‘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
India: Fears of coronavirus outbreak in Assam’s detention centres – By Raqib Hameed Naik & Mahibul Hoque (Apr 8, 2020, Al Jazeera)
Anti-CAA Protests and State Response in Assam: Identity Issues Challenge Hindutva-based Politics – By Chandan Kumar Sarma and Obja Borah Hazarika (Apr 8, 2020, EPW)
https://www.epw.in/engage/article/anti-caa-protests-and-state-response-assam
‘I cannot eat or sleep’: In Assam, farmers grown anxious as vegetables go unsold amid lockdown – By Harsh Mander & Abdul Kalam Azad (Apr 13, 2020, Scroll.in)
Nizamuddin, the Newest Chapter in the Assamese Distrust of the ‘Miya’ – By Rakshanda Deka (Apr 8, 2020, The Wire)
https://thewire.in/communalism/nizamuddin-the-newest-chapter-in-the-assamese-distrust-of-the-miya
