South Asia State of Minorities Report 2019 Making Foreigners in Assam and elsewhere In addition to introducing exclusionary, unfair and arbitrary policies toward refugees, India has also been disenfranchising some of its own citizens, making them foreigners in their own land, incarcerating them in detention centres, and putting them at risk of statelessness. The recently concluded exercise of drawing up a National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam in an effort to ‘detect and deport’ illegal foreigners has created havoc for millions of Indian citizens and has ended up disenfranchising citizens en masse.46 The central government now plans to scale this up nationally to identify ‘illegal immigrants’ everywhere, which many believe refers to Muslims. The long-winded NRC process in Assam has led to an atmosphere of pervasive fear and panic. In a region marked by chronic poverty, illiteracy, poor record-keeping and constant migrations due to floods that wash away entire settlements, individuals face potential disenfranchisement unless they are able to provide documentary evidence tracing their lineage back by almost five decades. In many cases, a mismatch of a mere letter in names in one of the many required documents has been enough to declare someone as a foreigner. The final NRC, published on 31 August 2019, left 1.9 million residents of Assam off the list. As the NRC is touted to be a list of citizens, fears of arbitrary deprivation of nationality of all those who were left off it is widespread. The legal redress awaiting these individuals is opaque, arbitrary and awash with prejudice among those implementing it.47 The exclusion of such a large number of persons is an outcome of procedural failures in the administration of NRC. Populations have been arbitrarily segregated into ‘original’ and ‘non-original’ inhabitants—with Bengali-speaking minorities making up the bulk of the latter, and differential criteria used to verify claims Street Journal, May 31, 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/fear-of-islam-leadsindia-to-snub-refugees-1527807807. 46 Helen Regan, ‘1.9 Million Excluded from Indian Citizenship List in Assam,’ Cable News Network, August 31, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/30/asia/ assam-national-register-india-intl-hnk/index.html. 47 Rohini Mohan, ‘Worse Than a Death Sentence’: Inside India's Sham Trials That Could Strip Millions of Citizenship,’ VICE News, July 29, 2019, https://news. vice.com/en_us/article/3k33qy/worse-than-a-death-sentence-inside-indias-shamtrials-that-could-strip-millions-of-citizenship. 56