Thousands of people in India’s northeastern state of Assam were removed from voters’ lists during national elections due to a complicated citizenship process. BBC Hindi’s Umang Poddar reports on people stuck in a legal quagmire.
Lakshmi Das, 47, felt terrible when she watched many of her neighbours in Silchar city, Assam, cast their vote in the second phase of India’s general election in April.
“The whole country participates in the general election, and I can’t participate,” she says.
Das is one of around 97,000 voters in the state who have a “D,” or “doubtful,” next to their name and are barred from voting because their Indian citizenship is in doubt.
The concept, known as the D-electorate list, is unique to Assam, where immigration and citizenship are among the biggest political fault lines.
The state shares a nearly 300-kilometre (187-mile) long border with Bangladesh and has seen migration from the neighboring country for decades, with people fleeing religious persecution or seeking work. It’s here.
Nationalist groups in Assam have long complained that immigration threatens the state’s cultural and ethnic demographics and strains the state’s resources.
In 1985, the Government of India declared that anyone who had entered Assam after March 24, 1971 without proper documentation would be considered a foreigner.
In 1997, the Election Commission of India (EC), which oversees elections, updated its electoral rolls and identified nearly 300,000 people whose citizenship it considered to be questionable and marked with a “D” against their names. . The EC used its own staff to verify whether these people had documents proving their citizenship.
If a police officer develops “reasonable suspicion,” the case will be referred to the Aliens Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body, where they will have a final chance to prove their citizenship using official documents such as birth certificates and land documents. was given to the people.
If a court declared a person to be a foreigner, the person was either deported or placed in a concentration camp.
The process is still ongoing and mired in controversy, with legal experts calling it confusing and chaotic. Many say it’s not clear how the Democratic supporter was initially identified. Others point out inconsistencies, such as the lack of set standards for what documents are acceptable.
In 2019, a family filed a Freedom of Information request demanding to know why they were marked as doubtful voters. In response, the EC said it had no record of the proceedings taken in the case.
“Democratic voters are left in limbo until the courts decide their fate, sometimes for decades,” said Cicil Day, a former member of the court.
“Until then, they will be prohibited from voting and will not be able to access benefits such as rationing,” he added.
Acquiring citizenship in Assam has long been a complicated process.
In 1951, four years after India’s independence, the government created the National Register of Citizens (NCR) to identify people born in Assam who might be Indians, as well as people who might be immigrants from Bangladesh (then part of Pakistan).
In 2015, we began updating the list for the first time, taking into account the new deadline set by the government: March 24, 1971.
More than 30 million residents have submitted documents proving their citizenship.
After several iterations, nearly 1.9 million names were removed from the final list released in 2019.
In the five years since then, neither the federal nor state governments have announced any concrete plans for the NRC.
Democratic voters were also allowed to apply when the list was updated, but their names were not included. This is because the question of their citizenship had already been decided by the Aliens Tribunal.
But some of their names appear on the final version, adding new confusion to the process.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has repeatedly promised to end the citizenship issue in Assam.
In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he would resolve the D-voter issue and abolish concentration camps from the state.
In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party passed a controversial law it claimed could help people whose citizenship was in doubt. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) allowed people of six religions to qualify for Indian citizenship if they could prove they entered India before 2014. But the law did not apply to Muslims.
Parimal Sukhavaidya, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Silchar, told the BBC that the law would help abolish the Democratic Party voters’ list as it would give most people Indian citizenship.
However, many people are not convinced.
Opposition leaders have called it an “election ploy” and activists say it is physically impossible to resolve the issue quickly.
Critics also point out that the CAA is xenophobic as it may help Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh obtain Indian citizenship, but not Muslims.
Image source, Getty Images
Tanya Laskar, a civil rights lawyer in Assam, says there are other challenges as well.
“The big issue is whether people have the documents to show when they come to India,” Laskar said.
“We’re talking about people who come from marginalized communities in states that get flooded every year. You’re talking about people who fled during wars; Are you imagining that you are running away with your documents?”
Those affected by the training are mostly poor and say they feel lost and fearful about their future.
Haricharan Das recalls the day in 2017 when police came to his house and declared him a democrat.
“I had no idea what it meant or why my name was on the list,” he says. “But I had to cooperate.”
Seven years later, with little knowledge of the case, he is still fighting to prove his citizenship.
He has a trunk full of documents in his house, but when the BBC asked to see copies of his court documents, he spent 30 minutes rummaging through the untidy piles and was unable to produce any.
“I don’t even know who my lawyer is,” he says.
In rare cases, the electoral register may include the name of someone who has already been declared a foreigner by a court.
Monindra Das, 64, says he voted in the ongoing election despite spending two years in a detention camp. He was temporarily released in 2022.
The litigation, which has dragged on for more than 20 years, has strained the family’s finances.
Her 27-year-old son, Virendra Das, said he was forced to drop out of college because his parents didn’t have the money.
Some are hopeful that the ordeal will end soon.
“When you go to the Bharatiya Janata Party, they say they will solve your problems straight away,” says Haricharan Das, a long-time supporter of the party.
But others, like Virendra Das, do not share his optimism. “All the politicians are here to vote, not to understand our pain,” he says.
Lakshmi Das agrees: “I’ve been a Democrat for a long time and no government has ever failed to help us,” she says.
“Who will solve this problem for us?”
