22 THE WEEK • AUGUST 4, 2019
COVER STORY
ASSAMy father is no more and
we did not preserve all his
documents. It seems now
that even a dead man’s
records have to be kept
safe.
—Faruq
Rahima Khatun’s sont will be worse than
Kashmir; it will be worse
than Myanmar.... All are
not Mahatma Gandhi; the
hotheaded may strike.
—Mohammad Faysal Haque
A shop owner in Boko, on the NRC
effectdraft, but not their
four children. The
children—sons Ramjan
Ali, Aminul Haque and
Abdul Haque, and daughter
Sahara Khatun—have been clas-
sified as “descendants of persons
whose cases are pending in the
tribunal”.
“But there is no case against me
and my wife,” said Syed, who has
travelled to the NRC office in Boko a
dozen times in the past year. He has
spent 0 24,000 to file objections, and
fears that he would have to spend
several lakhs before the ordeal is
over. “At the NRC office, instead of
helping us, the officials took the
biometrics of my four children. My
fear grew after that. NRC officials
are dropping names of citizens andresidents of As-
sam. Our lives are in
danger.”
More than 50 people
across Assam have commit-
ted suicide after being tagged
as foreigners. Samiran Nessa, an
18-year-old Arabic student at Hat-
ishala, said she, too, wanted to kill
herself five months ago. “We already
suffer because we are poor,” she said.
“The tag of foreigner is more than
what we can bear.”
It was her mother, Basirun Nessa,
who talked Samiran out of it. Her
father had deserted them to marry
another woman. Samiran had been
studying on a scholarship, but this
time she has not applied for the
grant, as she is unsure whether she
would be able to stay in India. “NRC
officials told me that all my docu-
ments are invalid,” she said. “My
father does not stay with us and he
is not here to defend me. So the offi-
cials told me that I would be declared
as a foreigner.”
Muslims say the situation in Assam
is graver than the one in Rakhine
state of Myanmar, where Rohingya
Muslims are being persecuted by
the government. Mohammad Faysal
Haque, who runs a hardware shop in
Boko, said the situation could result
in an armed rebellion. “It will be