Last week, a new report from the National Law School of India University and the Queen Mary University of London described how Assam’s quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals, supported by the Gauhati High Court, have stripped thousands of citizenship, ignoring India’s legal procedures and Supreme Court orders.
A study of 1,200 High Court orders, the report was put together by Article 14 editorial board member and law professor Mohsin Alam Bhat and colleagues Arushi Gupta and Shardul Gopujkar. “Future generations of Indians will be ashamed, appalled and enraged by this systematic cruelty being perpetrated in the name of their safety and security,” wrote Tarunabh Khaitan, professor and chair of public law at the London School of Economics Law School, in an endorsement of the report.
In 2017, I travelled to Assam to write this investigation into the lives disrupted and families torn apart in the state’s citizenship trials. They were then cloaked in a veneer of legalese and legitimised as an exercise overseen by the Supreme Court. The poorest, usually those without adequate documentation, were the most obvious victims.
Many Hindu migrants, too, were swept into the net, but the net was methodically adjusted over the years in such a way that mainly Muslims remain. (It is not out of the bounds of imagination if a similar disenfranchisement occurs in Bihar, where 6.5 million voters have been excluded, from a dodgy, last-minute revision of voter rolls, with plans now being made for other states).
The broader implications of the Assam blueprint are becoming ever clearer, as the dots are joined, and the exclusionary tactics are replicated in India’s unfolding Kristallnacht.
“India’s ruling BJP is fuelling discrimination by arbitrarily expelling Bengali Muslims from the country, including Indian citizens,” Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, a global advocacy group, was quoted as saying in a new report released on July 25. “The government is putting thousands of vulnerable people at risk in apparent pursuit of unauthorised immigrants, but their actions reflect broader discriminatory policies against Muslims.”
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