2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) having died therein. 10 Only six individuals have been deported thus far, making these detentions indefinite for all others. 11 However, the NRC story does not quite end there. In late 2019, the Central Government indicated that they had plans to replicate the NRC exercise across the entire country, with roll-out scheduled to begin with the collection of census data on the usual residents of the country (the National Population Register) from 1 April 2020 — a process that is currently on hold on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. 12 There are good grounds for fears expressed by many groups and communities, as this has the potential to generate one of the largest statelessness crises in history, with the citizenship rights of religious and ethnic minorities, sexual minorities and the poor being put at particular risk. Not unrelated to this development, also in December 2019, the Parliament of India passed an amendment to the Citizenship Act, 1955 (‘CAA’). This legislation is concerned with granting expediated Indian citizenship to persons belonging to non-Muslim minority religious communities from three neighbouring Muslim majority states — Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan — provided they entered Indian territory before the cut-off date of 31 December 2014. The discriminatory character of this legislation has been noted by several commentators. 13 As was made clear by the Minister of Home Affairs (amongst others) in the lead up to the passage of said amendment and the proposal to extend the NRC to a country-wide exercise, a synchronous connection in their respective functioning is conceived. 14 Namely, the CAA is conceived as a protective fallback option to be availed by persons who are not Muslim but find themselves excluded from citizenship through the NRC–FT exercise. Once again, the pandemic seems to have stalled moves towards fully implementing the CAA, with the Central Government yet to frame and bring into 10 11 12 13 14 Rahul Karmarkar, ‘30 “Foreigners” Dead in Assam’s Detention Centres’, The Hindu (online, 12 April 2020) <https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/30-foreigners-dead-in-assamsdetention-centres/article31325045.ece>. From 1985 to the 28th of February 2019, 63,959 people have been declared to be ‘foreigners’ in Assam by these tribunals. See Mannat Malhi, ‘How COVID-19 Measures Reinforce the Indefinite Detention of India’s “Foreigners”, Border Criminologies (Blog Post, 3 July 2020) <https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centrebordercriminologies/blog/2020/07/how-covid-19-0>. In recent months there have been moves made in the Indian State of Bihar, which borders the State of West Bengal, that some legal experts and activists have described as ‘backdoor NRC’. These steps, including calling for the urgent construction of detention centres and putting in place ‘mechanisms’ for people to report suspected ‘illegal immigrants’, have been initiated through an order passed by the state’s Patna High Court, with support from the Government of Bihar. See Neel Madhav, “Outsider narrative”: Muslims in India’s Bihar Fear Assam Repeat’, Al Jazeera (online, 21 September 2021) <https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/21/india-bihar-muslims-nrc-assam-citizenshipseemanchal>. See Farrah Ahmad, ‘Arbitrariness, Subordination and Unequal Citizenship’, U. of Melbourne Legal Studies Research Paper No. 906 (October 2020); Adil Hasan Khan and Michelle Foster, ‘Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 and International Law’, (Brief, Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, 1 April 2021) <https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/statelessness/resources/submissions-and-briefingnotes/briefing-notes>. Rohan Ventakaramakrishnan, ‘Who is Linking Citizenship Act to NRC? Here Are Five Times Amit Shah Did So’, Scroll (online, 20 December, 2019) <https://scroll.in/article/947436/whois-linking-citizenship-act-to-nrc-here-are-five-times-amit-shah-did-so>. 178