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The Assam government has been ordered by the Supreme Court to complete the first round of the citizenship exercise by 31 December.
GUWAHATI: Standing near her small house in an Assam village, nine-year-old Jahanara Khatun's tiny hands struggle to hold up the voters' list before the camera. It is proof, her mother says, that her husband Anowar Hussain, was an Indian. And so was their daughter, Jahanara.
But a notice from the local office of the National Register of Citizens, or NRC, asking them to submit the birth certificate of their nine-year-old daughter to establish her citizenship devastated the family in Goalpara district, 190 km from Guwahati.
"Once he got the notice, he said our end has come. My daughter will be sent to Bangladesh," Karimon Nessa, Anowar's wife told NDTV.
On 3 December, Anowar committed suicide by drinking pesticide.
The Assam government has been ordered by the Supreme Court to complete the first round of the citizenship exercise by 31 December and come up with some sort of a list that could identify residents of Assam who have been able to establish their citizenship, and the rest. The government is busy scrambling verification teams to meet the deadline.
The cut-off date is 1971 - anyone who came in before that is considered Indian; anyone after that is considered illegal, or a foreigner. Families have to prove they are descendants of a legal, pre-1971 resident of Assam.
Anowar Hussain needn't really have worried. His father, Tohuruddin's name figures in Assam's citizenship register prepared after the decadal census in 1951.
In electoral rolls, Anowar is listed as Tohuruddin's son. And birth certificates of his children would prove they are legal citizens. Except Jahanara, all of Anowar's remaining six children have certificates from school too attesting to their date of birth.
Hurmuz Ali, the headmaster of the local primary school, said Anowar had approached him and had been told to come back with details of his daughter's admission since she had stopped attending classes about four years ago.
"He (Anowar) was illiterate and did not have any idea", the headmaster told NDTV.
Local officials responsible for updating the citizenship register said it was wrong to attribute the death to the verification drive.
"We were shocked (to hear of Anowar's suicide). It is at the time of verification so it's natural to blame the notice, but one has to see if there were other reasons," said Hanifuddin Talukdar, who works in the NRC Sewa Kendra in Jaleshwar.
An updated citizenship register was one of the promises made in the 1985 Assam Accord that wanted illegal immigrants from Bangladesh identified and pushed back. Like the rest of the country, the central government did use the 2011 headcount to build a population register of residents. But work to update the citizenship register was started only in 2015 and gained momentum only in 2016, promising to drive away the illegal Bangladeshis.
Nearly 3.25 crore people have submitted documents - estimated to be nearly 500 truckloads - for verification. Officials say they would be able to complete reverification of about 2.38 crore people.
NRC officials said the process was complex but they were being very careful to ensure that no one is wrongly labelled a foreigner.
"We have digitized the data as part of the entire exercise. We will check the document with issuing authorities. We have to check about 6.63 crore documents this way," Prateek Hajela, the State Coordinator for the NRC told NDTV.
Assam's Muslims have largely been suspicious of initiatives to ascertain citizenship, worried that it was an effort to harass and disenfranchise them.
But there are some who welcome the citizenship verification drive.
"The NRC is all the more important for the Muslims, more so for the Bengali speaking Muslims because they are often branded as Bangladeshis and harassed. The NRC will seal the debate as to who is genuine and who is not," said Hafiz Rashid Choudhury, a senior lawyer at the Guwahati high court.
This is the theory.
In practice, there are fears that the poor and the illiterate would be the most vulnerable, given that they often do not have sufficient documentation and are often targeted during drives to identify foreigners.
It was a similar set of concerns that had prompted the central government to not go ahead with a similar citizenship identification drive in the rest of the country nearly a decade ago.
Human rights lawyer Aman Wadud said there were apprehensions about what the government will do.
"There is a reason. History has been testimony to genuine Indians having been marked as doubtful voters, disenfranchised, only to fight cases in foreigners' tribunals for years to prove that they are Indians," said Aman Wadud.
And now, the officials from the NRC have come knocking.
Nur Alam, a petty farmer and his wife Asma Khatun are tense.
Their five-year-old daughter, Mariyum Begum, also figures in the list of people yet to be verified as Indians.
They don't have a birth certificate - all they have is a hand written certificate from the local government health facility, making it a challenge for them to prove Mariyum's parentage. "The anganwadi (government-run day care centre for infants) did not give us the certificate," said Asma Khatun, Mariyum's mother.
The family also faces another challenge - minor discrepancies in Nur Alam's father's name in the 1951 NRC and other official documents, a common problem amongst the poor.
These patchy records have earlier led to many here being declared as illegal by Tribunals.
Village elders said the entire process has been nerve-wracking.
Tofail Ahmed, a village elder told NDTV, "We are anxious we may not be included in NRC because of small discrepancies. In Assam, this happens mostly with Muslim people."
"I can give you my own example. In one document, my name is Tofail Ahmed and in another Tufail Ahmed", he said.
But there is another side to this story: organisations such as the All Assam Students' Union, or AASU, that led the drive to evict illegal immigrants back in the 1980s that worries many illegal immigrants could use forged documents to slip through the sieve.
"They are trying to update their names in NRC by giving false documents. They have been patronised for years by political parties. We are appealing to the employees and officer to be honest during work," said Sammujjal Bhattacharjeee of AASU told NDTV.
But NRC coordinator Hajela said they were pretty sure about their systems. But he cautions that the list that they would be bringing out would be incomplete. "This does not mean people are included or excluded," he said, urging people to wait for the final list.
There is concern that the list could spark tension. Assam's 11 districts which have a significant proportion of Muslims are the most vulnerable.
The centre has sent about 5,000 troops to Assam.
"The venue of the display of the draft NRC would be one area we would be focusing again going by the sensitivity index," Mukesh Agrawal, the Additional Director General of Police (Law & Order) of Assam told NDTV.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/as-...e-nears-finish-line-uncertainty-looms-1792503
GUWAHATI: Standing near her small house in an Assam village, nine-year-old Jahanara Khatun's tiny hands struggle to hold up the voters' list before the camera. It is proof, her mother says, that her husband Anowar Hussain, was an Indian. And so was their daughter, Jahanara.
But a notice from the local office of the National Register of Citizens, or NRC, asking them to submit the birth certificate of their nine-year-old daughter to establish her citizenship devastated the family in Goalpara district, 190 km from Guwahati.
"Once he got the notice, he said our end has come. My daughter will be sent to Bangladesh," Karimon Nessa, Anowar's wife told NDTV.
On 3 December, Anowar committed suicide by drinking pesticide.
The Assam government has been ordered by the Supreme Court to complete the first round of the citizenship exercise by 31 December and come up with some sort of a list that could identify residents of Assam who have been able to establish their citizenship, and the rest. The government is busy scrambling verification teams to meet the deadline.
The cut-off date is 1971 - anyone who came in before that is considered Indian; anyone after that is considered illegal, or a foreigner. Families have to prove they are descendants of a legal, pre-1971 resident of Assam.
Anowar Hussain needn't really have worried. His father, Tohuruddin's name figures in Assam's citizenship register prepared after the decadal census in 1951.
In electoral rolls, Anowar is listed as Tohuruddin's son. And birth certificates of his children would prove they are legal citizens. Except Jahanara, all of Anowar's remaining six children have certificates from school too attesting to their date of birth.
Hurmuz Ali, the headmaster of the local primary school, said Anowar had approached him and had been told to come back with details of his daughter's admission since she had stopped attending classes about four years ago.
"He (Anowar) was illiterate and did not have any idea", the headmaster told NDTV.
Local officials responsible for updating the citizenship register said it was wrong to attribute the death to the verification drive.
"We were shocked (to hear of Anowar's suicide). It is at the time of verification so it's natural to blame the notice, but one has to see if there were other reasons," said Hanifuddin Talukdar, who works in the NRC Sewa Kendra in Jaleshwar.
An updated citizenship register was one of the promises made in the 1985 Assam Accord that wanted illegal immigrants from Bangladesh identified and pushed back. Like the rest of the country, the central government did use the 2011 headcount to build a population register of residents. But work to update the citizenship register was started only in 2015 and gained momentum only in 2016, promising to drive away the illegal Bangladeshis.
Nearly 3.25 crore people have submitted documents - estimated to be nearly 500 truckloads - for verification. Officials say they would be able to complete reverification of about 2.38 crore people.
NRC officials said the process was complex but they were being very careful to ensure that no one is wrongly labelled a foreigner.
"We have digitized the data as part of the entire exercise. We will check the document with issuing authorities. We have to check about 6.63 crore documents this way," Prateek Hajela, the State Coordinator for the NRC told NDTV.
Assam's Muslims have largely been suspicious of initiatives to ascertain citizenship, worried that it was an effort to harass and disenfranchise them.
But there are some who welcome the citizenship verification drive.
"The NRC is all the more important for the Muslims, more so for the Bengali speaking Muslims because they are often branded as Bangladeshis and harassed. The NRC will seal the debate as to who is genuine and who is not," said Hafiz Rashid Choudhury, a senior lawyer at the Guwahati high court.
This is the theory.
In practice, there are fears that the poor and the illiterate would be the most vulnerable, given that they often do not have sufficient documentation and are often targeted during drives to identify foreigners.
It was a similar set of concerns that had prompted the central government to not go ahead with a similar citizenship identification drive in the rest of the country nearly a decade ago.
Human rights lawyer Aman Wadud said there were apprehensions about what the government will do.
"There is a reason. History has been testimony to genuine Indians having been marked as doubtful voters, disenfranchised, only to fight cases in foreigners' tribunals for years to prove that they are Indians," said Aman Wadud.
And now, the officials from the NRC have come knocking.
Nur Alam, a petty farmer and his wife Asma Khatun are tense.
Their five-year-old daughter, Mariyum Begum, also figures in the list of people yet to be verified as Indians.
They don't have a birth certificate - all they have is a hand written certificate from the local government health facility, making it a challenge for them to prove Mariyum's parentage. "The anganwadi (government-run day care centre for infants) did not give us the certificate," said Asma Khatun, Mariyum's mother.
The family also faces another challenge - minor discrepancies in Nur Alam's father's name in the 1951 NRC and other official documents, a common problem amongst the poor.
These patchy records have earlier led to many here being declared as illegal by Tribunals.
Village elders said the entire process has been nerve-wracking.
Tofail Ahmed, a village elder told NDTV, "We are anxious we may not be included in NRC because of small discrepancies. In Assam, this happens mostly with Muslim people."
"I can give you my own example. In one document, my name is Tofail Ahmed and in another Tufail Ahmed", he said.
But there is another side to this story: organisations such as the All Assam Students' Union, or AASU, that led the drive to evict illegal immigrants back in the 1980s that worries many illegal immigrants could use forged documents to slip through the sieve.
"They are trying to update their names in NRC by giving false documents. They have been patronised for years by political parties. We are appealing to the employees and officer to be honest during work," said Sammujjal Bhattacharjeee of AASU told NDTV.
But NRC coordinator Hajela said they were pretty sure about their systems. But he cautions that the list that they would be bringing out would be incomplete. "This does not mean people are included or excluded," he said, urging people to wait for the final list.
There is concern that the list could spark tension. Assam's 11 districts which have a significant proportion of Muslims are the most vulnerable.
The centre has sent about 5,000 troops to Assam.
"The venue of the display of the draft NRC would be one area we would be focusing again going by the sensitivity index," Mukesh Agrawal, the Additional Director General of Police (Law & Order) of Assam told NDTV.
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/as-...e-nears-finish-line-uncertainty-looms-1792503
