Azadi - Arundhati Roy

and hard and intractable.
The Indian government is so proud of the part it played in Bangladesh’s liberation from Pakistan. Indira Gandhi,
the prime minister at the time, ignored the threats of China and the United States, who were Pakistan’s allies, and
sent in the Indian Army to stop the genocide. That pride in having fought a “just war” did not translate into justice or
real concern, or any kind of thoughtout state policy for either the refugees or the people of Assam and its
neighboring states.
The demand for a National Register of Citizens in Assam arose out of this unique, vexed, and complex history.
Ironically, the word national here refers not so much to India as it does to the nation of Assam. The demand to
update the first NRC, conducted in 1951, grew out of a student-led Assamese nationalist movement that peaked
between 1979 and 1985, alongside a militant separatist movement in which tens of thousands lost their lives. The
Assamese nationalists called for a boycott of elections unless “foreigners” were deleted from the electoral rolls—the
clarion call was for “3D,” which stood for Detect, Delete, Deport. The number of so-called foreigners, based on pure
speculation, was estimated to be between five and eight million. The movement quickly turned violent. Killings,
arson, bomb blasts, and mass demonstrations generated an atmosphere of hostility and almost uncontrollable rage
toward “outsiders.” By 1979, the state was up in flames. Though the movement was primarily directed against
Bengalis and Bengali-speakers, Hindu communal forces within the movement also gave it an anti-Muslim character.
In 1983 this culminated in the horrifying Nellie massacre, in which more than two thousand Bengal-origin Muslim
settlers were murdered over six hours. (Unofficial estimates put the death toll at more than double that.) According
to police records, the killers belonged to a neighboring hill tribe. The tribe was not Hindu, nor known to be
virulently ethno-Assamese. The motivation for that sudden, brutal spasm of violence remains something of a
mystery. Unsubstantiated whispers attribute it to manipulation by RSS workers present in Assam at the time.
In What the Fields Remember , a documentary about the massacre, an elderly Muslim who lost all his children to
the violence tells of how one of his daughters had, not long before the massacre, been part of a march asking for
“foreigners” to be expelled. 32 Her dying words, he said, were, “Baba, are we also foreigners?”
In 1985, the student leaders of the Assam agitation signed the Assam Accord with the central government. That
same year, they won the state’s assembly elections and formed the state government. A date was agreed upon: those
who had arrived in Assam after midnight of March 24, 1971—the day the Pakistan Army began its attack on
civilians in East Pakistan—would be expelled. The updating of the NRC was meant to sift the “genuine citizens” of
Assam from post-1971 “infiltrators.”
Over the next several years, “infiltrators” detected by the border police, or those declared “Doubtful Voters”—D-
Voters—by election officials, were tried under the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act, passed in 1983
by a Congress government under Indira Gandhi. In order to protect minorities from harassment, the IMDT Act put
the onus of disproving a person’s citizenship on the police or the accusing party—instead of burdening the accused
with proving their citizenship. Since 1997, more than four hundred thousand D-voters and Declared Foreigners (D-
Voters who are unable to prove their citizenship) have been tried in Foreigners Tribunals. 33 More than a thousand
are still locked up in detention centers, jails within jails where detainees don’t even have the rights that ordinary
criminals do. 34
In 2005, the Supreme Court adjudicated a case that asked for the IMDT Act to be struck down on the grounds
that it made the “detection and deportation of illegal immigrants nearly impossible.” 35 In its judgment annulling the
act, the court noted, “There can be no manner of doubt that the state of Assam is facing external aggression and
internal disturbance on account of large scale illegal migration of Bangladeshi nationals.” 36 Now, it put the onus of
proving citizenship on the citizen. This completely changed the paradigm and set the stage for the new, updated
NRC. The case had been filed by Sarbananda Sonowal, a former president of the All Assam Students’ Union who is
now with the BJP, and is currently the chief minister of Assam. 37
In 2013 the Supreme Court took up a case filed by an NGO called Assam Public Works that asked for illegal
migrants’ names to be struck off electoral rolls. 38 Eventually, the case for finalizing the modalities of the NRC was
assigned to the court of Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who happens to be Assamese.
In December 2014 a two-judge bench of the Justices Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman ordered that an updated
list of the NRC be produced before the Supreme Court within a year. 39 Nobody had any clue about what could or
would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them
being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they
be stripped of citizenship? And was India’s highest constitutional court going to oversee and micromanage a
colossal bureaucratic exercise involving more than thirty million people, nearly fifty-two thousand bureaucrats, and
a massive outlay of funds?
Millions of villagers living in far-flung areas were expected to produce a specified set of documents—“legacy