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.

Coronavirus is a crisis, and a chance at redemption, for the India media as well

Broken News

https://www.newslaundry.com/amp/story/2020%2F04%2F08%2Fcoronavirus-is-also-a-crisis-for-indian-media-and-a-chance-at-redemption?__twitter_impression=true

It’s in the nation’s interest for the media to remain free and questioning during this pandemic. But can cash-strapped organisations resist the pressure to toe the government’s line.

When we look back on this time of disease and death, there are some images that will remain etched in our consciousness, and our consciences. 

For irrespective of the age, class, caste or creed of persons infected by Covid-19, or killed by it, there is one reality that we as a country have been forced to confront. The reality of the invisible millions, the men and women who literally build and keep our cities running, but who are forgotten when a crisis hits us all.

Even the government does not remember them. How else can one explain the March 24 announcement of a 21-day lockdown giving four hour’s notice with no planning strategy in place for these millions who live on the margins?

Despite the prime minister’s advice to media owners, proffered a day before his dramatic announcement, that they should run “positive stories” at this time of the epidemic, the Indian media did tell the migrant story – vividly through photographs, and poignantly through the heartbreaking stories of thousands of men, women and children setting out to walk hundreds of kilometres to their distant homes because there was no source of sustenance in the cities where they had slaved for years.

These are the images we must continue to remember: of the father carrying his child on his shoulders, while another feeds his newborn baby even as he walks. Pictures of calloused feet, of women and children walking alongside the men, carrying small bags with all their worldly belongings. Or of this heartbreaking report about Ranveer Singh, 38, who collapsed and died even as he was speaking to his family.

This exodus from our cities represents over one third of the population, based on the 2011 census data, as this article in the Indian Express explains. That is, one in every three persons in this country is a migrant, either interstate or intrastate. Also 29 percent of the population of our big cities consists of people in the so-called informal sector living on daily wages, exactly the kind of people who picked up their belongings and fled once the lockdown was announced.

What these facts and images ought to have taught us, as Sanjay Srivastava presciently observed, is that “informality is not a staging post on the way to formality. It is a persistent condition of life with no indications of a dramatic change.”

Srivastava also points out something that we in the media ought to heed: “The odd thing about an epidemic is that though it might be global in nature, it is impossible to understand its impact without paying close attention to the local conditions within which it circulates.”

It is India’s local conditions, this persistent state of informality, in which millions are permanently caught that will determine the ultimate nature of this pandemic, how and where it spreads, and who it strikes down and kills.

Given the nature of news, the migrant story has virtually disappeared from our news pages.  But it is still the biggest story that will need to be followed up. This will not be easy, given the spread. Yet, we need to know how many of them made it, did they carry the infection with them and are district level health facilities able to cope if the infection spreads to rural areas. This story in Scroll gives some idea of the challenge we are yet to face. 

We also need to know how the migrants who were held back at state borders are surviving; if they will march on once the lockdown is lifted; when and if they will return to the cities.

Which brings me to the other crisis that the media is confronting. Such stories require investment in newsgathering. Media houses need resources to send out teams to distant places to investigate this reality. But the economic slowdown has also impacted the finances of the media. With cutbacks in advertising as companies cope with the economic downturn, news media has been hit, especially print, which depends heavily on advertising.

Already, the Indian Express has announced wage cuts and it is more than likely that others will follow. It is possible that multi-edition newspapers might have to close some editions. It is almost certain that journalists will face not just salary cuts, but also job cuts.

While running newspapers, and even digital platforms, with a small, lean staff is feasible given the nature of technology today, it’s not conducive for doing the kind of follow-up stories that are needed to record the full impact of this pandemic on all sections of the country. And if the media does not record it at this time, it will not be known. The people who are invisible, who came into focus for a moment during this crisis, will once again fade into anonymity.

There have been a couple of other worrying developments in the last weeks that concern the media. One is the direct message to media owners to focus on “positive” stories. This is nothing short of telling them not to investigate and report the government’s shortcomings in dealing with this crisis, stories that will be seen by those at the helm as “negative”.  No right-minded editor would accept this given that the job of the media is to dig out the truth.

But as I pointed out in my last column, it is striking how little we read about the failures of the government and how much more we see uncritical reporting of all that is given to us. There are always exceptions, and these media houses and particularly digital news platforms have continued to report incisively. But taken as a whole, the image of the Indian media, as this article in the New York Times notes, is of one that echoes the government’s tune.

What better illustration of this than the manner in which Covid-19 was forgotten and the incipient as well as blatant Islamophobia that is prevalent in this country came out in full view on television channels once a link was established between the spread of the virus and a Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi.

Even those media houses that did not want to feed this anti-Muslim fervour indirectly fell into it by headlining every case that could be traced back to the Tablighi Jamaat meeting. Few took the trouble to explain, as this article in Scroll clearly does, that the sudden rise in positive cases was also because there was much more focused testing over this period, something that had not been done earlier. In fact, many experts have continued to emphasise that the spread in India is probably much wider than is being reported because not enough people are being tested.

Also, given that Indian Muslims have already felt under siege for months with the threat of the National Register of Citizens hanging over their heads, this drumming up of the anti-Muslim rhetoric by the media has ratcheted up their fears to the point they are suspicious of anyone seeking information during this health crisis, as this report in the Huff Post vividly documents.

When India will emerge from this pandemic is not yet known. What is known is that the most marginalised will suffer the most. As many of those migrants making their weary journey home said, even if they don’t die of the disease, they will die of hunger.

What is also clear is that an economically beleaguered media is even more susceptible to pressure, especially from a government that has used every means possible to make it toe the line in so-called national interest. At times of crisis, it is in fact in the nation’s interest that the media remains free, questioning, and unafraid.

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.