The unending tragedy of the non-Assamese

If you drive down the narrow and dusty Station Road in the mofussil town of Dhubri, barely 600 meters from the entrance to the Dhubri Railway Station, is a locality known as Bidyapara.

Several narrow lanes lead to a maze of houses. The lane is so narrow that two persons cannot walk side by side. Doors of houses open directly onto the lane. After walking down for about 200 feet, the lane opens out to shanties squatting on land owned by the Indian Railways.

One can also walk down the platform to the south and keep walking till the shanties hover into view. It is in this squalid slum, surrounded by garbage dumps and large stagnant pools of horribly foul smelling water, that Shahimoon Bibi lived and died.

She committed suicide after one of the many Foreigners’ Tribunals declared her a ‘foreigner’. But the National Register of Citizens (NRC) listed her, after her death, as an Indian citizen. The NRC is of course being updated on the directions of the Supreme Court of India.

While nobody can tell how many innocent Indians have taken their own lives, at least 20 such cases have been reported in the media. Some of them committed suicide after the Foreigners’ Tribunals falsely declared them to be foreigners. Some have chosen to end their lives after they were left out of the ‘final’ NRC list released in July.

Now a fresh NRC list after corrections is expected to be issued in December. But chances look slim that even this list would be error-free. What is even more pertinent is whether anybody would be held accountable for the suicide of Indian citizens falsely declared as foreigner.

Dhubri’s Railway Station was thrown open in 1903. Once a part of undivided Goalpara district bordering Bengal, many Bihari migrant labourers and workers migrated and settled in the town.

Many of them were skilled and semi-skilled construction workers. Their children were born here and have never known Bihar.

Shahimoon Bibi's parents also came from Bihar during the 1950s, and settled here. She and her siblings too were born in Dhubri and grew up in the town. She married a local (Bengali speaking) Muslim, Khairul Alom, and her two sons, who were born here, speak neither Hindi nor Bhojpuri.

In 2015, Shahimoon Bibi and her husband, Khairul Alom applied for their names to be included in the updated NRC like millions of others in Assam. Soon, however, a notice from the Foreigners Tribunal was served on her. She was suspected to be a "foreigner", the de facto official term for an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant, and it was demanded that she should proves her citizenship by appearing before the respective Foreigners Tribunal in Dhubri.

This distressed the acutely impoverished Muslim family that barely ekes out a living. Her husband works as a casual labourer. One of her sons drives a three-wheeler while the other is an assistant to a butcher.

But the family collected the required money for her sister to travel to their ancestral village in Muzaffarpur in Bihar. She managed to obtain documents that proved that their father was indeed an Indian and belonged to a family which was originally resident of Muzaffarpur in Bihar.

The documents, however, were in Hindi. The Foreigners Tribunal reportedly refused to accept those documents and declared her a "foreigner".

Acutely distressed that she may now be put in detention in one of the six detention centres for foreigners in Assam, attached to respective jails, and unable to borrow more money to appeal against the cavalier judgment of the Foreigners Tribunal, Shahimoon Bibi committed suicide by hanging herself on the morning of 10 April 2018.

Her daughter-in-law, Najma Khatoon, who is barely 21 years old, opened the room to offer her the morning cup of tea and found her hanging. The family was in debt of at least Rs 50,000, incurred largely to contest her case in the Foreigners Tribunal.

Less than four months later when the draft NRC was published on July 30, 2018, it included her name in the list, an acknowledgment that she was indeed Indian, decided on the basis of the same documents that the Foreigners Tribunal had refused to accept as legitimate. But certified as genuine by the Bihar Government. It was too late though and Shahimoon Bibi had passed away, hopefully to a better world.

The tragedy, however, doesn’t end here. Successive judgments of the Gauhati High Court, and orders of the Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice of India which is hearing the matter of NRC, has mandated that family members of anyone declared a “foreigner” by any of the 100 Foreigners Tribunals in Assam, would be excluded from the NRC.

In effect, Shahimoon Bibi’s siblings and her children are vulnerable to be prosecuted as “foreigners” if the judgment that had declared her a foreigner isn’t challenged in a higher court and set aside by it.

Shahimoon Bibi is among the 20 recent incidents of suicide in Assam where the victims had taken their lives fearing detention on being declared “foreigner” by a Foreigners Tribunal, or in fear of being prosecuted by a Foreigners Tribunal after their names were excluded from the draft NRC published on 30 July 2018. These suicides, however, aren’t the only tragedies though.

In August 2018, there was a hue and cry in Assam’s local media that a “declared foreigner” was engaged in preparation of the updated NRC.

It was revealed that a teacher in a government school in Morigaon district of Assam, Khairul Islam, who was declared as a “foreigner” by a Foreigners Tribunal in the district, had been working as one of the officials deputed to the NRC authorities.

His mother, two brothers, and a sister, were had been declared “foreigners” by the Foreigners Tribunal No: 3 Morigaon on 20 February 2016. They challenged this judgment through two Writ Petitions in the Gauhati High Court, WP (Civil) Nos: 4012/2016 and 5232/2016. But even the GauhatiHigh Court upheld the judgment of the Foreigners Tribunal. These judgments were passed on 15 May 2018 and 13 June 2018 respectively.

This led to a massive uproar in the local media and Assamese nationalist organisations forced the authorities to arrest Khairul Islam and detain him at the detention centre for foreigners attached to the Tezpur Central Jail. Not one news channel or newspaper however bothered to examine the judgments.

Khairul Islam had, in his appeal, submitted an extract of the NRC 1951 issued by the NRC authorities, that showed that his father was a resident of Assam in 1951.

The Gauhati High Court had, however observed that the National Register of Citizens 1951 was prepared under the Census Act of 1948 as part of the Census of India 1951. Section 15 of the Census Act 1948 says that no document or list or any data, that was prepared as part of the Census, can be used as evidence in any criminal or civil proceedings in any court. Hence, the honourable high court held, the documents submitted could not be admitted as evidence.

This ‘technical’ ground led to the detention of the teacher as foreigner and the entire family had to bear the brunt of being hounded as ‘foreigner’.

When we recently went to visit Khairul Islam’s ancestral home in Thengsali (Khandapukhuri) village in the Mikirbheta Revenue Circle in Morigaon district in Assam, one of his nephews took us to the grave of their grandfather in their own backyard. He had died there before 1971.

Khairul Islam’s grandfather was also issued a gun license by the government which is now held by one of Khairul Islam’s paternal uncles. There are school records that Khairul Islam’s father had gone to school there in 1950s.

It would be obvious to even a lay person that this family cannot be “foreigners”. But this somehow cannot be figured out by two tiers of the judiciary, including an appellate court.

Ironically, the detention of so-called suspected ‘foreigners’ did not begin after BJP came to power in 2014 but in 2012 under the UPA.

But the process is so arbitrary that even a Dalit couple from the Hindi heartland have ended up in detention, with no one to look after their children outside after their grandmother had died of shock. Many such women detainees in the Kokrajhar detention centre are with infants.

In Assam now, two parallel processes are unfolding to “detect” foreigners – the old process of Foreigners Tribunals, of which there are now a total of 100, and the new NRC. Exclusion from the NRC wouldn’t automatically render one stateless and the cases then would have to go through the Tribunals.

But what causes immense anxiety is that the people who may be subjected to a fresh wave of prosecution in the Foreigners Tribunals are invariably poor and many are illiterate. And a wave of new notices has already started being served even before the process of claims and objections in the NRC has concluded.

In a village in Barpeta district in Assam (I am not revealing the name to protect privacy), hundreds of Muslim villagers were left out of the draft NRC. When they applied to know why their names had been excluded, the most common written reason given by the NRC Seva Kendra is “declared foreigner” or “family members of declared foreigners”.

No Case Nos, let alone a copy of the judgment, is provided to them. What is astounding is that most of these villagers had never even received any notice from any Foreigners Tribunal.

Two categories of the excluded have emerged. First are those who had never had any notice served on them by any Foreigners Tribunal and against whom no such case exists. Second, some villagers who had faced prosecution as “suspected” foreigners before the Foreigners Tribunals but which had then declared that the allegations were not sustainable and that they were Indians. Copies and lists of both these sets are with the writer.

The other worry is that it would still exclude family members of those declared as foreigners by outrageously arbitrary Foreigners Tribunals. How arbitrary these Foreigners Tribunals are can be understood from the fact that there had been instances when the same Tribunal prosecuting two brothers separately, declared one an Indian and the other, a foreigner, compelling the Gauhati High Court to order an investigation into the conduct of the tribunal and had its case records seized.

One may argue that judicial remedy is still available to the aggrieved. In reality, however, it is as good as non-existent, because justice is so inaccessible to the poor Muslim or Bengali Hindu villagers. They cannot afford to approach the court.

Even as I was writing this report, a phone call came from a poor widow from the Lahorigaht Revenue Circle of Morigaon district in Assam. I had visited her earlier this month in the one room shanty made of corrugated iron sheets on an embankment of the Brahmaputra she calls home. Her daughter was declared a “foreigner” in July 2014 and has been in detention ever since.

Sofiya Khatun was born in the Dhumkura village in Lahorighat Revenue Circle of Morigaon district of Assam. She married Abdul Khaleq from the same village although he was already married and with several children. Their village started to get eroded by the Brahmaputra and soon they lost all their land and their home to the river. That was about 35 years ago. Soon, even her husband died, leaving her with three young children – a daughter and two sons.

She migrated to an Upper Assam district and became a daily wage labourer. Her three children grew up there. Her daughter, Robija, then got married to another migrant labourer from her home district. In March 2014, the dreaded Border Police served the Notice from the Foreigners Tribunal on Robija and her husband, obtaining their thumb impressions as proof of notice being served on them.

She informed her mother, who ran from pillar to post to gather some money, obtain the documents necessary from her home districts, and hire a lawyer. The Foreigners Tribunal started the hearing on her case on 4 April 2014, and because she couldn’t gather the money quickly enough to hire a lawyer, the Foreigners Tribunal declared her a “foreigner” in just three months on 16 July 2014.

Robija’s husband had already abandoned her along with her young children and escaped to Morigaon in the desperate hope that that would save him from the Foreigners Tribunal. She went back to live with her mother who lived in another rented room nearby.

One afternoon, when her mother Sofiya Khatoon was away at work, the police came and whisked her away to detention with her two minor sons. The other three slightly older children were at a government school and were left behind with their maternal grandmother, Sofiya Khatoon.

It has been 4 years since Robija had been in detention but the family is so poor that they could not even obtain a certified copy of the judgment and case records till September 2018.

The village she was born in, Dumkura, is almost entirely lost to the Brahmaputra. The Census of India shows there are only 5 families with a total population of 34 left in that village. Sofiya and her grandsons have shifted to a flood embankment where hundreds of landless Muslim villagers who have lost their land now live in tiny claustrophobic shanties. Most are so poor that they need to save for a few months to make a trip down to Guwahati, barely a 100 kilometers away.

As I drove back from her tiny home that evening, I kept asking myself how does a Sofiya Khatoon or a RobijaBengum, who are so acutely marginalised that they can’t even look after themselves, pose an existential threat to the great “AxomiyaJati” that once even defeated and expelled a powerful combined Mughal-Rajput Army in 1671?

(The author is an activist and writer based in Assam and chairman of the Unified People's Movement)