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India builds detention camps for up to 1.9m people ‘stripped of citizenship’ in Assam
- Thread starter Abdullah719
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Zaz
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First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me
CricketCartoons
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Millennials history knowledge in a nutshell. Anything and everything has a nazi/fascism/hitler parallel.
Abdullah719
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Bangladesh wants ‘written’ assurance from India that it won’t send immigrants after CAA
https://theprint.in/diplomacy/bangl...hat-it-wont-send-immigrants-after-caa/342579/
New Delhi: Bangladesh has sought a written assurance from the Narendra Modi government that it won’t send immigrants across the border after the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), multiple sources told ThePrint.
The move came even as Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina continues to face criticism for being “soft” on New Delhi over the issue of National Register of Citizens (NRC), the sources said.
The Bangladesh government had made a similar demand when Hasina was on a private visit to India in October months after the NRC exercise was carried out in Assam, diplomatic sources told ThePrint.
At the time, India had given a verbal assurance to Bangladesh that those rendered “foreigners” under the NRC in Assam will not be sent to Bangladesh. However, it had refused to give a written assurance, stating that the exercise was carried out as per directions of the Supreme Court, said the sources.
However, after the passage of CAA in Parliament this month, fresh concerns have cropped up within the political leadership in Bangladesh that India may now “push” Muslim immigrants deemed illegal under the Act across the border, the sources said.
Now the Indian government does not have compulsions of the court, so a written assurance will not be difficult, added the sources. However, they added, India does not seem to have given any kind of assurance to Dhaka yet that such a sovereign guarantee will be given.
The passage of CAA, which provides for citizenship to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, provoked massive protests across India amid fears that the proposed NRC in conjunction with CAA could result in targeting of Muslims. The government has said there have been “no discussions” on NRC.
The move came even as Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina continues to face criticism for being “soft” on New Delhi over the issue of National Register of Citizens (NRC), the sources said.
The Bangladesh government had made a similar demand when Hasina was on a private visit to India in October months after the NRC exercise was carried out in Assam, diplomatic sources told ThePrint.
At the time, India had given a verbal assurance to Bangladesh that those rendered “foreigners” under the NRC in Assam will not be sent to Bangladesh. However, it had refused to give a written assurance, stating that the exercise was carried out as per directions of the Supreme Court, said the sources.
However, after the passage of CAA in Parliament this month, fresh concerns have cropped up within the political leadership in Bangladesh that India may now “push” Muslim immigrants deemed illegal under the Act across the border, the sources said.
Now the Indian government does not have compulsions of the court, so a written assurance will not be difficult, added the sources. However, they added, India does not seem to have given any kind of assurance to Dhaka yet that such a sovereign guarantee will be given.
The passage of CAA, which provides for citizenship to six non-Muslim communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, provoked massive protests across India amid fears that the proposed NRC in conjunction with CAA could result in targeting of Muslims. The government has said there have been “no discussions” on NRC.
RSS are not listening. The camps being built are the size of twelve Football pitches. I can tell you that they won't be for playing Football either but to kill their Muslim's. Welcome to the return of the Third Reich.
Romali_rotti
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daytrader
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Unfortunately whenever they're criticized they go in a defensive nutshell and drag in Pakistan for comparisons
cricketjoshila
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The law doesnt say so. Your whining here wont change that.
Anyone born after 1986 is only a citizen if either of the parents are citizens of India.
Millions of people particularly in rural area's do not know when they were born. They have never seen a document in their life and you want them to show their old birth certificate. More complete rubbish from you.
Romali_rotti
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CAA is already slowly starting to make progress
Modiji is Brilliant.. If BJP can win Bengal, which I feel they may in the future, the need to take out that Mamta Banerjee and lock her up for treason is imperative...
CAA is already slowly starting to make progress
Modiji is Brilliant.. If BJP can win Bengal, which I feel they may in the future, the need to take out that Mamta Banerjee and lock her up for treason is imperative...
Laws are always changing. It was the law to oppose the colonizers. Laws are always chaning, pretty dumb on to "law say so".
cricketjoshila
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Law isnt changing because you wsnt it to
Abdullah719
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Will Send 1 Crore Bangladeshi Muslims Back: BJP's Dilip Ghosh
Barasat: BJP's West Bengal unit chief Dilip Ghosh said on Sunday that the government is committed to implementing the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens and will send back 1 crore Bangladeshi Muslims living in the state illegally.
Addressing a rally in the North 24 Parganas district, Mr Ghosh said that those opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are anti-Bengali and against the idea of India.
He said 1 crore illegal Muslims in the state are "thriving" on the government's Rs 2 per kg subsidised rice.
"We will send them back," he announced.
"These illegal Bangladeshi Muslims are involved in arsons across the state," Mr Ghosh added
He said that he has no qualms in being branded communal for supporting the cause of Hindu refugees, who had to run for their life after being religiously persecuted.
"Those who are opposing the CAA are either anti-India or anti-Bengali. They are against the idea of India that is why they are opposing Hindu refugees getting citizenship," Mr Ghosh said.
Continuing his tirade against eminent personalities, opposing the CAA and the proposed nationwide NRC, he said their "hearts bleed for infiltrators".
"What about Hindu refugees? They don't have any answers. This is a double standard," Mr Ghosh said, days after terming them "parasites".
Exuding confidence about forming the next government in West Bengal, the controversial BJP leader said Mamata Banerjee's party will be restricted to 50 seats in the 2021 state polls.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/wes...k-rs-1-crore-bangladeshi-muslims-back-2166523
Barasat: BJP's West Bengal unit chief Dilip Ghosh said on Sunday that the government is committed to implementing the proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens and will send back 1 crore Bangladeshi Muslims living in the state illegally.
Addressing a rally in the North 24 Parganas district, Mr Ghosh said that those opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) are anti-Bengali and against the idea of India.
He said 1 crore illegal Muslims in the state are "thriving" on the government's Rs 2 per kg subsidised rice.
"We will send them back," he announced.
"These illegal Bangladeshi Muslims are involved in arsons across the state," Mr Ghosh added
He said that he has no qualms in being branded communal for supporting the cause of Hindu refugees, who had to run for their life after being religiously persecuted.
"Those who are opposing the CAA are either anti-India or anti-Bengali. They are against the idea of India that is why they are opposing Hindu refugees getting citizenship," Mr Ghosh said.
Continuing his tirade against eminent personalities, opposing the CAA and the proposed nationwide NRC, he said their "hearts bleed for infiltrators".
"What about Hindu refugees? They don't have any answers. This is a double standard," Mr Ghosh said, days after terming them "parasites".
Exuding confidence about forming the next government in West Bengal, the controversial BJP leader said Mamata Banerjee's party will be restricted to 50 seats in the 2021 state polls.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/wes...k-rs-1-crore-bangladeshi-muslims-back-2166523
Abdullah719
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'Gov't killed my husband': Why detainees are dying in Assam?
Goalpara, India - In October last year, day-wage labourer Duryadhan Das was out looking for work in Sitamari village when his phone rang. He was instructed to come to Guwahati Medical College in the capital of India's northeastern state of Assam, where his father, 70-year-old Falu Das, had been admitted due to a "deteriorating health condition".
Five days after the call, on October 24, 2019, Falu would go on to become the 28th inmate of Goalpara detention centre to die under unexplained circumstances.
"We did not know he was unwell. He had been in the hospital for five days before they contacted us. The Indian government killed my husband," Korbula Das, his wife of 30 years, told Al Jazeera.
Falu, a Hindu of Bengali origin, was placed in detention in Goalpara district in July 2017 after failing to prove his citizenship to the quasi-judicial "Foreigners' Tribunal" (FT). There are 100 FTs that decide the citizenship of people suspected of being foreign or "doubtful" citizens - a concept introduced in 1997.
More than 1,000 people have been languishing in six detention centres in the state, where immigration has dominated politics since hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into Assam during Bangladesh's liberation war in 1971.
The northeastern border state has also had a border police force of more than 4,000 officers since the early 1960s, tasked with "detecting and deporting" people coming in from neighbouring Bangladesh, branded as "foreigners".
In August 2019, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) - a Supreme Court-monitored bureaucratic citizenship exercise - was published, excluding Falu and nearly two million people of Bengali origin. They have essentially been rendered stateless.
'Send his body to Bangladesh then'
Falu's family refused to accept his body, angry his life had been taken by a bureaucratic exercise that has torn countless families apart.
"We showed them every valid document in his name and yet, he was declared a foreigner. If he was indeed a foreigner, then his body should be sent to Bangladesh. The Indian government jailed him, believing that belonged to that country," said Bhagu Das, Falu's younger son, still seething with anger.
"My father spent his last two years in jail for failing to establish any relationship to Indian citizens in court. How come they now believe we are family when it is time to cremate him?"
Falu left behind a wife and six children, four daughters and two sons, their spouses and children. Eleven of them - his wife, two sons, their wives and six grandchildren - live together in Sitamari where they are one of the poorer families.
Their two small huts near a temple are sparsely furnished - some kitchen utensils, plastic chairs, charpoys (rope beds) and their most precious possessions, government documents kept in a worn polythene bag.
Duryadhan, 30, carefully pulled out the documents - all he has left of their father's life: a voter identification card, a letter from Falu's bank and two letters from the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Nalbari, the first informing them of his father's illness, the second telling them he was dead.
Promises of job and housing
The days following Falu's death were a blur and a media circus, the family recalled. Nalbari district officials and local members of the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were pressuring the family to receive Falu's body while activists and leaders of the opposition Congress party pulled them the other way - advising the family to not accept his body until he was declared an Indian national.
Duryadhan said BJP leaders had offered him monetary compensation, jobs and housing in return for his family ending their protest and receiving Falu's body.
He and his brother were caught between the two forces - with no jobs, no savings, no money for funeral expenses, and no citizenship. "Only my mother and two elder sisters' names are in the final NRC. My brother, two sisters and I are not on the list," Duryadhan told Al Jazeera.
Nearly five months after his father's death, none of the BJP promises have materialised, nor has citizenship.
Deadly protests erupted in Assam after the national BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 11 last year, fast-tracking the naturalisation process for non-Muslims from three neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh.
Under the provisions of the CAA, Muslims of Bengali origin, who are among the 1.9 million people left off the NRC, will not be allowed naturalisation - a move critics say goes against the country's secular constitution.
But many Assamese have decried the law, saying all immigrants, irrespective of their faith, should be deported.
"The BJP leaders told us that we did not need to protest for citizenship. When CAA is implemented, our names will be automatically in the list because we are Hindus," Duryadhan said.
Death under mysterious circumstances
Since last October, three so-called foreigners - Dulal Paul, Falu Das, and Nareshwar Koch - have died under mysterious circumstances in Assam's detention camps. The details of their stories are interchangeable, all are equally disturbing.
All three families told Al Jazeera they were pressured to accept the bodies of their loved ones. In all three cases, the families were not given the medical records clarifying the cause of death.
Dulal, 65, died two weeks before Falu, on October 13 last year. His son Ashok narrates an eerily familiar story. He got a call in October and a notice from the top district officer informing the family of Dulal's admission to Guwahati Medical College due to his "deteriorating health".
The 65-year-old had been in Tezpur detention camp since 2017.
Dulal's family said local politicians coerced them into accepting the body. "They offered me a job, the local BJP MLA Ganesh Limbu, offered financial assistance for the family, if we stopped the protest," recalled Ashok.
"No one should suffer the way my family has suffered. I still do know how my father died. We don't have the death certificate or a post-mortem report. I will fight for my father's right to be declared an Indian [as long as] I am alive," he told Al Jazeera. All of Dulal's three sons have been excluded from the NRC list.
Local BJP leader Narayan Deka, who was in touch with Falu's family, and BJP legislator Ganesh Kumar Limbu, who was in touch with Dulal's family, did not respond to emails and phone calls. Similarly, BJP National Spokesperson Nalin Kohli had not responded to emails and phone calls at the time of publication.
Soon after it happened, Ashok told Amnesty International that his father's death was under very suspicious circumstances. "I was called by the jail authorities saying that my father was ill and was taken to hospital. I went to Tezpur hospital to find he wasn’t there. Then I went to the district jail, where the jailer for the very first time asked me to come and sit inside," Ashok told Amnesty.
"He told me, 'don’t raise any alarm with the civil society bodies but your father's health condition had deteriorated very badly so we’ve sent him to Guwahati, where the government will take care of his hospital expenses'. That's when I got suspicious."
When Ashok reached the hospital in Guwahati, he saw his father lying on the floor. "There was no one to give him water and no one was attending to him. He told me to take him home or else he'll end up dead inside the jail," he told Amnesty.
Foreigners Tribunals 'wreaking havoc'
Dulal's family initially refused to accept the body but after the intervention of the governing party, including the chief minister’s office, they held the funeral after 10 days.
Rights organisations have criticised authorities on the treatment of people in detention centres.
"Indian state is under obligation, under both Indian and international law, to conduct a transparent inquiry if someone dies in custody. The government must order a postmortem report and share it with the family," said Dr Mohsin Alam Bhat, executive director of the Centre for Public Interest Law, who was part of a mission from National Human Right Commission (NHRC) that visited the detention camps to review living conditions inside.
"Persons under detention continue to enjoy the right to life, and dignity, and the right against cruel and inhuman treatment, under the Indian constitution and international human rights law," Dr Mohsin told Al Jazeera.
On January 5, Naresh Koch - an Indigenous Koch tribe of Assam - died in a detention centre in Goalpara.
Koch was neither a Muslim of Bengali origin, nor a Bengali Hindu, the two groups widely perceived to belong to the category of people suspected to be undocumented immigrants.
"He was declared a foreigner despite the fact that he and his ancestors did not have a connection with any foreign country other than the soil of Assam," Abdul Kalam Azad, a human rights researcher who met the family immediately after Koch’s death, told Al Jazeera.
He was picked up from a shop in 2017 in Kamrup district and it was days before his wife Jini knew where he was. "We found out eventually but did not have money to visit him in the prison in Goalpara," she said.
Two years later, in December 2019, Jini was told her husband had been admitted to the Guwahati Medical College after his health deteriorated. By the time she reached the hospital, Koch had suffered a stroke, which left him paralysed. She took care of him for the next two weeks with policemen standing guard.
"How come the foreigners become Indian, when they are about to die?" she asked, sitting in her courtyard in the Bongaigaon village on a January evening.
Jini's family has also not received the medical records, post-mortem report, and death certificate explaining the circumstances of Koch's death.
In a report titled Designed to Exclude, Amnesty International criticised the Foreigners Tribunals for "wreaking havoc in Assam by arbitrarily denying people their citizenship".
The report went on to argue that foreign tribunals were a violation of international laws, which maintain that states carry the burden of proving citizenship, as opposed to the current situation in which the onus of proving one's citizenship is on the individual.
All three families said they were pressured to cremate their loved ones after initially refusing to receive their bodies. The promises that politicians made to them - of jobs, cash and housing - however, are yet to be fulfilled.
No one followed-through on the promises, they told Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/killed-husband-detainees-dying-assam-200303040949450.html
Goalpara, India - In October last year, day-wage labourer Duryadhan Das was out looking for work in Sitamari village when his phone rang. He was instructed to come to Guwahati Medical College in the capital of India's northeastern state of Assam, where his father, 70-year-old Falu Das, had been admitted due to a "deteriorating health condition".
Five days after the call, on October 24, 2019, Falu would go on to become the 28th inmate of Goalpara detention centre to die under unexplained circumstances.
"We did not know he was unwell. He had been in the hospital for five days before they contacted us. The Indian government killed my husband," Korbula Das, his wife of 30 years, told Al Jazeera.
Falu, a Hindu of Bengali origin, was placed in detention in Goalpara district in July 2017 after failing to prove his citizenship to the quasi-judicial "Foreigners' Tribunal" (FT). There are 100 FTs that decide the citizenship of people suspected of being foreign or "doubtful" citizens - a concept introduced in 1997.
More than 1,000 people have been languishing in six detention centres in the state, where immigration has dominated politics since hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into Assam during Bangladesh's liberation war in 1971.
The northeastern border state has also had a border police force of more than 4,000 officers since the early 1960s, tasked with "detecting and deporting" people coming in from neighbouring Bangladesh, branded as "foreigners".
In August 2019, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) - a Supreme Court-monitored bureaucratic citizenship exercise - was published, excluding Falu and nearly two million people of Bengali origin. They have essentially been rendered stateless.
'Send his body to Bangladesh then'
Falu's family refused to accept his body, angry his life had been taken by a bureaucratic exercise that has torn countless families apart.
"We showed them every valid document in his name and yet, he was declared a foreigner. If he was indeed a foreigner, then his body should be sent to Bangladesh. The Indian government jailed him, believing that belonged to that country," said Bhagu Das, Falu's younger son, still seething with anger.
"My father spent his last two years in jail for failing to establish any relationship to Indian citizens in court. How come they now believe we are family when it is time to cremate him?"
Falu left behind a wife and six children, four daughters and two sons, their spouses and children. Eleven of them - his wife, two sons, their wives and six grandchildren - live together in Sitamari where they are one of the poorer families.
Their two small huts near a temple are sparsely furnished - some kitchen utensils, plastic chairs, charpoys (rope beds) and their most precious possessions, government documents kept in a worn polythene bag.
Duryadhan, 30, carefully pulled out the documents - all he has left of their father's life: a voter identification card, a letter from Falu's bank and two letters from the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Nalbari, the first informing them of his father's illness, the second telling them he was dead.
Promises of job and housing
The days following Falu's death were a blur and a media circus, the family recalled. Nalbari district officials and local members of the governing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) were pressuring the family to receive Falu's body while activists and leaders of the opposition Congress party pulled them the other way - advising the family to not accept his body until he was declared an Indian national.
Duryadhan said BJP leaders had offered him monetary compensation, jobs and housing in return for his family ending their protest and receiving Falu's body.
He and his brother were caught between the two forces - with no jobs, no savings, no money for funeral expenses, and no citizenship. "Only my mother and two elder sisters' names are in the final NRC. My brother, two sisters and I are not on the list," Duryadhan told Al Jazeera.
Nearly five months after his father's death, none of the BJP promises have materialised, nor has citizenship.
Deadly protests erupted in Assam after the national BJP government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 11 last year, fast-tracking the naturalisation process for non-Muslims from three neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh.
Under the provisions of the CAA, Muslims of Bengali origin, who are among the 1.9 million people left off the NRC, will not be allowed naturalisation - a move critics say goes against the country's secular constitution.
But many Assamese have decried the law, saying all immigrants, irrespective of their faith, should be deported.
"The BJP leaders told us that we did not need to protest for citizenship. When CAA is implemented, our names will be automatically in the list because we are Hindus," Duryadhan said.
Death under mysterious circumstances
Since last October, three so-called foreigners - Dulal Paul, Falu Das, and Nareshwar Koch - have died under mysterious circumstances in Assam's detention camps. The details of their stories are interchangeable, all are equally disturbing.
All three families told Al Jazeera they were pressured to accept the bodies of their loved ones. In all three cases, the families were not given the medical records clarifying the cause of death.
Dulal, 65, died two weeks before Falu, on October 13 last year. His son Ashok narrates an eerily familiar story. He got a call in October and a notice from the top district officer informing the family of Dulal's admission to Guwahati Medical College due to his "deteriorating health".
The 65-year-old had been in Tezpur detention camp since 2017.
Dulal's family said local politicians coerced them into accepting the body. "They offered me a job, the local BJP MLA Ganesh Limbu, offered financial assistance for the family, if we stopped the protest," recalled Ashok.
"No one should suffer the way my family has suffered. I still do know how my father died. We don't have the death certificate or a post-mortem report. I will fight for my father's right to be declared an Indian [as long as] I am alive," he told Al Jazeera. All of Dulal's three sons have been excluded from the NRC list.
Local BJP leader Narayan Deka, who was in touch with Falu's family, and BJP legislator Ganesh Kumar Limbu, who was in touch with Dulal's family, did not respond to emails and phone calls. Similarly, BJP National Spokesperson Nalin Kohli had not responded to emails and phone calls at the time of publication.
Soon after it happened, Ashok told Amnesty International that his father's death was under very suspicious circumstances. "I was called by the jail authorities saying that my father was ill and was taken to hospital. I went to Tezpur hospital to find he wasn’t there. Then I went to the district jail, where the jailer for the very first time asked me to come and sit inside," Ashok told Amnesty.
"He told me, 'don’t raise any alarm with the civil society bodies but your father's health condition had deteriorated very badly so we’ve sent him to Guwahati, where the government will take care of his hospital expenses'. That's when I got suspicious."
When Ashok reached the hospital in Guwahati, he saw his father lying on the floor. "There was no one to give him water and no one was attending to him. He told me to take him home or else he'll end up dead inside the jail," he told Amnesty.
Foreigners Tribunals 'wreaking havoc'
Dulal's family initially refused to accept the body but after the intervention of the governing party, including the chief minister’s office, they held the funeral after 10 days.
Rights organisations have criticised authorities on the treatment of people in detention centres.
"Indian state is under obligation, under both Indian and international law, to conduct a transparent inquiry if someone dies in custody. The government must order a postmortem report and share it with the family," said Dr Mohsin Alam Bhat, executive director of the Centre for Public Interest Law, who was part of a mission from National Human Right Commission (NHRC) that visited the detention camps to review living conditions inside.
"Persons under detention continue to enjoy the right to life, and dignity, and the right against cruel and inhuman treatment, under the Indian constitution and international human rights law," Dr Mohsin told Al Jazeera.
On January 5, Naresh Koch - an Indigenous Koch tribe of Assam - died in a detention centre in Goalpara.
Koch was neither a Muslim of Bengali origin, nor a Bengali Hindu, the two groups widely perceived to belong to the category of people suspected to be undocumented immigrants.
"He was declared a foreigner despite the fact that he and his ancestors did not have a connection with any foreign country other than the soil of Assam," Abdul Kalam Azad, a human rights researcher who met the family immediately after Koch’s death, told Al Jazeera.
He was picked up from a shop in 2017 in Kamrup district and it was days before his wife Jini knew where he was. "We found out eventually but did not have money to visit him in the prison in Goalpara," she said.
Two years later, in December 2019, Jini was told her husband had been admitted to the Guwahati Medical College after his health deteriorated. By the time she reached the hospital, Koch had suffered a stroke, which left him paralysed. She took care of him for the next two weeks with policemen standing guard.
"How come the foreigners become Indian, when they are about to die?" she asked, sitting in her courtyard in the Bongaigaon village on a January evening.
Jini's family has also not received the medical records, post-mortem report, and death certificate explaining the circumstances of Koch's death.
In a report titled Designed to Exclude, Amnesty International criticised the Foreigners Tribunals for "wreaking havoc in Assam by arbitrarily denying people their citizenship".
The report went on to argue that foreign tribunals were a violation of international laws, which maintain that states carry the burden of proving citizenship, as opposed to the current situation in which the onus of proving one's citizenship is on the individual.
All three families said they were pressured to cremate their loved ones after initially refusing to receive their bodies. The promises that politicians made to them - of jobs, cash and housing - however, are yet to be fulfilled.
No one followed-through on the promises, they told Al Jazeera.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/killed-husband-detainees-dying-assam-200303040949450.html
Abdullah719
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">India’s largest detention centre nears completion in Assam. The centre will have the capacity to house as many as 3,000 people. That’s a small fraction of the 1.9 million left off the state’s citizenship list so far.<br><br>Photo Ahmer Khan for <a href="https://twitter.com/newhumanitarian?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@newhumanitarian</a> <a href="https://t.co/yfmR1qJSrk">pic.twitter.com/yfmR1qJSrk</a></p>— Ahmer Khan (@ahmermkhan) <a href="https://twitter.com/ahmermkhan/status/1235940922417790976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 6, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Abdullah719
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‘Muslims Are Foreigners’: Inside India’s Campaign to Decide Who Is a Citizen
JORHAT, India — For nearly two years, Mamoni Rajkumari, a lawyer, spent her days deciding who was an Indian citizen and who was not, as part of a tribunal reviewing suspected foreigners in the state of Assam. Then, she says, she was dismissed for not declaring enough Muslims to be noncitizens.
“I was punished,’’ she said.
Ms. Rajkumari, 54, has found herself on the front line of India’s citizenship wars. In addition to the tribunals, which Assam has operated for decades, the state has also recently completed a broader, separate review of every resident’s paperwork to determine if they were citizens.
That review found that nearly two million of Assam’s 33 million residents, many of them desperately poor, were possibly foreigners. Now this group — which is disproportionately Muslim — is potentially stateless.
What’s happening in Assam is a preview of what may be coming to India as a whole as Prime Minister Narendra Modi tries to pull the country away from its foundation as a secular, multicultural nation and turn it into a more overtly Hindu state.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/asia/india-modi-citizenship-muslims-assam.html
JORHAT, India — For nearly two years, Mamoni Rajkumari, a lawyer, spent her days deciding who was an Indian citizen and who was not, as part of a tribunal reviewing suspected foreigners in the state of Assam. Then, she says, she was dismissed for not declaring enough Muslims to be noncitizens.
“I was punished,’’ she said.
Ms. Rajkumari, 54, has found herself on the front line of India’s citizenship wars. In addition to the tribunals, which Assam has operated for decades, the state has also recently completed a broader, separate review of every resident’s paperwork to determine if they were citizens.
That review found that nearly two million of Assam’s 33 million residents, many of them desperately poor, were possibly foreigners. Now this group — which is disproportionately Muslim — is potentially stateless.
What’s happening in Assam is a preview of what may be coming to India as a whole as Prime Minister Narendra Modi tries to pull the country away from its foundation as a secular, multicultural nation and turn it into a more overtly Hindu state.
The New York Times interviewed one current and five former members of the Assam tribunals that review suspected foreigners. The five former members said they had felt pressured by the government to declare Muslims to be noncitizens. Three of them, including Ms. Rajkumari, said they were fired because they did not do so.
State and central government officials declined to comment.
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has its roots in a Hindu nationalist worldview, and during last year’s national elections, party leaders vowed to apply the same type of citizenship checks used in Assam to the rest of India. Mr. Modi has recently denied he has any such plans.
Like Assam, India is majority Hindu, with a large Muslim minority. In December, India’s national government passed a sweeping new immigration law that gives a fast track to citizenship for undocumented migrants from nearby countries as long as they are Hindu or one of five other religions. Muslims are excluded.
The upshot is that any Hindus left off Assam’s citizenship lists after its broad review, or declared by tribunals to be foreigners, will likely be affirmed as citizens because of the new immigration law. Muslims may not.
“Increasingly, it is looking like Muslims are becoming a target,” said Binod Khadria, an expert on migration who is a former professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “It’s a charged situation.”
Even before the citizenship review, an indigenous rights movement in Assam, in northeast India on the border of Bangladesh, had been agitating for the government to expel foreigners.
The police — sometimes acting on reports from private citizens — had referred more than 433,000 residents as “suspected foreigners,” according to parliamentary documents, and sent them to tribunals like the one Ms. Rajkumari sat on to produce documents or witnesses to prove they are truly Indian.
Now, the citizenship review has produced 1.9 million new “suspected foreigners.” So Assam is adding more foreigner tribunals to adjudicate their cases.
The whole tribunal process has troubled Ms. Rajkumari and some others who have served as tribunal members, generally hearing cases on their own.
Many poor Indians lack the required paperwork to prove citizenship, like parents’ voting records and land ownership documents that have been certified by authorities as authentic.
What’s more, the choice of who is labeled a suspected foreigner seems to have a religious bias to it, with a much higher percentage of Muslims sent to the tribunals than Hindus, according to Ms. Rajkumari and the tribunal members interviewed. Some of those current and former tribunal members spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals from the government.
Although the tribunals are not technically courts, they function as if they were. If they find that someone cannot prove his or her citizenship, that person can be sent to detention, often within a jail.
Kartik Roy, a lawyer and another former tribunal member, said “most of the references’’ that police officers made to his tribunal to investigate suspected foreigners “were against Muslims.”
He said the pressure was clear: “You have to declare ‘foreigners’ means you have to declare the Muslims,” he said.
Ms. Rajkumari agreed, saying state officials “think Muslims are foreigners.”
Some of the tribunal members interviewed said they felt pressure in general to find more “foreigners,” with a monthly requirement to report how many cases they had heard and of those, how many people had been declared foreigners.
Two other former members said officials in Assam’s Home and Political Department, which from 2016 has been controlled by Mr. Modi’s political party, had complained that they were not declaring enough people noncitizens.
The former tribunal members said the complaints relayed to them were a form of indirect but heavy pressure.
Tribunal members who declared more people foreigners had their performance rated as “good,” which increased their chances of keeping their jobs, according to court documents viewed by The Times. The performance of those who didn’t declare enough people foreigners was marked as “not satisfactory.”
Both Ms. Rajkumari’s and Mr. Roy’s names appeared on that review list with a note against their names, saying they “may be terminated.”
That is exactly what happened. The terms of Ms. Rajkumari and Mr. Roy were not renewed in 2017.
They both said that because the bulk of people in front of the tribunals were Muslims, the expectation was that they would declare Muslims as foreigners, paving the way to deport them, incarcerate them or take away fundamental rights.
The director general of police in Assam and other state officials declined to comment.
Mr. Modi and top officials in his party have denied targeting Muslims in the Assam citizenship check, saying it was meant purely to identify illegal migrants.
The Home Ministry in New Delhi, which ultimately oversees citizenship and residency rules in India, also declined to comment, citing the demands of the coronavirus crisis.
Most of the migrants in Assam came from Bangladesh, at one time or another. Many have lived in Assam for generations, the descendants of economic migrants from decades ago.
And many are illiterate and poor, often with no idea how to read the papers vital to proving a citizenship claim, and keeping them out of jail.
Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country, and one of the poorest and most densely populated nations in the world, has expressed zero enthusiasm in taking migrants back.
The passage of the national citizenship law sparked protests in Assam and across the country, and they continued to flare up until Mr. Modi imposed a coronavirus lockdown across India in late March.
Dozens of people in Assam whose citizenship has been questioned have killed themselves, according to Indian media reports. Countless others fear being expelled from India or thrown in jail.
Mr. Modi’s government doesn’t seem to be devising any plans to deport millions of people.
But it is expanding its capacity to incarcerate foreigners; an enormous detention facility is under construction in the Goalpara district of Assam, where up to 3,000 people are likely to be held.
The compound, set to open in a few months, has thick, high walls on the periphery, watchtowers in every corner, separate sections for men and women, and an infirmary.
In July 2017, Ms. Rajkumari, Mr. Roy and 12 other former tribunal members sued the government for wrongful dismissal, disputing the government’s rating of their work. They lost the case.
Ms. Rajkumari, who continues to practice law, said that what the government pressured her to do was wrong. A few weeks before she was fired, she recalled, she visited her mother.
“Ma, how will I accomplish this task?” Ms. Rajkumari remembered asking her, tears streaming down her face. “Because it is very illegal.”
State and central government officials declined to comment.
Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has its roots in a Hindu nationalist worldview, and during last year’s national elections, party leaders vowed to apply the same type of citizenship checks used in Assam to the rest of India. Mr. Modi has recently denied he has any such plans.
Like Assam, India is majority Hindu, with a large Muslim minority. In December, India’s national government passed a sweeping new immigration law that gives a fast track to citizenship for undocumented migrants from nearby countries as long as they are Hindu or one of five other religions. Muslims are excluded.
The upshot is that any Hindus left off Assam’s citizenship lists after its broad review, or declared by tribunals to be foreigners, will likely be affirmed as citizens because of the new immigration law. Muslims may not.
“Increasingly, it is looking like Muslims are becoming a target,” said Binod Khadria, an expert on migration who is a former professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “It’s a charged situation.”
Even before the citizenship review, an indigenous rights movement in Assam, in northeast India on the border of Bangladesh, had been agitating for the government to expel foreigners.
The police — sometimes acting on reports from private citizens — had referred more than 433,000 residents as “suspected foreigners,” according to parliamentary documents, and sent them to tribunals like the one Ms. Rajkumari sat on to produce documents or witnesses to prove they are truly Indian.
Now, the citizenship review has produced 1.9 million new “suspected foreigners.” So Assam is adding more foreigner tribunals to adjudicate their cases.
The whole tribunal process has troubled Ms. Rajkumari and some others who have served as tribunal members, generally hearing cases on their own.
Many poor Indians lack the required paperwork to prove citizenship, like parents’ voting records and land ownership documents that have been certified by authorities as authentic.
What’s more, the choice of who is labeled a suspected foreigner seems to have a religious bias to it, with a much higher percentage of Muslims sent to the tribunals than Hindus, according to Ms. Rajkumari and the tribunal members interviewed. Some of those current and former tribunal members spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals from the government.
Although the tribunals are not technically courts, they function as if they were. If they find that someone cannot prove his or her citizenship, that person can be sent to detention, often within a jail.
Kartik Roy, a lawyer and another former tribunal member, said “most of the references’’ that police officers made to his tribunal to investigate suspected foreigners “were against Muslims.”
He said the pressure was clear: “You have to declare ‘foreigners’ means you have to declare the Muslims,” he said.
Ms. Rajkumari agreed, saying state officials “think Muslims are foreigners.”
Some of the tribunal members interviewed said they felt pressure in general to find more “foreigners,” with a monthly requirement to report how many cases they had heard and of those, how many people had been declared foreigners.
Two other former members said officials in Assam’s Home and Political Department, which from 2016 has been controlled by Mr. Modi’s political party, had complained that they were not declaring enough people noncitizens.
The former tribunal members said the complaints relayed to them were a form of indirect but heavy pressure.
Tribunal members who declared more people foreigners had their performance rated as “good,” which increased their chances of keeping their jobs, according to court documents viewed by The Times. The performance of those who didn’t declare enough people foreigners was marked as “not satisfactory.”
Both Ms. Rajkumari’s and Mr. Roy’s names appeared on that review list with a note against their names, saying they “may be terminated.”
That is exactly what happened. The terms of Ms. Rajkumari and Mr. Roy were not renewed in 2017.
They both said that because the bulk of people in front of the tribunals were Muslims, the expectation was that they would declare Muslims as foreigners, paving the way to deport them, incarcerate them or take away fundamental rights.
The director general of police in Assam and other state officials declined to comment.
Mr. Modi and top officials in his party have denied targeting Muslims in the Assam citizenship check, saying it was meant purely to identify illegal migrants.
The Home Ministry in New Delhi, which ultimately oversees citizenship and residency rules in India, also declined to comment, citing the demands of the coronavirus crisis.
Most of the migrants in Assam came from Bangladesh, at one time or another. Many have lived in Assam for generations, the descendants of economic migrants from decades ago.
And many are illiterate and poor, often with no idea how to read the papers vital to proving a citizenship claim, and keeping them out of jail.
Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim country, and one of the poorest and most densely populated nations in the world, has expressed zero enthusiasm in taking migrants back.
The passage of the national citizenship law sparked protests in Assam and across the country, and they continued to flare up until Mr. Modi imposed a coronavirus lockdown across India in late March.
Dozens of people in Assam whose citizenship has been questioned have killed themselves, according to Indian media reports. Countless others fear being expelled from India or thrown in jail.
Mr. Modi’s government doesn’t seem to be devising any plans to deport millions of people.
But it is expanding its capacity to incarcerate foreigners; an enormous detention facility is under construction in the Goalpara district of Assam, where up to 3,000 people are likely to be held.
The compound, set to open in a few months, has thick, high walls on the periphery, watchtowers in every corner, separate sections for men and women, and an infirmary.
In July 2017, Ms. Rajkumari, Mr. Roy and 12 other former tribunal members sued the government for wrongful dismissal, disputing the government’s rating of their work. They lost the case.
Ms. Rajkumari, who continues to practice law, said that what the government pressured her to do was wrong. A few weeks before she was fired, she recalled, she visited her mother.
“Ma, how will I accomplish this task?” Ms. Rajkumari remembered asking her, tears streaming down her face. “Because it is very illegal.”
Abdullah719
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">"We went to hearings wherever and whenever we were called, but now we have realised the truth: the government doesn’t want this issue to be resolved.”<a href="https://t.co/yU54z4aDlA">https://t.co/yU54z4aDlA</a> | <a href="https://twitter.com/psychia90?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@psychia90</a></p>— scroll.in (@scroll_in) <a href="https://twitter.com/scroll_in/status/1299635652351455233?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 29, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Abdullah719
T20I Captain
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Video?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Video</a> | "I was fired from my <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/job?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#job</a> as a member of the Foreigners Tribunals because I declared fewer people as <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/foreigners?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#foreigners</a>," says ex-judicial official to <a href="https://twitter.com/poonamjourno?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@poonamjourno</a>.<a href="https://t.co/wrEqnHrgpA">https://t.co/wrEqnHrgpA</a></p>— The Quint (@TheQuint) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheQuint/status/1313350774618025984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/exclusive?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#exclusive</a> interview of a former judicial officer of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Assam?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Assam</a> Foreigners Tribunals who says that he was sacked because he declared fewer foreigners. He says some of his colleagues declared Indians as foreigners to save their jobs. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NRC?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NRC</a> <a href="https://t.co/kUbVU79lBW">https://t.co/kUbVU79lBW</a></p>— Poonam Agarwal (@poonamjourno) <a href="https://twitter.com/poonamjourno/status/1313368556440965120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/exclusive?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#exclusive</a> interview of a former judicial officer of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Assam?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Assam</a> Foreigners Tribunals who says that he was sacked because he declared fewer foreigners. He says some of his colleagues declared Indians as foreigners to save their jobs. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NRC?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NRC</a> <a href="https://t.co/kUbVU79lBW">https://t.co/kUbVU79lBW</a></p>— Poonam Agarwal (@poonamjourno) <a href="https://twitter.com/poonamjourno/status/1313368556440965120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 6, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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