South Asia Desk
India has published the final list of the people who have been stripped of Indian citizenship in the restive north-eastern state of Assam that borders Bangladesh.
The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a list of people who can prove they came to the state by 24 March 1971, a day before Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan with active military support from India.
India already detained thousands of people suspected of being foreigners in temporary camps which are housed in the state’s prisons, but deportation is currently not an option for the country, according to a BBC report.
According to political analysts, the process tantamount to “witch hunts” against Assam’s ethnic and religious minorities.
A draft version of the list published last year had excluded four million people from Indian nation.
The NRC was created in 1951 to determine who was born in Assam and is therefore Indian, and who might be a migrant from neighbouring East Pakistan , now Bangladesh.
The register has been updated for the first time.
Families in the state of Assam have been required to provide documentation to show their lineage, with those who cannot prove their citizenship deemed illegal foreigners.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has long advocated for action against what it calls illegal immigration in India but has made the NRC a priority in recent years.
Assam is one India’s most multi-ethnic states. Questions of identity and citizenship have long vexed a vast number of people living there.
Among its residents are Bengali and Assamese-speaking Hindus, as well as a medley of tribes people.
A third of the state’s 32 million residents are Muslims, the second-highest number after Indian-occupied Kashmir. Many of them are descendants of immigrants who settled there under British rule.
