2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(1) collected funds to help them fight for their cause. Nonetheless, social stigma persists where people are called out as ‘Bangladeshis’ or as people who ‘entered Assam by crossing the fence’. The respondents believe that their dialect and attire are held against them and used to profile them as ‘illegal immigrants’. These interviews illuminate the kinds of challenges that interfere with women accessing their right to be included in the NRC. The process itself was not friendly to women, speaking to the monumental challenges that women, especially pregnant or senior women, face in bureaucratic spaces. Dependency on male family members and unfamiliarity with administrative procedures impacted women attempting to get their names registered. The respondents also spoke to the differential treatment of the FT members towards male and female respondents. The FT members tended to ask more complicated questions of the women. A respondent reported that she was asked about the weather on her marriage day, the number of guests present and the address of those guests. FT members were reported to have ignored the claims of alleged foreigners. A male respondent spoke to the fact that that girls in his community were not allowed to get education, whereas boys had access to middle school education at the very least. Due to the lack of income sources, navigating a corrupt system was rendered difficult for persons from lower economic strata. A respondent whose husband was arickshaw-puller highlighted how he was targeted for not being able to bribe the local police personnel, which resulted in them receiving a notice to appear before the FT. A local social activist and a student leader corroborated this as being common practice in the state.!48 It would not be a stretch to state that these challenges would be harder for those women who did not have independent sources of income or support from male family members. While we have looked at the experiences of women in this paper, it is worth considering the experiences of men as well. While treatment by government officials is the same for both genders, the women we surveyed struggled with an acute lack of awareness, access to legal aid and education. Men, on the other hand, were more aware and relatively more educated. This led to a slight divide in the level of harassment experienced by both genders. Men reported that they were more likely to attend meetings and awareness drives happening near their homes and thus are more likely to be able to stand up for themselves with proper arguments and avail of legal aid. Finally, the exclusion of awoman’s name from the register has implications for the rest of the family — the chances are high that the rest of her family, especially her children, would be left out as well. Conversely, there does not seem to be any guarantee that the inclusion of her husband’s name would lead to her name being included. The difficulty in finding the perfect set of documents is revealed through these interviews. In summary, the FT process, as well as the NRC process, seem to disproportionately affect members of ethno-religious minorities from lowerincome backgrounds. The requirement of proving lineage is inherently patriarchal and puts an insurmountable barrier before women who may not have documentary proof of being their parents’ child. This adds to their pre-existing disadvantages, in terms of lack of access to the resources and skillsets necessary to navigating a complex bureaucracy. 148 Interview with Ainuddin Ahmed, Working President of All Assam Minority Students Union (Padmini Baruah, telephone, 20 June 2020). 256