The bigger story in Kashmir is the media’s silence on action against its own

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 23, 2026

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/01/23/the-bigger-story-in-kashmir-is-the-medias-silence-on-action-against-its-own

The job of a journalist, in any part of India, is to observe, investigate, verify and report. But if you do precisely that in Kashmir, you are in big trouble. That is what journalists associated with major English language newspapers – Indian Express, Hindustan Times and The Hindu – found out recently.

They have now experienced what journalists not attached to such prominent media houses have been through since August 2019 when the Modi government abrogated Article 370 and converted the state of Jammu and Kashmir into a union territory. With that change came control and coercion of the local press that included arrests, closing offices of publications like Kashmir Times, shutting the Press Club in Srinagar, and daily harassment of journalists and photographers.

You would think that now that this routine has touched mainstream print media, it would make for front page news. It did not. 

 

Bashaarat Masood, Assistant Editor with Indian Express who has been reporting for the paper since 2006 was first summoned on January 14 for this report that appeared on January 13.  The story was billed as an exclusive.  

Masood reported that the J&K police were conducting a survey of all mosques in Kashmir collecting information about the personnel in these mosques like imams and muezzins, members of their managing committee and their charitable wings. He followed this up with another report that quoted people who were concerned about these actions of the police, which they said had never happened before. Both stories are straight-forward reportage.  Yet, for reasons not made clear to Masood when he was summoned, they caught the attention of the police.

The response from his newspaper should have been immediate, the very next day. However, it took Indian Express a week before it ran a front-page story about what their own correspondent had been subjected to by the police, including being asked to sign a bond under Section 126 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023, to prevent “breach of peace” or anything that could disturb “public tranquillity”. A day before the belated Indian Express story, the Wire had already filed a report. 

Also, although the correspondent of Hindustan Times, Ashiq Hussain had also been summoned, his paper buried the report on an inside page on January 21. As if to compensate for this lapse, the paper published an editorial the next day saying the police had crossed a “red line”.  The editors of the paper should be aware that this line had been crossed a long time back.

Altogether four journalists, including Peerzada Ashiq from The Hindu, have been summoned for reporting on what in all respects is a routine story. 

Why should we be shocked or concerned that finally the daily harassment faced by so many Kashmiri journalists has now reached these well-known bylines?

Because, as I have argued in previous columns, what happens in Kashmir is a litmus test for what could happen anywhere in India. If a government does not respect the right of journalists in one part of the country to report without constantly watching their backs, what is to stop it from doing the same elsewhere?  

Furthermore, asking journalists to sign a bond under a provision of the law that anticipates that what you write might disturb “public tranquillity” is particularly dangerous and runs counter to any concept of freedom of expression. If such a precedent is set in Kashmir, it will give police the right anywhere in India to use this provision to stop journalists from doing their work.  

The message from these recent developments in Kashmir is that even what we in the media consider routine reporting can be unacceptable to the current dispensation. As a Kashmiri journalist told Scroll, “If there is no tolerance for even this kind of journalism, then what is the future of journalism here?”

Indeed, that is a question that all journalists and media houses, not just those based in Kashmir, should be asking.

Also, after these developments in Kashmir, will media houses ask their correspondents there, and elsewhere, to tread carefully, or will they encourage them to continue to report as journalists are supposed to do? 

While content even vaguely critical of the government is becoming scarce in most mainstream print media, although occasionally an in-depth report on an issue will pop up, this virtual flattening of the media undermines its credibility. Why should readers/viewers believe anything that is reported when most people with access to the internet have their own channels of information? Some of these peddle fake news but there are an equal number that provide coverage of issues that the mainstream ignores. 

As an illustration, here’s a story that the media in Maharashtra should have covered and used it to question the government when it insists that India is forging ahead as a growing economy. Hidden from view, because the media does not pay attention to the dark invisible corners of perpetually deprived areas in India, are stories like this one about the Melghat region in Maharashtra.

While reports on the region’s abundant wildlife in sanctuaries like the one in Tadoba make it to the news pages, the people who have lived in its forests do not. The Adivasi communities living in Melghat have suffered decades of neglect with patchy roads, poor health care facilities and abject poverty. 

Recently the Bombay High Court came down hard on the Maharashtra government in response to several writ petitions about the conditions in Melghat. It chastised the government for doing “too little” and said there should be “zero tolerance” of such neglect.

Those journalists who have covered Maharashtra since the 1980s are familiar with the Melghat story.  This has been a region of chronic developmental neglect that successive governments have addressed only when pushed.  The fact that in 2026 we are reading stories about Melghat that echo those reported four decades back is an indictment of India’s development story, as well as the indifference of its media.

According to this story in The Hindu, between April and October 2025, that is in six months, 97 children below six years died in the Melghat region either due to stillbirths or because the infants were low birth weight, born to severely malnourished women. In the same period, of the 4,437 pregnant women, 4,170 were anaemic. Let these facts sink in.  This is Maharashtra, one of the better off states in India.

Malnutrition and maternal deaths, in any part of India, rarely qualify as “breaking news”. But surely the detection of  “infiltrators” that the prime minister continues to mention at every opportunity, ought to find space in the news? It does not. 

By way of contrast, in the US, the actions of masked and fully armed ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents are top of the news. They are filmed pushing, shoving, chasing and even shooting down people presumed “illegal aliens” even before they have a chance to present their credentials. But in India, our equivalent of ICE, the police in a state like Assam have been literally pushing so-called “foreign nationals” into neighbouring Bangladesh and yet we read little about this in our newspapers.

Thanks to the consistent work of some independent journalists and platforms we get to read some stories about this. Stories like this worrying report by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll about two men from Nagaon in Assam who were pushed into the no man’s land between India and Bangladesh not once but three times.

Hasan Ali, whose father was a “declared foreigner” and pushed out, told Scroll: “My country has declared my father a foreigner from Bangladesh. But Bangladesh has returned him twice. Taile amader desh kunda? Amader desh ase ki?” (Then, which is our country? Do we have any country at all?)

Who will answer Hasan Ali’s question? 

 

Full volume on Op Sindoor, silence on the stateless

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 5, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/06/05/full-volume-on-op-sindoor-silence-on-the-stateless

While the Indian mainstream media remained obsessed about Operation Sindoor and reported uncritically even as the Prime Minister and members of his party made political capital from the recent Indo-Pak armed clash, a quiet, more insidious episode unfolded, largely unnoticed. 

The first to draw attention to it wasMaktoob Media, a digital news platform based in Kerala. Two days after the guns fell silent on the borders of India and Pakistan, it claimed on May 12 that around 40 Rohingya, who were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees India and recognised as stateless, were literally pushed off a naval boat into the sea near the coast of Myanmar. The Rohingya, as is well-known, fled Myanmar in 2017 to escape persecution by its military junta.

The report alleged that, on May 8, even as the Solicitor General was assuring the Supreme Court that deportations would follow established procedures and the law, these men and women were first summoned to a police station, then flown to Port Blair in the Andamans and then blind-folded, shackled and put on a naval boat before being pushed into the sea. The group included elderly men, women and children, who had to allegedly swim ashore to safety. 

This was followed up by a story in Scroll that contained more details.

Mainstream media only woke up when Tom Andrews, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said: “The idea that Rohingya refugees have been cast into the sea from naval vessels is nothing short of outrageous. I am seeking further information and testimony regarding these developments and implore the Indian government to provide a full accounting of what happened.” 

The UN statement drew the attention of the international media with reports appearing in New York Times, South China Morning Post and Straits Times.

Since early May, there has been little by way of follow-up to this story or even comment on this except, predictably, in independent digital platforms. The most searing comment was this article by Harsh Mander in Scroll. He asks how India has become “a place in which exceptional cruelty, prejudice and a casual defiance of constitutional obligations and customary international law have become official state policy”.

Meanwhile, equally insidious and inhuman is the process that continues in Assam of “pushing back” suspected Bangladeshi nationals. 

Once again, as in the case of the Rohingya, the early reports appeared in independent digital platforms. The stories were heart-breaking. Many of those literally pushed back across the India-Bangladesh border were married women, who had not been able to prove their citizenship.

Read the stories by Rokibuz Zaman in Scroll: Of a teacher picked up and pushed out, of two women, Shona Bhanu and Begum, who were amongst the people pushed out only to be brought back because they are Indian citizens. 

These stories remind us again what was known ever since the Assam government undertook the process of the National Register of Citizens and set up quasi-judicial Foreigners’ Tribunals in 2019. Over time, lakhs of people have been declared “foreigners” by these tribunals leaving them no option but to spend time and money hiring lawyers and filing cases in higher courts. 

Also, as was evident almost from the start, the process has disproportionately affected the poor and unlettered, many of them married women. Read this article by Abhishek Saha, who followed the story of one woman, Manowara Bewa. Declared “illegal” by a tribunal in 2016, detained, sent to a detention centre and finally released on bail in 2019, she was picked by the police on May 24, and “pushed back” into Bangladesh despite her pending appeal in the Supreme Court.

In 2019, at the height of the NRC process, and soon after the tribunals were set up, the media did report on what was going on. Even then, it was evident that the process was unlikely to be fair to those who do not have sufficient documents, a reality facing millions of poor people in this country.

I saw this when I visited Assam in 2019. The sight of thousands of men and women, clutching plastic bags full of documents that they wanted to show lawyers who had offered to help is one that I cannot forget. Amongst them were many women who were completely bewildered and did not understand what was happening.

Even then, those who were following the issue could see the arbitrary way in which cases were decided in the tribunals. People travelled long distances to have their cases heard only to find that the date of the hearing had changed. Those who could not make it for a hearing often found that the tribunal had made a ruling ex parte. No outsiders, including journalists were permitted to sit through proceedings as they can in a regular court. This opacity made the process even more problematic. 

Today, more than five years after the renewed thrust to detect and deport suspected Bangladeshis took off in Assam, using Operation Sindoor as an excuse to prevent “infiltration”, the Assam government has stepped up its efforts by pushing out people “declared foreigner” by the tribunals despite their pending cases in other courts. As the article by Saha reminds us, “declared foreigners” are not “individuals who have been apprehended at India’s borders, attempting to enter the country without documentation on the sly. They are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who assert that they are Indian citizens.”

And he rightfully states: “The humanitarian crisis in Assam’s citizenship imbroglio begins here – neither India nor Bangladesh acknowledges the ‘declared foreigners’ as their own.”

While this story has failed to catch the interest of much of mainstream media, the one story that found prominent coverage was, not surprisingly, the official version of what happened last month. In response to reports about people being pushed back into Bangladesh, these reports quoted the Border Security Force saying they had successfully foiled “infiltration” from Bangladesh. Or this one that reports that 2000 “illegal immigrants” have been pushed back since Operation Sindoor and that officials claim some left voluntarily.

The story will not end today or tomorrow.  It is incumbent on the media to follow and report it, even if the place where the actual drama is taking place is the northeastern corner of India. 

For what this process shows us is how it becomes convenient for governments to pick on the weakest to show how decisive and strong they are. But physically throwing people off a boat or pushing a woman with an eight-month-old child across a physical border, leaving her and others standing through the night in a rice field, and for her family to not be told where she has disappeared, does not indicate a strong government. It only confirms one that it is indifferent to the plight of the most vulnerable.

More ‘politics’, less meaning: In mainstream media’s ivory towers, an incomplete budget story

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on July 25, 2024

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2024/07/25/more-politics-less-meaning-in-mainstream-medias-ivory-towers-an-incomplete-budget-story

Once again, Sansad TV, giving live feeds from the ongoing budget session of parliament, trumps other television channels in providing engaging coverage. 

Although reports of the debate over the union budget appear in the next day’s newspapers, they do not capture the diversity of interventions in the house, often by first time MPs. And this time, with an invigorated opposition, there is a robustness to the debate compared to the last decade.

Yet, as media, we must ask whether we have settled into a predictable groove in covering the budget, albeit with entertaining graphics and learned commentary from experts and others. Are we making enough of an effort to reach out to large sections of the population for whom the entire exercise probably has little relevance?

In the 1980s, when I worked with the Delhi edition of a national daily, and before the advent of multiple private TV channels and social media, the vox popconsisted of the reporter stepping out and speaking to the chaiwala outside the office and the workers at the local dhaba frequented by many journalists who worked in newspaper offices located on that street.  

Clearly, this was not representative of what poor people thought, but at least an effort was made to go beyond industry big-wigs and economists to assess what the man – and it was always a man – on the street thought.

At a time of unaddressed unemployment, of economic distress, of the struggle of so many poor people in our cities and countryside to keep their heads above water, surely there is a need to know whether they even know about the budget, whether they care, and if they do know, whether they believe it will make any material difference to their lives.

Also, in a time when we are becoming aware that legacy media, that is print media, and even the mainstream TV channels are not the primary sources of news for a growing number of people, especially the young, it would be useful to know whether they care about the budget, whether they even know what the exercise is about, and whether they think it makes any difference to their lives.  

In the absence of such reporting, entertaining as are the interventions in parliament in the budget debate – and I might add the rather predictable behaviour of Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla who continues to find fault with interventions by the opposition – the story remains incomplete. The union budget is a political exercise, but it also has real life impacts on ordinary people. As media consumers, we need to know and understand what these are.

While the budget session will continue to dominate the news for some time, the understandable media focus on it has overshadowed one of the most important stories reported in the last fortnight.

On July 18, Indian Express carried a front page story about a man called Rahim Ali from Assam.  Rahim Ali fought a 12-year battle to contest the ruling of a Foreigners’ Tribunal in Assam that declared he was not an Indian. The family appealed to the Gauhati High Court but got no relief. Finally, on July 11, the Supreme Court, where the case was pending, declared that Rahim Ali was, in fact, an Indian and the tribunal was at fault for determining his legitimate claim to citizenship by focussing on minor discrepancies in the documents he had presented.

The heart-stopping moment, as you read the story, was to be told that Rahim Ali was already dead. He had died more than two years before the judgement, a broken man unable to face the consequences of the tribunal’s ruling.

As Indian Express wrote in an editorial the next day:

“Ali’s story, at once tragic and absurd, is symbolic of the promises not kept in the fundamental social contract between citizen and state, enshrined in the Constitution’s letter and spirit. Ali’s wife, Hajera Bibi, on learning of the Court’s verdict, told this newspaper: ‘What is the point now? The fear that he lived under, of being taken away, died with him. If they still wanted to call him a foreigner, what would they have done? Picked him up from his grave?’ The question, steeped in sadness and anger, is a reproach. It is also a call for accountability from an opaque and labyrinthine process that casts the onus of proving their innocence on the vulnerable.”

The Express editorial also quotes the shocking official figures released by the Assam government in February of the number of people declared non-citizens by 100 tribunals – 1,59,353 – and the cases that are still pending, 94,149. And it rightly asks: “How many of the 1,59,353 have been unfairly stripped of their citizenship like Rahim Ali? For how long, and by what justification, will the nearly 1 lakh people whose cases are pending live under the Sword of Damocles?” 

That “opaque and labyrinthine process” that the editorial speaks of has been at work for many years in Assam. It drew some media attention in the early years, but as with many stories that are part of a process, and not an event, it slipped off the radar. 

There are surely many more like Rahim Ali, who continue to struggle against an arbitrary system that randomly picks up people and demands that they prove their citizenship. On a visit to Assam in 2019, I met some of these people. All of them carried plastic bags full of documents, their faces creased with anxiety as they did not know how to convince the tribunal that they were legitimate citizens of this country and not “illegal”.

The Rahim Ali story ought to prompt a renewed media focus on the process of weeding out so-called “illegal immigrants” in Assam, an issue that continues to be raked up by the current BJP government in the state. For years, civil society groups working on the ground have been crying themselves hoarse trying to attract media, and political attention, to the ongoing injustice being played out in the state. But the attention is sporadic, not sustained.

For those interested in learning more about this issue, do listen to this in-depth interview with Aman Wadud, a young lawyer who has been pursuing these cases, by LiveLaw. He explains the extent to which this process of determining citizenship is unfair and penalises the poor in Assam. He suggests that the Rahim Ali judgement should be read widely to understand how an Indian citizen can be declared a non-citizen.  

Dear ‘national’ media, stories on Assam floods must go beyond the ‘mighty Brahmaputra’ or the rhino

 

Broken News

It was the one-horned rhino that finally woke us up to the devastation caused by floods in Assam.

 

What began in early June finally reached "national" status, in that the so-called "national" media woke up to it, when the Kaziranga National Park was submerged almost entirely and the couple of thousand one-horned rhino housed there had to scramble to find higher ground. Some of them did not make it. Over 100 wild animals, including at least nine rhinos have died so far.

 

Many humans have also died. More than a hundred. The floods have affected an estimated 56 lakh people across 21 districts. Their homes have been submerged or washed away and thousands have had to seek refuge in relief camps.  Cropland, covering an estimated 128,000 hectares, has been destroyed. By all measures, this is a catastrophe on an enormous scale, worthy of attention.

 

Why then does it take weeks before the Indian media turns its gaze towards it? While it is true that floods are an annual occurrence in Assam and Bihar, is that enough reason to pay so little attention to the human and ecological tragedy unfolding? After all, almost every year, parts of Mumbai go under water during the monsoon. This year, so did parts of New Delhi.  But they made it to the national news.

 

The unjustifiable neglect of reporting on the Assam floods illustrates the continuing debate over what constitutes "national" news.  The Assamese have held a long and festering grievance against successive central governments and what they call "mainland" media for ignoring their plight during the flood season. The floods are also inextricably entwined with the politics of the region.

 

Just by virtue of the scale of the current disaster, which is a combination of natural and ecological factors as well as developmental interventions over decades, the flooding in Assam is a big story. And the people who face the fury of the "mighty" Brahmaputra, an adjective automatically used to describe the river, deserve as much attention as the one-horned rhino.  Yet, almost like clockwork, every year when the rhino faces imminent danger of drowning, the stories begin appearing in the national, and even international media.  In Britain, the royals were putting out anxious statements about the plight of the animal.

 

While the damage caused by the floods is extensive, since the 1980s, people in Assam have felt that the flooding has worsened. Apart from the nature of the river, and the terrain through which it flows, the disaster has been compounded by human interventions and policies, such as deforestation in the catchment areas. Furthermore, the river brings down an enormous load of silt that accumulates, thereby raising the height of the riverbed in some sections.  This is a direct consequence of the policy of building embankments to prevent flooding.  These structures restrict the river, but when the river is in spate, it breaks through the embankments, or flows over them. As a result, the force of the water is far stronger and causes much more damage.

 

According to the "Floods, flood plains and environmental myths" published by the Centre for Science and Environment in 1991, an expert committee set up after the 1986 Assam floods had recommended that no more embankments should be built. Yet the policy continues, with successive governments spending crores on building and strengthening embankments in the mistaken belief that this will alleviate flooding.

 

What is evident is that the story of floods is not just about what happens when the river floods, but also previous policies that have contributed to the damage caused by this annual event.  This context is often missing from most of the reporting on floods in general, and the floods in Assam in particular.

 

It is reported as an event, not the culmination of several processes.  As a result, we fail to understand why the extent of devastation appears to get worse every year.

 

There are exceptions as always.  Here Scroll.in has done a service by assembling a reading list of previous and current articles on the Assam floods that place them in a context. This article by Mitul Baruah is particularly useful in understanding why embankments have contributed to the problem, rather than being a solution. The other articles also look at another popular perception that dams control flooding when often they exacerbate it.

 

There's also a reason why the wildlife in Kaziranga is having such a tough time in recent years. That is because national highway 37 runs right through it.  Even when there are no floods, scores of animals are crushed under speeding vehicles when they cross over from one part of the sanctuary to the other.  The highway was built despite strong campaigns by environmentalists against it.  The current state government is now apparently planning to build a 36 km long flyover costing Rs 2625 crore so that there is a corridor beneath for the animals to cross.  Could there be a clearer illustration of environmentally blind developmental policy?

 

It is important for the media to bring out this background and context to what are seen as "natural" disasters so that people are informed about how myopic and short-sighted policies also play a part.

 

Equally important is the question of what constitutes "national" news. This is relevant at all times, but especially now.  People living in remote areas, or even not so remote, feel strongly about how the "nation" appears to be centered on the metropolitan cities, and the Hindi belt. Even news from the south takes time to register in the rest of the country.

 

Today, the Covid-19 pandemic is playing out locally, but is also national and international. Yet, it is evident that without the detailed reports from the ground, people would not be able to relate to media reports about the pandemic, as my last column had emphasised.

 

In the post-Covid media scenario, with decreasing revenue streams that have already led to retrenchments of journalists in all forms of media, this question could take on greater significance.

 

For some time now, television news has defined "national" by its ability, or inability, to get a camera crew to do a story.  Financial constraints have already replaced news bulletins with studio-based discussions.

 

Print, and digital news platforms, still manage to cover much more of the country.  But they will also face limits because of the economics of running media houses. As a result, they too might be compelled to limit the extent of reporting.

 

Meanwhile, local media outlets are also financially strapped and could face closure in the years ahead. One wonders how long a paper like Mylapore Times, featured in this interesting article in Newslaundry, or others like it in the rest of the country, will be able to keep their heads above water.

 

The trend of local papers downsizing or closing altogether has been visible in the US for some time.  Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, writes about this and the decline of one such paper where she began her career. She argues that local reporting actually strengthens democracy. It also provides a source for credible news. In its absence, rumours flourish. 

 

And of course these days, with social media, the problem has grown exponentially.

 

Sullivan quotes a PEN America study of 2019 that has a resonance for us in India. “As local journalism declines, government officials conduct themselves with less integrity, efficiency, and effectiveness, and corporate malfeasance goes unchecked. With the loss of local news, citizens are: less likely to vote, less politically informed, and less likely to run for office.” 

 

In the current situation in India, when there is no end in sight to the pandemic, when economic hardships have already hit the most vulnerable and are staring the majority of citizens in the face, when the severe cracks in our health infrastructure have become evident, and when the bankrupt nature of our politics is on full display every day, democracy will be further weakened if sources of credible and reliable news disappear because there is no finance to back them.

 

 

Humanitarian crisis awaits Assam

This is a longer version of the op-ed article in The Hindu that appeared on July 17, 2019:  https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-many-hurdles-in-proving-citizenship/article28493185.ece?homepage=true

 

Floods are an annual event in Assam. Thousands of families lose their lands, their cattle and their homes, as relentless rains submerge vast tracts.

This year, along with the floods, another humanitarian crisis awaits the state. The date is already set. It is July 31.

On that day, the final list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) will be released, the culmination of a fraught process conducted since 2015 at the urging of the Supreme Court, and monitored by it.

While reports of the many anomalies that dog the process of determining citizenship, including the constantly changing list of documents that are, or are not, accepted, the sheer enormity of the human crisis facing the state has yet to register in the rest of India.

Numbers alone do not indicate this.  What is known today is that out of a population of 31.1 million (2011 census), projected to be around 33 million today, 32.9 million have applied to the NRC to be listed as a "genuine" Indian citizen.  Of these roughly 29 million have been accepted. 

It is the future of the over four million excluded from the NRC so far, a number that might reduce when the final list is published on July 31, that provides the foundation for the impending human crisis awaiting Assam.

Even if half of this number is excluded, in that these people cannot establish their credentials as Indian citizens, we are looking at the future for two million stateless people.

What will happen to me and my family after July 31? That is the question that haunts thousands of men and women. The anxiety in their strained faces is haunting. Hundreds of individuals, clutching frayed plastic bags containing documents, will wait hours in inclement weather to meet anyone willing to listen, and answer this one question. 

 

After travelling to three districts in Assam at the end of June, the full dimension of this humanitarian crisis hits you. 

The majority of the people left out of the NRC so far are abjectly poor; many are unlettered.  They cannot understand the legal complications of the process; nor do they have the money to hire legal help.  As a result, literally thousands stand in danger of being declared "foreigners" even though they could be "genuine" Indian citizens.

The people affected by this process of verification of citizenship fall into three different categories. One is those who were marked "D", or doubtful voter when the electoral rolls were revised in 1997.  Their names are excluded from the NRC unless they can establish their credentials before a Foreigner's Tribunal.

There are currently fewer than one hundred such tribunals in Assam. The opacity that surrounds the way decisions are made in these quasi-judicial courtrooms is a separate story.

The second category is people picked up by police on suspicion of being illegal immigrants.  The border police, represented in every police station, finger prints them, and then informs them in writing that they must appear before a Foreigner's Tribunal to prove they are Indian. Most such cases are of poor, daily wage workers who are unable to assemble the relevant documents.

The third is of those who have registered with the NRC, but have been excluded because there was a discrepancy in the documents they submitted. One list of exclusions with four million names was published last year; another on June 26 this year with 102,462 names. Many of those on the excluded lists have filed additional documents in the NRC centres. Their fate will be known on July 31.

In addition, there are people who have already been declared "foreigners" by the tribunals.  In February 2019, the government informed the Supreme Court that of the 938 people in six detention centres, 823 had been declared foreigners. How long will they be held? Can they be deported? To which country? These questions remain unanswered.

In this haze of numbers and judicial processes, the real and tragic stories of individuals often go unheard and unheeded.

 

Take Anjali Das, a 50-year old woman who we meet in Bijni, Chirang district.  She is one of four women sitting in a small room full of men, waiting patiently for their turn to present their cases to a group of lawyers.  The meeting has been organised by a local group, Bharatiya Nagorik Adhikar Surakshya Mancha.

Dressed in a rust coloured saree, Anjali cannot hide her anxiety behind a weak smile. Her maternal home is in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, where her father and brother still live.  Anjali came to Assam in 1982 when she married.

She has no birth certificate, like so many people in India. She does have a school certificate that states she was a student up to class five and gives her date of birth as June 1, 1969.  She also has a certificate from the panchayat, and her father's Aadhar card as proof that she is Indian. But this will not suffice.  Anjali's name has been excluded from the NRC, the only one in her marital home. And she cannot understand why this happened.

Anjali Das is only one of thousands of married women who have been left out of the NRC for similar reasons. Although disaggregated data is not yet available, it is estimated that more than half of those excluded from the NRC are women like her.

 

Then there are women who are struggling to understand why some members of their families have been excluded. In Hanchara village in Morigaon district, Jamina Khatun arrives with the ubiquitous plastic bag full of documents. She pulls out a photocopy of the June 26 list of names excluded from the NRC. The list has the names of her husband, her two sons, and her 11- year-old granddaughter.

The latter's name is likely there because Jamina's son, Nur Jamal Ali, was referred to the Foreigner's Tribunal based on a complaint by the man from whom he rented a room in Jorhat.  He was working there as a construction worker.  The complaint led to Nur Jamal being finger printed by the border police, sent a notice to appear before a Foreigner's tribunal, and then declared a foreigner. As a result, his only daughter is also excluded from the NRC.

Multiply Anjali and Jamina's stories a thousand times over and you get a picture of the scale of the crisis in the lives of tens of thousands of poor people in Assam. Men and women of all ages, travelling long distances with plastic bags bulging with any and all documents they can gather, swamp anyone who extends help, by way of legal counseling for instance.

After July 31, the focus will shift to the Foreigner's Tribunals. The state government plans to set up 200 by the end of this month and eventually one thousand, as all those excluded from the NRC will have to present themselves before these tribunals.

Only the litigants and their lawyers know what happens within the four walls of these tribunals as neither the public nor the media are permitted.

To try and visualize what happens in these quasi courtrooms, this writer tried to get a peek into one in Guwahati.

 

Foreigner's Tribunal Court Room 3, Kamrup Metro district, Guwahati, is located in a residential colony on the ground floor of one of the buildings. Above are flats that are occupied, evident from the washing hanging out.

The room is small. It is arranged like a courtroom.  A white railing separates the podium on which the tribunal member sits from the litigants. The railing becomes a small witness stand at one end.

The tribunal member has the help of an assistant who sits on the side. His job, one such assistant tells me, is to check documents. On the high desk there is also a computer screen and a printer.

According to the assistant, who does not give his name, cases are heard on simultaneous days, stretching out to five days.

An elderly man, a lawyer, who walks in, has a different story.  He looks at the top of his brown folder. The case he has come for began in March. It is now July and it is still being heard.

The assistant also confirms that I can only sit in for the hearings if I get permission from the secretariat.  So far, no journalist has been granted such permission.  The only way to gain access is by subterfuge.

This then is the other problem. People travel long distances to appear before the tribunals. Their cases stretch out over months. This means spending money for travel and stay, apart from lawyers’ fees.  For those living in poverty, this is unaffordable.

 

Men like Nurzamal from Pathari Namargaon, South Salamara Mankachar district. He stands outside the tribunal building waiting for a lawyer.  Like Jamina Khatun's son, the border police in Guwahati picked up Nurzamal where he was employed as a construction worker. He was finger printed and then sent a notice to appear before the Foreigner's Tribunal in Guwahati.

Nurzamal's home is around 270 km away from Guwahati. He has already made five trips from his home and does no know how many more. If he gives up, or cannot afford to make the journey, his case will be decided "ex parte".

Literally thousands of cases are being judged "ex parte". In a statement in the Lok Sabha on July 2, the Minister of State for Home Affairs, G. Kishan Reddy acknowledged that from 1985 to February 2019, 63,959 people had been declared foreigners in ex parte rulings. 

An illustration of the arbitrariness surrounding this process comes from a case in the Supreme Court for which notices were served on July 3 to the central government and Assam government. In this case, Hazizul Hoque was sent to a detention camp on March 24, 2017 after being declared a foreigner ex parte by a tribunal. The only reason this happened is because Hoque, who suffers lower limb paralysis, could not attend the hearings.  Even his appeal to the Gauhati High Court was dismissed.

There are already many more stories like Hoque's.  Unfortunately, the majority cannot go even to the High Court to appeal leave alone the Supreme Court.

The citizenship issue in Assam is layered and complex.  It is not easy for people outside the state to understand all the multiple threads.

What is clear though is that the brunt of the systemic problems of establishing citizenship in this manner, and in such haste, is being borne disproportionately by the poorest.