INDIAN OR NOT? MUSLIMS FRET AMID DRIVE AGAINST ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS

Ashraf Ali with their families at their home

"Demographic changes in Assam owing to illegal immigration of Bangladeshis is alarming to the extent that many districts have become Muslim-majority areas," BJP spokesperson said.

Marzina Bibi, a Muslim woman living in India’s northeastern state of Assam, is petrified she will be declared stateless.

The 26-year-old’s name was not on a preliminary list of citizens that was published at midnight on Sunday, although she holds a voter identity card and had voted in state elections in 2016.

“Why are they doing this to me?” Bibi asked, sitting beside a bamboo mat she was weaving outside her mud house in Assam’s Fofonga village. “They think I am a Bangladeshi. I was born here, my parents were born here, I am an Indian.”

RELATED-ASSAM RECOGNIZES 19 MILLION AS CITIZENS IN FIRST NRC DRAFT, 13.9 MILLION MORE WAITS FOR STATUS

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which came to power in Assam in the April, 2016 elections, vowed during the campaign to act against illegal Muslim immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. But rights activists say the drive is also targeting Muslims who are Indian citizens.

The draft list, to be published at midnight on Sunday, will ultimately be incorporated into the National Register of Citizens (NRC) after a census carried out for the first time since 1951.

The government claims this register will be used to identify and deport illegal immigrants, but activists warn that hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Assam could be rendered stateless in the process.

"The officials [associated with the NRC project] visited many homes in our village but skipped ours. I am scared about my family being kept off the list. I am an Indian citizen. My father teaches in a school here; my grandfather has a national voter identity card too, [but I] am still petrified," 25-year-old Hussein Ahmed Madani, who lives in the remote Baladmari Char village in lower Assam told with media .

"I have seen many people in my village returning after long fights in the High Court and Supreme Court, vindicated after long battles to prove their citizenship. But there is an atmosphere of fear in the village, in our community here. Who knows who will be thrown out as Bangladeshi."

India says it has implemented a border management plan in conjunction with Bangladesh, but the Bangladeshi government has denied discussing the deportation of migrants with Indian officials. The two countries share a border of more than 4,000 kilometres.

The BJP government says there are about 20 million Bangladeshi immigrants in India, although this figure is disputed.

The release of the NRC comes after the first census in more than half a century. The BJP says it is a "nationalist project" to identify immigrants and thwart "designs of demographic change in the state".

"This NRC register is a step towards identification and isolation of such elements."

Wadud, however, said the state was making it very difficult for Muslims to prove their Indian citizenship.

"Indian citizens are being branded as foreigners, harassed and targeted," Wadud said. "But this is not new. Massacres against Muslims branded as Bangladeshis in Assam are cyclic. There is a new form of segregation growing."

Declared ‘illegal migrants’ from Bangladesh and sent away to a detention camp in Assam in August 2015, Ashraf Ali and Kismat Ali had to wait for more than two years to return home .

Ashraf Ali, 41, and his neighbour Kismat Ali, 40, were on the verge of being deported to a country further south — Bangladesh. The two men were sent to a detention camp in August 2015 by the Foreigners’ Tribunal, which declared them illegal migrants from Bangladesh. On October 30, they finally returned home thanks to a Supreme Court order, having spent exactly two years, two months and 17 days at the camp.

“It was well past midnight on August 11, 2015, when I woke up to repeated knocks on my door, to find our house surrounded by gun-toting policemen. They asked me to dress up as quickly as I could, and bundled me into a vehicle. Then we went to Ashraf’s house nearby, where they picked him up the same way. We were first taken to the Dimakuchi police station and then to the SP (Border)’s office in Udalguri,” Kismat Ali says. At the SP (B)’s office in Dimakuchi, about 120 km from Guwahati, the men were told their names had been marked as D-voters (D for doubtful) in the electoral rolls.

“We were also told that we would be able to get out once we approach the High Court,” Kismat Ali says. Then the two were driven to Goalpara — about 310 km away — and dumped into the detention section of the district jail, meant to accommodate illegal Bangladeshi migrants awaiting deportation.

“There was nothing much to do at the camp,” Kismat Ali says. “We were served tea and biscuits around 7 am, and two meals of rice-daal-sabzi, at 10 am and 4.30 pm.” According to him, while the detention section had over 200 inmates, all identified as ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’, many more were in the remaining part of the jail, including both convicts and undertrials. “The two of us lived in constant fear of what we would do if pushed out to Bangladesh,” says Ashraf Ali, adding that the jail staff often talked about people being deported from the detention camp in Silchar.

Just for belong a Muslim both people are unnecessarily harassed and sent to jail. After long investigation that both people are proved in supreme court .

They goen to the Supreme Court, which called for reports from governments of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, from where Kismat’s and Ashraf’s families had migrated to Assam. Based on the reports, the apex court ordered a CBI probe. Reports from the UP and Bihar governments, and then by the CBI, all proved that Kismat and Ashraf were Indian citizens, following which the Supreme Court, on August 22 this year, asked the Foreigners’ Tribunal in Udalguri to pass a reasoned order. Accordingly, the Tribunal reopened the matter and passed separate orders for Kismat and Ashraf on October 30, declaring both as citizens of India, and ordering their release.