No Place Called Home - How NRC exclusion drove a teenager

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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.

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 to correct this issue and save the country from further inflow.

The final draft of the NRC was published on 31 August 2019, but the process of its updation began in 2013, following an order by the Supreme Court of India, which has since monitored the project closely. A total of 19,06,657 individuals have been excluded from the final list, and they will now have to prove their "Indian citizenship" before the state’s Foreigners Tribunals (FTs) within the next 120 days. At present, there is no clarity on what action may be taken against the persons deemed to be foreigners. But over nineteen million people face the prospect of statelessness, questioning the incumbent establishment's overarching sentiment concerning the act of ethnic cleansing of the predominantly minority muslims being affected by the NRC.

Glaring questions arise of the intent, If the NRC was just a guise for a larger xenophobic endeavour to get rid of minority muslims from one state of India, subsequently spreading the "concept" throughout the country to cleanse India of its plural existence?

On 9 December 2019, the Lok Sabha (Majority seats with the incumbent BJP Government) passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. The bill excludes members of the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian communities who entered India from Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh, from the definition of an illegal immigrant under Indian citizenship law. Effectively, Muslims from these three countries would continue to be treated as illegal immigrants, and would be denied the benefits of the bill.
On 13th December 2019, the President of India gave it his assent, 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 minority Muslim communities throughout India, leading to a string of intense and unstoppable protests demanding the repealing of this draconian and 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 as the world’s largest superficial democracy.

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