‘They Are Manufacturing Foreigners’: How India Disenfranchises Muslims

After India helped create Bangladesh out of East Pakistan, in 1971, Assam saw an influx of migrants. This amplified the state’s indigenous communities' disdain for Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus. Muslims who migrated long before the partition have also been branded as “Bangladeshis.”, a curse word, a humiliation for the minority’s in the region, soon a threat to the entire nation's minorities having to prove their "patriotism". The Bengal-origin Muslim community has historically been targeted by right-wing political parties looking to consolidate popular Hindu votes. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a register containing names of all "genuine" Indian citizens. It was first prepared in 1951 to ostensibly get rid of its longstanding problem of illegal migrants , the NRC was seen as a move to correct this issue and save the country from further inflow. The final draft of the NRC was published on 31st August 2019 and a total of 19,06,657 individuals have been excluded from the final list. Now over 1.9 million people face the prospect of statelessness. There is growing panic among Muslims outside Assam, as various leaders of the ruling party have demanded that this kind of exercise be extended to the rest of India. On 9th December 2019, the Lok Sabha passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. On 13th December 2019, the President of India approved it, turning it into an Act of Law, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The passing of the CAA has fuelled major insecurities of persecution within the Muslim community throughout India, leading to a string of intense and unstoppable protests demanding the repealing of this regressive Act that goes against the grain of the Indian constitution, which would also be a financial nightmare when consumed throughout India, a social and economical drain, a waste of gigantic proportions. In many places, the state’s response to protests have been characterised by brute force, spiralling India’s global image.

Story : Siddhartha Deb

Photography : Zishaan A Latif

Commissioning Editor : Kristen Geisler for The New York Times Magazine in 2021

Commissioning Editor : Tanvi Mishra for The Caravan Magazine in 2019. {Assam’s Ordeal with the National Register of Citizens (NRC)}

No Place Called Home - How NRC exclusion drove a teenager to take her own life.

“Abba, I heard two people have been picked up by police,” Abdul Kalam recalled his daughter had asked him on the day she committed suicide. “Will they also pick me up?” Abdul Kalam and Halima Khatun are a married couple residing in Kharupetia town in Assam's Darrang district. Their 17-year-old daughter, Noor Nehra Begum, took her own life after she was excluded from the first two drafts of the National Register of Citizens. In end July 2019, I travelled through four districts in Assam, documenting the devastation left behind by the floods that swept parts of the state earlier that month, and the plight of the people struggling for inclusion in the NRC.

No Place Called Home - Poetry as Protest in Assam.

Since 2016, a new wave of protest poetry by Assam’s Bengal-origin Muslim community has emerged in the state. The poetry centres itself around the persecution faced by the community in Assam, the existential dilemma faced by its members, who have been subjected to social and legal backlash for the articulation of their identity, and their vulnerability to exclusion from the National Register of Citizens. “When we speak our story, they say that we are exaggerating, we’re calling them xenophobic,” Abdul Kalam Azad, an independent researcher and poet, said. “Sometimes I wonder, I keep thinking, how can I transfer some of our suffering, in a positive way, to them ... to see this issue empathetically.” In end July 2019, I travelled through four districts in Assam, documenting the devastation left behind by the floods that swept parts of the state earlier that month, and the plight of the people struggling for inclusion in the NRC.

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