Muslims of Bengali Origin In Assam Agree "They Were Wrong" About NRC.

After a string of delays and two draft lists, the updated NRC(National Register of Citizens) was published on August 31 last year- 2019. Of the 3.29 crore people who had applied, only 3.11 crore made it.

The Muslim community accuses the BJP government of trying to delegitimise the register since the number of Bengali Muslims excluded fell below its expectations.

Present Scenario:

Kicking off the old prejudices Large groups of people(especially Bengali Speaking Muslims) now believe that the NRC has given the community a newfound confidence. “Now people are no longer that scared about the foreigners’ issue,” said Hussain, the lawyer from Darrang. “We know what it takes to prove one’s citizenship – all of us have those documents.”

People believe that they were wrong about the concepts of NRC as they had earlier thought their dignities would be put to Stake but now agree that it has turned out to be a life saver for the People of Assam.

Saddam Hussain, a young lawyer from Darrang.

Thought Processes of People Earlier:

Recalling the frenetic summer of 2015, Saifulla Sarkar, who runs a pharmacy in Oudubi, a village in Lower Assam’s Bongaigaon district; said, “Everyone was busy getting their documents in place. All of us had the papers, but it was a question of locating and arranging them – finding out which of the siblings had the land documents of their grandfather; getting previously bought land registered formally, things like that.”

Like the rest of Assam, Oudubi’s residents were preparing to apply to be counted as Indian citizens that summer. Assam’s National Register of Citizens, compiled in 1951, was being finally updated after a series of adversities. Assamese nationalists had long demanded it – the NRC was seen as a means to filter out Indian citizens from undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, who Assamese groups claim were overrunning the state.

Muslims of Bengali origin living in Assam – a community routinely branded as “illegal migrants” – were more than eager to go through the citizenship test. “We wanted the NRC because we wanted to establish once and for all that we are Indians, we are Assamese, that we have the documents to prove it,” said Sarkar. “It was going to be our shot at a life of dignity, an existence free of that slur of Bangladeshi Miya.”

For decades, the word “Miya” had been used as a disparage to refer to Bengali-speaking Muslims, presumed to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

A vast majority of this community furnished documents to prove citizenship according to the terms of the NRC exercise. Yet after a year after the final NRC list was published, most allege they continue to be looked at with suspicion. The humiliation endures.

“Nothing has changed, nothing at all,” said Sarkar.

Saifulla Sarkar at his pharmacy shop in Oudubi.

Certified citizens

To be included in the NRC, applicants had to prove that they or their ancestors had been living in India before midnight on March 24, 1971 – a cut-off that corresponds to beginning of the Bangladesh war, which triggered a fresh wave of migration. To prove this, they had to produce documents proving their own identity as well as pre-1971 documents proving they were descended from someone living in the country before the cut-off date.

The fact that many of them who were not registered under the NRC had been made to go through additional rounds of verification in a process that was tortuous in the first place. Across communities, applicants were excluded from the draft lists of the NRC because of minor clerical errors in yellowing documents made decades ago, or because of technological set-backs in the current process.