![]() The economic, social and psychological impacts of India’s crackdown on illegal migration are felt acutely by those on either side of the prison bars. His family, and those of dozens of others labeled noncitizens under existing laws, told TIME stories of children dropping out of school as parents struggled to pay legal fees, crippling poverty resulting from mounting debt, and the pain of families being separated. The experience of Mahuruddin-in perpetual limbo, with little opportunity to fight his case-could be a preview of what lies ahead for at least some of the 1.9 million people who were left off the National Registry of Citizens in Assam and are now waiting to hear what will happen to them. ![]() This is being done to us because we are Muslim.” “If there is no mistake in our documents, even then we are declared foreigners. “For Muslims, even if we have all our papers we are foreigners,” says Begum. READ MORE: Here’s What to Know About the Citizenship Amendment Act Months after it was published, the Indian government enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which gave fast-track citizenship to many immigrants in the country illegally who are Hindus or members of five religious minorities-though not Muslims. The government has moved to protect some 500,000 Bengali Hindus and people of other religions left off the citizenship registry. Human-rights observers and families of the detained now fear that Modi’s BJP has turned an anti-immigrant movement to identify and deport mostly Bengali-speaking migrants into a project to disenfranchise and create a climate of fear among Assam’s 10 million Muslims. They now live under the threat of being ruled noncitizens by opaque foreigners tribunals and detained indefinitely. When the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) was finally published in August 2019, it excluded nearly 1.9 million people. As part of an exacting citizenship test, all 33 million residents of Assam had to provide documents proving they or their ancestors were Indian citizens before March 1971. When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in the state in 2016, it intensified efforts to weed out so-called illegal immigrants in Assam. It is this web in which Mahuruddin and many others are now caught. Since then, the state of Assam and the national government have introduced a complex, overlapping web of measures to determine who is a legal citizen and who is not. This culminated in 1985 with the signing of the Assam Accord, which said anyone who entered the state after March 24, 1971, the day before neighboring Bangladesh gained independence, is considered to be in India illegally and must be deported. ![]()
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