Citizenship test alarms Muslim massacre survivors
NELLIE (India): Thirty-six years after losing his parents, sister and a 4-year-old daughter in one of India’s worst sectarian massacres, Abdul Suban says he is still trying to prove he’s a citizen of the Hindu-majority nation.
Suban is one of hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims categorised as “doubtful voters”, who will not find their names in a National Register of Citizens (NRC) the northeastern state of Assam will release today.
“If the government has decided to brand us foreigners, what can we do?” said Suban, 60. “NRC is trying to finish us off. Our people have died here, but we will not leave this place.”
Suban was seated with his wife at their house a few hundred metres from a vast padi field where, in 1983, scores of people were chased down and killed by machete-armed mobs intent on hounding out Muslim immigrants. He survived by running as hard as he could and hiding behind a bush for days.
Work on the citizens’ register had accelerated under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
With an eye on the 2019 national election, BJP’s Hindu-first campaign has become more strident, critics said, playing to its core base with divisive programmes, such as the citizenship test in Assam.
Several other survivors of the “Nellie Massacre”, which killed around 2,000 people from more than a dozen villages, gave accounts of burying bodies in a mass grave now partly under water.
They said they hoped the release of the NCR list today would not spark further violence. Security had been tightened across Assam.
The citizenship test is the culmination of years of often violent agitations by Assamese demanding the removal of outsiders they accused of taking jobs and cornering resources in the state of 33 million, known for its tea estates and oil fields.
“NRC is extremely important to make the Assamese people feel protected,” said Santanu Bharali, the legal adviser to the BJP chief minister of Assam.
“It’s a moral victory. The ethnic Assamese always maintained the presence of foreigners and this will prove that.”
But the opposition Congress party and rights activists said the government was misusing the register to target even legal Indian Muslim citizens who had traditionally voted for non-BJP parties. BJP and NRC authorities had denied the allegations.
To be recognised as an Indian citizens, residents of Assam had to produce documents proving that they or their families lived in the country before March 24, 1971.