Shahjahan loves teaching science to his students at a government school in the Morigaon district of India’s northeastern state of Assam. But for the past year, the 28-year-old teacher has started each day feeling as though he’s living a lie. Shahjahan, whose name has been changed at his request, hasn’t told anyone at his school that he was not included in the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) that the Indian government published last year. He worries that if the school authorities or his colleagues find out, they’ll discriminate against him. “I also fear that I may be suspended, as I heard of another government schoolteacher who was suspended after the NRC list excluded him,” he said.
First prepared as part of independent India’s first census in 1951, the NRC is the official register of Indian citizens in Assam, the northeastern Indian state that shares a 163-mile-long border with Bangladesh. Over the years, the government claimed that the NRC’s main purpose was to identify and deport Bengali immigrants who’d illegally crossed the border from what started as East Pakistan and then became Bangladesh. The updated list, released on Aug. 31, 2019, was created with a similar intention: It’s excluded 1.9 million people, primarily Bengalis—both Muslim and Hindu—leaving them potentially stateless until proven otherwise.
