Ever since July 2018, Azit Ali, a 28-year-old sepoy in the Indian Army, has been perplexed by one question. “How can I be a doubtful foreigner all of a sudden when I have served in the army for seven years already?” he asks.
Ali, a resident of Saru Harid village in western Assam’s Barpeta district, is referring to his name being missing from the complete draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that was published in Assam last year. The reason for the exclusion, as he was informed, was a pending case against him suspecting him of being an illegal foreigner.
Beginning in February 2015, with the cut-off date of citizenship as March 24, 1971, Assam has been undergoing an updating of the NRC. The aim is to detect illegal immigrants residing in the state after the cut-off and follow the necessary legal course.
When the draft NRC came out in July last year, 40-lakh-odd people out of a total of around 3.29 crore applicants in Assam could not find their names in it. Among others, these included people who were either declared or suspected to be illegal foreigners by a quasi-judicial institution in the state called the Foreigners’ Tribunal.
In the Ali family in Saru Harid, such suspicion, however, was not directed at Azit alone. Six other members had been similarly kept out of the last year’s draft. The reason given was the same for all—a pending case in the Foreigners’ Tribunal.
“We had used several documents of the pre-1971 period while applying for our names in the NRC. Yet, none of us could make it to the list last year,” says 62-year-old Qubbat Ali, Azit’s father, with surprise.
For Azit, the situation is even more baffling though. For someone who joined service in 2012 after three rounds of verification, the need to prove his Indian citizenship has been both puzzling and frustrating. “Should I be now fighting to prove my citizenship in a tribunal or perform my duties for my country?’ he asks with irritation.
The uncertainty surrounding the Alis is indeed a telling development that reflects the many procedural flaws that appeared during the NRC updating exercise in Assam. Although they had never received any notice earlier, Azit and his father inform that they found a case against them only after inquiring from the police.
“The border branch [of Assam Police] told us that a case had been pending since as early as 2002. If that was true, how could my son get a job with the Indian Army? This is bizarre,” says Qubbat Ali, echoing his son’s frustration.
However, with little time left to August 31, the date of final publication of the NRC, all that Azit and his family can do is wait and hope for an inclusion. They believe the re-application they made during December last year will be considered by the authorities this time.
“Following that, my family has deposed before the NRC authority for three separate hearings between February and June this year. In the last round, we were assured that we would make it to the final list. We are just waiting now,” says Azit with anticipation.
However, in a village long known for sending its boys to the country’s different armed forces, Azit Ali is not the only one to have undergone such an ordeal. Around 20 men are currently serving in different forces, and like Azit, a number of them are fighting the same battle over their Indian citizenship.
Take for example the case of 28-year-old Rubul Ali, Azit’s neighbour and a rank constable in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Out of the total of six members in his family, only one could make it to the NRC draft list in July last year.
While the reason for exclusion was similar to Azit’s family—a pending case in the foreigners’ tribunal—the details, however, are way more intriguing here. “Despite the NRC authority’s claim that we had a pending case [in the Foreigners’ Tribunal], we could not find anything in our inquiry with the border police,” says Ratul Ali, Rubul’s younger brother.
But according to Ratul, this was not the only flaw affecting their application. He says there has been a major inconsistency in the explanations given by the NRC authority on different occasions.
“When the partial draft had come out in December 2017, we were excluded on the ground of being doubtful voters. But last year in July, at the time of the complete draft, they said it was because of a case pending in the foreigners’ tribunal. This clearly proves that we have been wrongly targeted,” Ratul asserts.
On being asked about the uncertainty surrounding his family, Rubul whi is currently stationed in Jharkhand, said over phone that he hasn’t been able to sleep properly for several months now. “My life is full of stress and anxiety because of my duty in a Naxalite-affected area. With so much risk to life already, how do I cope with this additional tension regarding my family’s citizenship crisis?” he laments.
Convinced of the merit in their documents, Rubul Ali’s family decided to reapply for NRC inclusion during the ‘Claims’ window last year. Following an assurance from a visiting team of Assam Police’s Border Branch a couple of weeks back, the family hopes their names will appear in the upcoming NRC on August 31.
Cases of exclusion from the NRC however do not end in this village. Just a hundred metres away from Rubul Ali’s house, army veteran Shahidul Islam has found himself in a similar predicament.
Islam, a 45-year-old subedar currently posted in Kolkata, says that two of his younger brothers—Dilwar Hussain, 28 and Mizanur Ali, 27—also serve in the Indian Army and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) respectively. While all of them had made it to the draft NRC last year, doubts emerged out of the blue when the family was slapped with a Foreigners’ Tribunal notice in late October.
“I have been serving the Indian Army since 1993. During the Kargil war, I fought in the Drass sector to protect my country. Is this the reward I get for all my dedication and sacrifice?” Islam asks with anger.
Islam maintains that it was only after pressure came from the top brass in the defence establishment, that the Foreigners’ Tribunal cleared his name in March this year. But the cloud did not disappear over the fate of his soldier brothers.
“Since their cases had remained undecided, names of Dilwar and Mizanur were struck off from the draft NRC in a separate list that came out in June this year. In the hearings that followed, they pleaded for inclusion again with the necessary pre-1971 documents as done previously,” he says.
Like the other soldier families of the village, Shahidul Islam and his brothers are now looking forward to the final document on August 31. Given the service they have rendered for the country, they believe they will make it to the upcoming register of Indian citizens.
The citizenship tangle surrounding the soldiers of Saru Harid is not the only instance of such a nature in Assam. During the lengthy updating of NRC in the state, there have been a few other cases that created ripples in recent times.
Most notable was the retired army man, Mohammad Sanaullah, who made headlines in June over his detention as a declared foreigner. He was released only after a public outcry and an intervention by the Guwahati High Court. The reason for his detention, as it later became clear, had been a technical error made by the police.
More recently in July, a tribunal in eastern Assam’s Jorhat declared Muzibur Rahman, an assistant sub-inspector of the Border Security Force (BSF) along with his wife, as foreigners. Claiming that he had land documents of as early as 1923, Rahman approached the Guwahati High Court for a solution.
All such developments question the credibility of the existing mechanism of Foreigners’ Tribunals in the state. In the coming months, following the publication of NRC on August 31, their numbers are only likely increase. In such an event, there is a possibility that instances of controversial judgments will come up again in the state.
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