Politics of citizenship flare in India
Millions insist they are legal residents in Assam
MAYONG, 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 four million other people 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 Samujjal Bhattacharya, 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.”
On Friday, 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. 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 Bengalispeaking Muslims.
But proving that can be complicated 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.
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 grabbed hold of the issue. Few deny there has been widespread illegal migration into Assam, often by poor Bangladeshis in search of work as farm labourers. The state’s demographics have shifted dramatically in recent decades, with the percentage of Bengalispeakers jumping from 22 per cent in 1991 to 29 per cent in 2011, and the percentage of Assamese-speakers declining. Many analysts, however, say those numbers in part reflect the higher birth rates among Muslims. 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.
Even some of those who support the citizenship survey say the migrants are a significant part of the economy.
“Those immigrants play a very important role in supplying your labour economy. So if those people are given work permits, minus political rights, they could be very valuable in Assam,” said Nani Gopal Mahanta, an Assam-based political analyst.
“We are genuine Indians. We are not foreigners.” ABDUL MANNAN INDIAN FARMER