TheEconomistJuly 13th 2019 351I
t is hotterthan Prague. It does not have
the Czech capital’s cobbled squares or
narrow streets but instead tin-roofed
houses and paddies hemmed with palms
and mango trees. Yet Franz Kafka would
have felt quite at home in Assam. Since
2016 this hilly tea-growing state in India’s
north-eastern corner has been compiling a
National Register of Citizens (nrc). Billed
as a scientific method for sorting pukka In-
dians from a suspected mass of unwanted
Bangladeshi intruders, the seemingly ba-
nal administrative procedure has instead
encoiled millions of people in a cruelly ab-
surdist game.
Rather than find and prosecute illegal
immigrants, Assam has instead tasked its
33m people, many of them poor and illiter-
ate, with proving to bureaucrats that they
deserve citizenship. Those who fail risk be-
ing locked up. Some 1,000 people currentlymoulder in Assam’s six existing detention
centres for “foreigners”. The Indian public
has lately been shocked by stories of peo-
ple, such as a decorated war hero and a 59-
year-old widow, who have found them-
selves jailed for failing to prove their Indi-
an-ness. But the state of Assam is clearly
expecting a lot more to come. Ten purpose-
built camps are planned.
The current phase of the nrcgame is set
to stop on July 31st, the deadline for pub-
lishing the completed citizens’ register.After that, those left off the list will have to
wait for Foreigners’ Tribunals, special par-
allel courts with no right of appeal, to hear
their cases. There is no telling how many
there may be. When a draft nrcwas issued
last year, it left out some 4m of Assam’s 33m
people. In June 100,000 more were deemed
suspected foreigners. The majority of the
losers are Bengali speakers, some of them
Hindu but mostly Muslim; other Assamese
were automatically included in the register
because they have obvious local pedigrees
or belong to recognised “native” tribes.
Not surprisingly, some 93% of those ex-
cluded have petitioned for inclusion, pre-
senting evidence that they are Indian-
born. But the bureaucratic machinery,
primed by Assamese chauvinists aligned
with the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), which
rules both the state and the country, has
been incentivised to reject as many as pos-
sible. Indeed, the national government is
preparing to declare the exercise a great
success. It wants to extend the nrcand For-
eigners’ Tribunals to the rest of the country.
Muslims, who are 14% of India’s 1.3bn peo-
ple, fear that they may find themselves, as
in Assam, disproportionately sifted into
the reject bin. They are right to be worried.
In the hamlets around Goroimari, a
largely Bengali-speaking village in the lushIndia’s hunt for “foreigners”Madness in the hills
GOROIMARI
The government of Assam has set about declaring unwanted citizens to be
foreigners. The central government wants to extend the practiceAsia
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