Book review: Abhishek Saha,No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam’s NRC Crisis

In 2015, the state of Assam embarked on an ambitious task of preparing a register of Indian citizens. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) was actually an upgrade of the NRC prepared in the state for the first time in 1951. Cross-border migration and a tumultuous post-Independence history around the issue led to this development (Pisharoty, 2018). The politics of the country’s Northeastern states after Independence have been largely shaped by concerns of supposed continued illegal immigration across the border. Successive governments have failed to provide an effective solution to the problem. Civil society organisations of the state have also actively demanded a lasting solution. To sort out this issue, the idea of updating the NRC was initiated.

Abhishek Saha’s book covers this process very extensively. The mammoth task has been completed in four years and the final NRC published on 31 August 2019. While the process for the first time brought some semblance to the issue and gave a numerical shape to the problem, it has failed to satisfy multiple stakeholders. The final document has left out 1.9 million names of applicants whose citizenship now has to be decided upon by the Foreigners’ Tribunals (FT).

This volume, No Land’s People also looks at the humanitarian crisis which has emerged out of this exercise which was carried out under the purview of the NRC state’s co-ordinator Prateek Hajela, a 1995 batch IAS officer. To authenticate one’s citizenship, a mechanism was worked out through which people had to prove their linkage to family members who were residents of Assam before 1971. To ensure accessibility of this information a huge number of old documents had to be digitised, in itself a challenge. To avoid duplication and ensure cross-checking, family trees were created. Around 52,000 Assam officials worked meticulously to finish the task at hand (Karmakar, 2019). To ensure that no foreigner had enrolled his/her name in the NRC, clauses for reverification and claims/ objections were included. This huge bureaucratic process claimed to be completely dependent on documentary evidence. The book has thoroughly covered the technicalities of this process, including the kinds of documents admissible. While the system seemed to be unbiased, the implementation at the immediate stage presented a number of anomalies.

The author starts his book with a personal story of his grandmother, Alata Rani, who entered the state in1949 and has lived there her whole life only to be tagged as a D Voter or Doubtful Voter and left out of the final NRC. The anomalies and the discretionary approach became apparent soon enough as Saha moves from his grandmother’s case to the larger picture. The process of marking citizens as ‘Doubtful’ is carried out on the basis of field reports submitted by the border police. In many cases, field reports read as works of fiction, illustrating field visits which have never actually taken place. This became clear in the case of an army man, Sanaullah who, after serving in the Indian Army for 15 years, took a job in the police department. However, later he was picked up and sent to the infamous detention centre situated in Goalpara Central Jail for allegedly being unable to prove his citizenship beyond doubt.

The case received a great deal of attention because the person concerned had been a former serving army man. It seemed that the field report filed against Sanaullah stated that he was an illiterate labourer. While Sanaullah was out on bail within a week, no such respite has been available for many others who have continued to languish in jails for years. Saha in his book covers some other cases which bring out similar anomalies. The Moinal Mollah case, for instance, proves that scores of people have been declared foreigners, ex-parte. While Mollah’s parents were declared Indian, he was declared a foreigner in an ex-parte case and detained.

Cases of wrongful identification have seen people spend years in captivity while the state machinery continues its many oversights with impunity. A closer look accorded by Saha at many cases make one thing clear––minute differences in names or spellings has led to the wrongful detention of many people. This is not surprising as a majority of such people in this region are illiterate, dependent on the discretion of enumerators. However, there is no system of holding enumerators accountable for such mistakes. There have been instances when the same person has been summoned again and again to the Foreigners’ Tribunals even after his/her name has been cleared.

Allegations of terminating the services of certain FT members for not declaring a sufficient number of people as foreigners have been made by suspended officials, giving an inkling into the larger politics at play.

In the name of ensuring that no non-citizen has been enrolled in the NRC, a number of corrective measures have been included. This includes a window for claims and objections whereby genuine Indians who have been left out can make a claim to be included and concerned citizens can raise objections against the inclusion of suspicious individuals. However, what has been witnessed are numerous spurious objections being raised by anonymous people, in fact running into hundreds of thousands, made in the last two days of the allotted period. Harassment was also seen when for reverification people were asked to travel hundreds of kilometres to unknown places at short notice.

The loss of lives across communities and social classes has shown the helplessness of people. Reports indicate that around 60 people committed suicide for fear of being left out of the NRC. Lack of funds and road accidents caused casualties.

The book also looks into the creation of categories like Original Inhabitant (OI). These are people whose names were included despite the lack of documentary evidence on the premise that they are indigenous to Assam. While in the name of giving respite, the authority coined the OI category, it in fact put in place a hierarchy based on discretion. The book meticulously follows the role people played, starting from Hajela, who gave directions to the entire exercise, to Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi. It further elaborates how the process has problematised the issue of citizenship by creating a hybrid category of hyphenated citizenship—someone of Indian origin, but able to trace his/her origins to being in Assam before the given cut-off date.

The exercise also made exceptions to amendments to citizenship that were valid for the entire country. The veracity of the exercise however has been questioned because it is an application-based process. Citizens voluntarily applied to be included. Could it have left out people of dubious status who simply may not have applied for inclusion? The frenzied reaction around the process almost foreclosed any discussion on these possibilities and loopholes.

The book begins on a personal note, but ends up capturing a much larger picture. It rightly points out that the 1.9 million people who were left out of the final NRC are today in limbo. They have to go through the lengthy process set up by the FTs to get a verdict on their citizenship. This is a challenge as the efficiency of the FT courts have been questioned on a number of occasions.

The updating of the 1951 NRC, despite its limitations, did see an overwhelming support from people across the state. The sole reason for this was that it was supposed to provide some semblance of a solution to the long-drawn issue of alleged illegal immigration into the state. The process for the first time gave a numerical shape to the issue. While it did challenge the exorbitant numbers often cited by different political formations, talks of re-verification or outright dismissal of the document reeked of tendencies to gain political mileage. Saha’s book brings to one place the information around the complicated process of the NRC as well as its humanitarian cost and perceived ramifications. The volume provides a much needed basis for carrying forward studies on the citizenship question in Assam.