South Asia State of Minorities Report 2019 citizens.49 And, in 1997, under political pressure, the Election Commission of India launched its own programme to mark out foreigners, identifying ‘doubtful’ voters and removing names from voter lists, again all through the FTs. Since 1985, some 100,000 persons have been declared foreigners, with a steep uptick since 2016, when BJP took power in Assam. Two thirds of these were in ex parte proceedings, where the accused never got a chance to make their case before the bench.50 Individuals declared as foreigners, whose appeals in higher courts have been turned down, end up in detention centres where conditions are grim. In July 2019, India’s Home Ministry revealed in Parliament that Assam’s six functional detention centres housed 1133 such declared foreigners.51 While the NRC and associated exercise was designed primarily to drive Bengali-speaking Muslims out of the state, its actual impact has cut across religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities. Even among the minorities, the most affected are the poor and the vulnerable who cannot afford effective legal representation. Particularly at risk are women, many of whom have married young and moved away to their husbands’ villages, with no official documentation to prove their link to their families and to their places of birth. The documents they can manage to produce, usually issued by village-level authorities, are often considered inadequate by the FTs. The uncertainty and resultant panic have contributed to a spate of suicides by people who fear the indignity of disenfranchisement and the horror of detention. By June 2019, Citizens for Justice & Peace (CJP), a human rights organisation, had tracked 51 such cases in the state, with most of them being reported since the publication of the first draft list in January 2018.52 Many more suicides have been reported since the publication of the final list.53 49 ‘SC Strikes down IMDT Act as Unconstitutional,’ The Economic Times, July 13, 2005, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/sc-strikes-down-imdt-act-asunconstitutional/articleshow/1168803.cms?from=mdr. 50 ‘Unstarred Question No. 1724,’ Supplementary Questions, Parliament of India, last modified July 2, 2019, http://loksabhaph.nic.in/Questions/QResult15. aspx?qref=1909&lsno=17. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 54 ‘Fear over NRC Grips West Bengal, Two More Commit Suicide,’ The Times of India, September 24, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fear- 58