‘Muslims Are Foreigners’: Inside India’s Campaign to Decide Who Is a Citizen – By Karan Deep Singh and Suhasini Raj

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.

SEE ALSO

Waiting for Citizenship – By Harish Wankhede (Mar 28, 2020, EPW)

Shaheen Bagh Protests: ‘Muslim Women Don’t Need Saviours, They Were Saviours of the Idea of India’ – By Eram Agha (Mar 28, 2020, News18)

Police surrounded me, wanted me to wind up; Muslim women became my saviour – By Sandeep Pandey (Apr 1, 2020, The Counterview)

India’s citizenship protests – By Aditi Bhandari and Anand Katakam (Mar 30, 2020, Reuters)