We have witnessed the campaign by the Burmese in Myanmar to exclude the Rohingya. India plans a similar expulsion. Two years ago, Assam, an Indian state bordering Bhutan and Bangladesh, embarked on a vast exercise: to identify every resident who could demonstrate roots in the state before March 1971. And deport anyone who couldn’t. Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, authorities published an unfinished draft of 19 million names minus the names of 14 million other residents. Proving the identities of more than 30 million people – many bearing handwritten records, or none at all – has fallen to Prateek Hajela, a senior civil servant. “We have received around 65 million documents,” he says from his office in Guwahati, the Assam capital. The fate of those who fail to win citizenship is outside his control, he says. “What happens to those people who have applied and are not found to be eligible, I can’t say.”
The Assam chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, said in an interview last month that foreigners would lose constitutional rights. “They will have only one right – human rights as guaranteed by the the UN that include food, shelter and clothing.” The issue of deportation, he said, “will come later”.
The process is sparking anxiety in Assam, warning it might be about to manufacture a teeming population of stateless people. Assam is building a new detention centre to process the “foreigners” it plans to evict in the coming years. Tribunals have already declared about 90,000 people in Assam to be foreigners. At least 2,000 people are already detained in six facilities across the state.
For centuries until the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, human traffic flowed freely across the territory. In smaller numbers, people have continued crossing in the decades after: Indian security agencies estimate about 15 million Bangladesh citizens work and live in India without authorisation. Border guards were accused of gunning down nearly 1,000 people in the decade to 2010. A barbed-wire fence, bolstered in parts by floodlights and cameras, has been under construction since the mid-1980s and will eventually stretch more than 3,300km.
Resentment has been most acute in Assam, where it sparked an anti-migrant movement in the 1980s that paralysed the state and eventually won government. It also fuelled one of India’s worst single-day massacres since partition: a frenzied seven-hour pogrom in a clutch of Muslim villages that left at least 1,800 people dead. Assamese complain thousands of migrants have found their way onto voting rolls and take jobs and land from locals.
The prospect of being suddenly arrested as a foreigner and languishing for years in a detention camp is worrying Bengali Muslims in particular. There is enormous fear and apprehension in the community.
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