How it feels to be stateless in your own country

Even as millions of ‘citizens’ in Assam await the final list of the National Register of Citizens scheduled to be published on August 31, several hundred thousand people are bound to find themselves as ‘stateless’. Statelessness is a perennially anxious existence of being left out in the lurch as people without a nationality. People fleeing from civil war or escaping because of persecution or discrimination can and do end up as stateless persons. One recent example is the Rohingyas who had to flee from Myanmar.

The process of updating the National Register of Citizens in Assam, first compiled in 1951, has already left out of the draft NRC 41 lakh people. What will happen to those who lose their citizenship? Will these people spend the rest of their lives in detention centres ? Neither the Government nor the Supreme Court have provided an answer so far.

Which country will accept them as their citizens? Bangladesh has formally declared that the NRC is an internal matter of India and that there was no question of accepting people who have been living in India for the past 70 years as ‘Bangladeshi citizens’.

People most likely to lose their citizenship are the poor and the illiterate and people who move their home and hearth periodically because of shifting sands, river and floods. And those who migrated to Assam from other states for work and settled down. Or people who moved out of Assam in search of work and lost connections back in Assam.

Those who may not have a birth certificate (millions don’t) or have gone to school or may not have registered themselves as voters , which in any case is not mandatory, are particularly vulnerable. Because they lack the documents to back up their claim that they and their ancestors have lived in Assam for 40 years or more.

Reports suggest that many poor people, who were left out of the NRC because of negligence of the police and officials, were not even aware of their plight. There are reports that a large number of orders were passed by Foreigners’ Tribunals ex-parte in the absence of the so-called foreigners.

In many cases the poor were unable to engage lawyers and failed to understand requirements of the law.

Others have engaged lawyers by selling off what little land they had. No wonder, the exercise is likely to bring international shame on India. While the immediate concern of the BJP, which has been vigorously pursuing the NRC, is to deprive a large number of people of voting rights, people who are rendered stateless will suffer many more handicaps.

The stateless will end up losing out on Government subsidies, healthcare, state education and food support. They will be deprived of jobs and their movement will be severely restricted. They would not be able to move out in search of a better living or better work. They may succeed in getting married but the marriage and the children from the wedlock will fall in a grey, no-man’s land. The children will also suffer the consequences.

India is not a party to any of the United Nations conventions of 1954 or 1961 on statelessness. The 1954 convention ensures a set of minimum human rights to stateless people whereas the 1964 convention establishes an international framework to reduce statelessness over time. But India not being a party to any of these two conventions, it is not bound by any of these frameworks.