Assam citizen register: Displaced fight to be included
Millions of Bangladeshi refugees, both Muslim and Hindu, arrived in India following the country’s 1971 war for independence. The mass influx of refugees into Assam has sparked violent anti-immigrant campaigns in the past.
Nearly two million people have been excluded from a list of citizens in India’s northeastern Assam state, raising fears they could be rendered stateless.
The list, known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC), was published on Saturday after a years-long exercise aimed at identifying legal residents in the impoverished border state.
Those excluded have 120 days to prove their citizenship at hundreds of regional quasi-judicial bodies known as foreigner’s tribunals. Up to 200 more tribunals are expected to be set up on top of the existing 100.
From Assam, Al Jazeera’s Priyanka Gupta explains how land, ethnicity and language have split the region.