Four million citizens could be deported by authorities

India contemplates to remove citizenship to four million people

Fear of being a stateless person of night to morning. Fear of being taken to a detention camp. Fear of being deported. Fear of an unknown solution. The muslim minority resident in state of Assam, norast of India, a fear of being target of an operation that searches for to expel from country immigrant who live in that region illegally. The authorities want to clarify who deserves citizen of india and who is not. is A list with millions of names has answer.

After government of Assam, a state with 33 million inhabitants that borders Bhutan and Bangladesh, publication of final draft of a list that approves identity of its residents, re is a growing restlessness among those who do not appear in it. And deadline for entry in list is about. 29 million names have received approval, but remaining four, for now, excluded,may lose ir rights of citizenship; y have until September to claim it by submitting documents showing that y or ir predecessors have indigenous roots prior to march of 1971. "No indian citizen genuine should be afraid", said registrar general.

The border of 4,000 kilometres between India and Bangladesh, a line of old blurred and now fenced with barbed wire, has been scene of migrations during centuries. From 1971, hundreds of thousands of bangladeshis crossed border fleeing from a bloody war in which country of bay of Bengal was separated from Pakistan. Many settled in Assam, but re have been turning on constant tensions between natives and outsiders for reasons of religious, ethnic, or labor, or due to disputes over ownership of land. The worst episode was experienced in 1983, when a pogrom in villages of muslim immigrants left at least 2,000 people were killed with strike of a machete. From n on, local population, of hindu majority, blamed growth of muslim community to arrival of persistent foreign nationals without documents.

process of reviewing The backgrounds of all residents of Assam started many years ago, and has supervision of Supreme Court. In December we published a first draft that already did jump alarms among minorities, fearful of ending up in any of six detention camp built to manage deportation of those who are considered illegal. Currently, re are a thousand people locked in se centres.

"even Though we have been told that we can file [ test] once again, we are concerned about our future," he told Reuters Nur Banu, a woman of 45 years who did not find it in list to any of his six family members. In last year we have documented several suicides of individuals who have not seen his name in interim drafts. There were also cases of divided families: children that appear in listings that are not ir parents.

The basic problem of many of m is that it does not retain documents that are as old or only have hand-written. is Not have a way to show your source, something that could happen to indian citizens length and breadth of a country where official records, evidence of identity and censuses are questionable. Also illiteracy rates.

"Being born in India does not make you indian citizen. These people may be expelled if it does not prove that you have been here for generations," he says to THE WORLD, analyst Abhijit Iyer-Mitra. The expert of Institute of Peace Studies and Conflict believes that this issue is "a serious threat" because it is giving back to a basic principle: "Now defendant is guilty from beginning and must prove his innocence, this will have consequences very dramatic in Assam".

The Interior minister, Rajnath Singh, party's hindu BJP, requests that you do not start a "panic unnecessary" because it has been ordered not to be carried out deportations based on last published list. His colleague training and head of government of Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal, has said that none of four billion excluded will be sent to a detention camp. But same Sonowal in January as he announced that people that do not appear in final list, scheduled for end of year, will lose ir constitutional rights. Responsible for finance of his cabinet, he added, for if he had doubts, that "all those whose names do not appear on list will have to be deported".

human rights organizations denounce parallels that exist between process lives in Assam and denial of citizenship suffered by rohingyas in Burma in 1982. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have shown in addition to its concern about possible arbitrary arrests and detentions, before massive creation of stateless people that will be difficult to be deported to Bangladesh, a country that does not recognize m.

The investigator Niranjan Sahoo, specialist in public policies and social exclusion, believes that this is a problem "very politicised" that BJP used with electoral purposes, which could be compounded if prosper an amendment to national law of citizenship. The reform, even if passed, aims to differentiate which migrants can come to be indian citizens according to religion y profess: to accept religious minorities that are persecuted in ir countries of origin, provided that non-muslim communities. "It is an idea very discriminatory I hope that ends up overturning Supreme Court," says Sahoo to this journal.