unit of the BJP and its principal partner in Assam’s government, the ethno-chauvinist Asom Gana Parishad (AGP-Assam People’s Association), have criticized Saturday’s “final” NRC for not targeting far more Bengali-speakers for deportation. “The AGP is not satisfied at all about the number of exclusions … [it] is far too low and we cannot accept that,” declared party chief and Assam cabinet minister Atul Bora.

The stated aim of the NRC is to root out and expel all those who cannot prove that they or their ancestors lived in India prior to March 24, 1971. Thus by design, the vast majority of those who have been deemed “foreigners” were born and have spent their entire lives in India, or at the very least have lived there for decades. However, human rights groups have documented numerous instances of people whose families have lived in Assam for generations, and thus fulfill the state’s reactionary citizenship criteria, but have nevertheless been excluded from the NRC due to the authorities’ communal malevolence and incompetence.

The NRC process has sparked opposition and outrage in India and internationally, with even the western press, which never tires of celebrating India as the “world’s most populous democracy,” publishing critical reports.

On Sunday, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tried to paint the publication of the NRC as essentially a non-event. He denied those excluded from the NRC have been rendered “stateless” or designated “foreigners.” “Exclusion from the NRC,” said Kumar, “has no implication on the rights of an individual resident in Assam. Those who are not in the final list will not be detained … till they have exhausted all the remedies available under the law.”

All this is lies—a transparent attempt to dress up a state-engineered ethnic-cleansing campaign as lawful, restrained, even humane.

The right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP President and Home Minister Amit Shah, has repeatedly described “illegal” immigrants as “termites” and vowed to drop them in the Bay of Bengal.

Six detention camps already exist in Assam, most of them within district jails, and almost a dozen more are reportedly under construction.

The NRC process has already caused enormous anxiety, distress and hardship, as poor, often illiterate people have scrambled to come up with documentation to convince hostile government appointees that they should not be excluded. Now, under conditions where the state government has publicly declared that it is dissatisfied that “only”1.9 million have been denied citizenship, those excluded from the NRC will have to go before one of the more than one thousand newly-established “Foreigners Tribunals” to try to convince the authorities that they meet the reactionary NRC criteria. Should they fail, theoretically they can appeal to the courts, but every step of this process involves spending money that most don’t have.

The Modi government’s whipping up of hostility against immigrants, like its promotion of “cow protection,” the building of a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of the razed Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, and other Hindu communalist causes, is aimed at deflecting mounting anger over mass joblessness, chronic poverty and agrarian distress into reactionary channels.

The BJP’s anti-Bengali campaign in Assam, it should be added, has a pronounced anti-Muslim communalist thrust. In line with its vile Hindutva-ite ideology which defines India as a Hindu nation, and in keeping with its plans to transform into a Hindu rashtra or state, the BJP has brought forward legislation to grant Hindus who have migrated to India from Bangladesh citizenship, while denying it to Bangladeshi Muslims, on the claim that the former have fled persecution. But when it comes to the Rohingya fleeing ethnic-cleansing in Burma, the BJP government is adamant that none will be granted asylum, let alone citizenship.

The Indian state’s foul and shameful actions in Assam echo its actions in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and underscore that India’s ruling elite, like its counterparts around the world, is increasingly using authoritarian methods of rule and cultivating communalist and fascist reaction.