Debarshi Das explores and contextualizes the journalist Abhishek Saha’s book on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam in northeast India. Following his commentary, we showcase an excerpt from the sixteenth chapter of No Land’s People, which focuses on suicide and the thanatopolitics of the NRC regime.

1. Erasure, neutrality, and identity in Assam: A commentary by Debarshi Das

Writing about the contemporary invites a set of troubling questions. The contemporary is a place where the narrator lives cheek by jowl with the subject of her narration. It’s too close, too immediate, some would argue, to afford any space for contemplation or a dispassionate look. Thus, paradoxically, the absence of immediacy can be a valuable thing, for the narrator can claim to have donned the cloak of neutrality because of her distance. The closeness of the events, on the other hand, could compromise the integrity of narration. A question that follows is, how is the fiction of neutrality constructed within the field of journalism? 

This is not an esoteric question the resolution of which can wait for a leisurely future date. If one has not considered the question before, it confronts her all the same. In the grippingly narrated book No Land’s People, the reader is reminded of this uncomfortable immediacy of the contemporary. In the far eastern state of Assam, India, a massive Supreme Court-directed exercise went on from 2015 to 2019 to verify the citizenship of every individual residing in the state. Assamese nationalist organizations alleged that foreigners of Bangladeshi origin had  been living in the state for decades. These illegal immigrants could be identified, and subsequently deported, by updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), they argued. 

In August, 2019, just before the final list of the NRC was to be published, an insidious social media campaign was afoot. A dossier containing the names of the so called “anti-NRC gang” members made the rounds, circulated by anonymous actors. Academics, lawyers, activists, and journalists found a place in the dossier. Abhishek Saha, the author of No Land’s People, was one of them. Saha—at that time a journalist with the Indian Express, based in Guwahati, the city he grew up in—learned from the dossiers that he “was ‘obsessed with’ reporting on ‘detention centres and atrocities on Bengali-speaking Muslims’” (p. 209). 

This is not a stray incident which the book relates. Running through the book, at a level just below the surface, a constant conversation is at play: a conversation between the dispassionate reporting of a journalist, and his social location. Saha is the grandson of migrants from erstwhile East Bengal and East Pakistan whose grandmother did not make it to the NRC because, for Kafkaesque reasons, she has been marked as a “D voter” since 1997 by the Election Commission of India (D for doubtful). Tellingly, the authors of the dossier, mentioned above, did not forget to trace the racial and ethnic identities of the “anti-NRC gang” journalists. In a strife-ridden time and place, however dispassionately she conducts her reportage, the journalist and her creations can be reduced to who she is ethnically, linguistically, religiously. Rohith Vemula, a young Dalit activist, probably alluded to this suffocation when he wrote in his trenchant suicide note that every man is reduced to his immediate identity.

A caveat may be added here. Such attributions are usually reserved for those who are not in a position of power. Those who are in a position of power define the normal. The dominant is the normal. One does not question its social roots, or its economic purposes. The voices which are not dominant are probed, scrutinized, sorted and labelled. Apart from its meticulous documentation of the NRC, and of the politics that propelled the NRC, Saha’s book is a collection of fascinating—and heart-breaking—stories of this scrutiny of the marginalized, and the silent violence that comes with it. His journalistic skills lend the stories a degree of factual authenticity. At the same time, the historical context of the partition of the subcontinent, the mass migration that preceded and followed it, and the ethnic and linguistic frictions which dogged this part of the republic since then have not been lost sight of. This sense of history elevates a collection of journalistic accounts to serious academic documentation. 

At midnight on 31st December, 2017, the first draft list of the NRC was published. The juridico-bureaucratic process which was set rolling through a Supreme Court judgement nearly three years earlier was coming to its conclusion—or so one hoped. When the first list came out, nearly 42 percent of the applicants could not find their names in it. Stories trickled out of anxious men and women running from pillar to post for the right papers to prove their citizenship, taking their own lives in desperation. The anxiety was heightened by a parallel foreigner-detection process which preceded the updating of the NRC and resulted in the indefinite incarceration of “foreigners” in detention camps. These “foreigners” were mostly poor and unlettered, Muslim and Hindu, Bengali-speaking men and women, who could not produce the right documents in Foreigners Tribunals (Foreigner Tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies  which ascertain if an accused is a foreigner; the burden of proof in Foreigner Tribunals lies on the accused). Given the travesty of justice in Foreigner Tribunals, the logic of the NRC—which is a State-directed process in which the whole population of a flood-ravaged, economically backward region would prove their legitimacy by furnishing flawless documents that were at least forty-five years old—seemed specious at best. 

In early 2018, as I contemplated taking a public stand over this simmering issue, I remembered the Axom Andolan (Assam Movement, 1979-1985). In the heat of those curfewed days and nights, many a time, linguistic and religious minorities were at the receiving end of mass violence. Unsurprisingly, the Andolan provoked divergent opinions. It is commemorated as a nationality movement by its jatiyotabadi (nationalist) supporters. To its critics such as Amalendu Guha and Hiren Gohain, its content was chauvinistic, and its form and tactics fascistic. Will not the ghosts of past riots rise and reduce my stand to my language, to my birth-identity, just as Saha’s reportage was reduced to his birth-identity? I got a taste of the many fine balances the Muslims of this country have to negotiate. It was easier for me to speak out against the destruction of Babri Masjid than against the NRC. A part of me wished I was an OI (“Original Inhabitant” of Assam, whose NRC papers are scrutinized less), not because of the higher chances of making it to the NRC list, but because as an OI, my thoughts would not be scrutinized for their bohiragata (outsider) bias. A greater part of me wanted to reject the whole OI versus non-OI business. But that would be tantamount to discarding the vast foreigner detection paraphernalia that has been constructed over the decades which has been depicted diligently in this book. 

In case of Saha, the thoughts and writings were suspect. But the object and site of scrutiny could be more everyday in nature. Kazi Neel’s Miya poem “Miya hoy ki nohoy?”—“Are you a Miya or not?”—narrates this incessant, everyday scrutiny of one’s marginalized identity:[1]

“I wade down to the pond to fish
The two-rupee fishing net questions me,
Are you a Miya or not?

I will visit the in-laws, I step out of the house dressed up nattily
Bloody lungi raises a finger at me,
Are you a Miya or not!

I make a trip to Sibasagar to do labour…”

(translation by Debarshi Das)

Saha had applied for an official press recognition card from the state government. The local police station in the Guwahati city, while doing routine background checks, asked for the documentary proof of his family’s inclusion in the NRC. This was despite government assurances that exclusion from the NRC does not result in the denial of any rights. “I do not know whether the policeman asked for my NRC details only because my surname was Saha—and not, say, Gogoi or Kalita or Saikia.” (p. 221). This uncertainty, the inability to tell that one is not being suspected for his surname, points towards a certain socio-political desolation. It is not the non-completion of the NRC, perhaps, but this desolation, that nullifies closure in Assam. 

[1] “Miya poetry” is a genre of poetry which has evolved in the last few years among the East Bengal origin Muslims of the Brahmaputra Valley (East Bengal origin migrant Muslims are derogatorily termed “Miya”). It is usually written in the lingua franca prevalent among the East Bengal origin migrant Muslims of the Valley – a mishmash of East Bengali languages as well as Assamese.

II. Excerpt from No Land’s People

Chapter 16, “Chaos and deaths,” P. 186-193

A month before Das’s suicide, I reported on the suicide of a Bengali labourer in Assam’s Baksa district whose mother was fighting a case to prove her citizenship. Binay Chanda, thirty-two, was found hanging from a tree near his home in Dimlarpar village, twenty days after his first child was born. Binay’s mother Santi was fighting a ‘foreigner’ case at an FT and that, according to the family, took a toll on him.

Nirod Baran Das was not the only one to commit suicide after being confounded by Assam’s excruciating matrix of citizenship determination processes. As the NRC progressed, it left a trail of suicides, deaths and sporadic violence in its wake.

A list compiled by independent researchers from news reports was published in the Meghalaya-based webzine Raiot, claiming that twenty-eight cases of suicides related to grievances caused by the NRC and other citizenship processes had happened from July 2015 to March 2019. Some of the suicides listed here may not be circumstantially convincing, but nonetheless they are markers of a problematic pattern.

Binay and his three elder brothers were daily-wage labourers. While the other three were busy fulfilling the needs of their own families, Binay took care of the mother and bore the financial burden of her case. But his monetary constraints were aggravated because he now had a newborn to take care of. He was scared about how he would be able to meet the expenses of both the case and the child.

The lawyer representing Santi told me that she had a refugee certificate from 1964, based on which she was trying to prove her Indian citizenship. The ‘relief eligibility certificate’ listed her as an eighteen-year-old who had migrated with her family from a village in Mymensingh district in April 1964. The case against Santi was first registered at an FT in Nalbari district in 2009 but was transferred to an FT in Baksa in 2016. She got her notice for appearance before the Baksa FT in March 2018, and up until September, she—accompanied by Binay—had attended numerous hearings. Binay kept sinking into debt as the case went on, and his worries increased.

After Binay’s death, Santi lost the case at the FT. She then appealed at the Gauhati High Court, where the case remains pending. She can be arrested and put in a detention camp any day. In February 2020, when I called Santi, who is in her sixties, she asked, ‘Do you know what will happen to my case at the High Court? I am very worried—will they take me away now?’

***

A week after Das’s death, the suicide of Deepak Debnath, a fifty- nine-year-old cycle mechanic, made headlines. He hanged himself from a tree behind his house in Ghagra village of Udalguri district. His name was dropped from the draft NRC and he had received a notice from an FT to appear before it to defend his Indian citizenship.

Debnath was in the first draft of the NRC but was dropped because he supposedly had an ongoing case at the local FT. Days before the final draft NRC was published, he received a notice from the FT to appear before it. He and his family did not understand how and when this case was registered, the way Das did not know how he had become a ‘declared foreigner’.

I spoke to the Debnaths and the local police soon after the incident. The family said they were certain that the notice from the FT and his exclusion from the draft NRC had led to Debnath’s suicide. The cops, however, said there was nothing in the case to directly connect the suicide with the ‘foreigner’ case. ‘There are family issues and acute financial crunch. But yes, he did get a notice from the FT. The suicide is unfortunate,’ a senior officer of the district police told me. Gopal Debnath, the elder brother who was in his seventies, told me that he had explained to Deepak ‘to not worry’ about his citizenship since the family had pre-1971 papers. ‘But Deepak was so sad. To each and every person he spoke then, he said the same thing. “They have said I am a foreigner. I don’t know what will happen next. Will they take me to a detention camp?”,’ Gopal told me over the phone in October 2018. ‘The next date of hearing (at the FT) was 30 October. He committed suicide on 28 October.’ Gopal told me that the family registered an FIR, and in their complaint mentioned that fear caused by the FT notice was the trigger for Deepak’s suicide.

Enquiring into these suicides, I found that the distress caused by the citizenship tangle was intensified by poverty, illiteracy, social ostracization, opacity in the functioning of government offices and probable mental health problems. The police and administration often focus on the absence of a suicide note, knowing very well that it is absurd—in fact, cruel—to expect a marginal farmer or a daily- wage labourer to express his thoughts about losing his citizenship in a lucid note. Providing a multifactor analysis of the suicides helped the state distance itself and its citizenship determination mechanisms from them and deny culpability.

One of the first documented cases of suicide allegedly triggered by the NRC exercise was that of fifty-seven-year-old Angad Sutradhar, a labourer in Baksa district, when the NRC application process had just begun in 2015. According to the family, their inability to smoothly furnish the necessary documents connecting their lineage to Sutradhar’s grandfather—Kalamoni—had upset the man and driven him to take his own life. He hanged himself from a tree next to their house hours after his son Jyotish returned from an NRC Seva Kendra, unable to submit their application form because of unavailability of documents.

However, an enquiry into the ‘unnatural death’ by the sub- divisional magistrate at Salbari, A.K. Das, concluded that no such connection could be made. Citing this enquiry, the DC of Baksa, M. Hazarika, said in his report to the Home and Political Department of the Government of Assam that it was learnt from the family that Sutradhar was ‘a very sentimental, emotional and introvert sort of person ... However, it cannot be ascertained that he has committed suicide owing to pressure/tension evolved due to the NRC matters,’ the report noted.

In some cases, the trigger was threat to the citizenship status of one’s kin. For instance, when seventy-year-old farmer Deben Barman of Dhubri district, who belonged to the Koch Rajbongshi community, died by suicide a week after the publication of the final draft of the NRC, his family said he was ‘depressed over his son and grandchildren’s names not figuring’ in it. His own name, that of his wife and their daughter-in-law Kanika were included. Kanika told the press that Barman was worried ‘the family would be divided’ because of the exclusions.

***

‘Is your name in the NRC?’ emerged as a slur in some vigilante attacks in Assam while the exercise was underway. In June 2018, a month prior to the publication of the final draft NRC, Bijay Ray, a youth in early twenties from Gauripur in the border district of Dhubri, had gone to meet a woman in Darrang district, some 300km away. He was mobbed in broad daylight; his hands were tied and he was thrashed mercilessly.

A widely-shared video of the assault captured Ray being punched, rolled on the ground and kicked. He was abused and asked where he had come from, whether he was a Bangladeshi and whether his name was in the NRC, even though only the first draft had been published at that time. He protested, ‘I am an Assamese’, even as the blows rained on him.

Pankaj Hazarika, the primary accused, as identifiable from the video, was soon nabbed by the police. Later, a journalist who had covered the incident in detail told me that the youth who was attacked belonged to the Koch Rajbongshi community, but from his ‘appearance’ the mob had ‘mistaken him for a Bengali Muslim’.

In April 2019, on the heels of the Indian general elections, forty- five-year-old Shaukat Ali, a resident of Biswanath district in Assam, was thrashed by a vigilante mob for allegedly selling beef and was force-fed pork in apparent retaliation. In the grainy video clip of the attack, verified by the police as authentic, Ali, wearing a white beard and a red shirt, is seen kneeling on the ground and begging his attackers to stop. They heckle and abuse him in turn, screaming, ‘Are you a Bangladeshi? Is your name on the NRC?’

Days later, as he lay recovering in a hospital bed in Biswanath Chariali town, Shaukat Ali spoke to me over the phone. He told me his family had run the eatery at the local market for over forty years and they had been serving beef all these years, as did several others in the market who catered primarily to a Muslim clientele. ‘I was made to eat pork,’ Ali said, recounting the horrific attack, ‘they threatened to kill me if I didn’t eat it. They wanted me to break the vows of my religion.’ In the middle of the conversation I brought up the NRC. He said the names of everyone in his family were included in it.

In September 2019, weeks after the publication of the final NRC, the Hindu reported that a group of four labourers, Muslims of Bengali origin, were stopped by a mob in Assam’s Baksa district while travelling in a pick-up truck. The mob demanded proof of their inclusion in the NRC. Suspecting their nationality, the mob handed over the four to the police, who later found that they were not illegal foreigners.

***

I was on a family holiday in Bhutan on the day Nirod Baran Das died. Even as WhatsApp messages about him kept appearing on my phone, I was unable to report the story for my newspaper. In February 2020, I visited Kharupetia while working on this book. A black signboard outside a shuttered shop proclaimed in white letters—‘Legal Consultant N.B. Das, MA, BT, LLB, Advocate’. It was going to be Das’s office.

The short handwritten suicide note Das had left behind did not mention the NRC. He asked his wife to repay a few small debts they owed to neighbours, and also said that no one in the family was responsible for his suicide.

Das’s youngest daughter, Aparajita Acharjee, who lives with her husband in Kharupetia, told me that the family was convinced that the NRC letter and false tag of ‘declared foreigner’ could be the only reasons that drove her father to take his own life. ‘Tar jibone onno kono ashanti chilo na (There was no other problem in his life),’ Aparajita said, in Bengali.

In the two months between receiving the FT letter and dying by suicide, Das spoke very little at home. He would seek advice from people he trusted about how to get rid of the ‘foreigner’ tag and whether it was likely that he would be incarcerated in a detention camp. ‘I scolded him once,’ said Rama, ‘for not discussing things when at home. I tried to make him understand that this “foreigner” problem will go away in time, that he should not worry so much.’

‘I asked him one day, “Why do you look so sad? What happened?”,’ Ganesh Ghosh, the Kharupetia town committee vice-chairman, told me. When Das told him that it was about the ‘foreigner’ tag, Ghosh, also a former student of Das, offered to take him to the local government official. The official, Ghosh said, assured Das that it was definitely a mistake and asked him to submit all the necessary documents and said he would take care of the issue.

What seemed to have triggered Das’s breakdown, according to Ghosh and Acharjee, was a taunt. ‘Someone passed a comment, probably in Mangaldoi (district headquarters of Darrang), saying “Oi sa, Bangladeshi aahi gol (Hey look, the Bangladeshi has come [in Assamese])”,’ Ghosh said.

‘That led to further depression and eventually the suicide, I think. Every year on the day of Dashami, the last day of Durga Puja, he would sit at the pandal the whole day and exchange season’s greetings with everyone. But that year he was there only for a few minutes, and two days later he was gone.’

‘Only, only because of the NRC, he committed suicide,’ Ghosh repeated, stressing on ‘only’.

Ghosh explained to me that Das had a bundle of family documents from the 1960s—his matriculation admit card and his father’s name in voter lists—which could easily have established his Indian citizenship before the cut-off date of 24 March 1971.

I asked Ghosh how he knew about the jibe. ‘Are you repeating something you heard?’

‘He told me,’ Ghosh said. ‘He had heard people making fun of him by calling him “Bangladeshi”. I told him he had nothing to worry about because he was a genuine Indian citizen who had all the documents necessary to prove that.’

I repeated the question to Aparajita, who confirmed that her father had indeed mentioned a few insulting comments.

I learnt that Das’s family had registered an FIR alleging that ‘NRC officials’ were responsible for his suicide, though they did not name anybody. But media reports at the time of the incident documented how district administration officials had immediately ruled out NRC exclusion as the cause of his suicide, citing the absence of any mention of it in Das’s note.

It can probably never be completely known why exactly the NRC exclusion letter described Das as a ‘declared foreigner’—whether it was a case of mistaken identity, an error by ground-level NRC staff, or an action of pure malice. In the end, one concludes that red tape and bureaucratic inefficiency led to Das’s plight.

Rama told me that she has not heard anything about the outcome of any enquiry by the state, and she could not care less either. ‘After the final NRC came out, I haven’t checked whose name is in and whose is out. After what happened, what should I check?’

Debarshi Das is a Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati. His research focuses on the interactions between agrarian economies and political economy in developing nations. 

Abhishek Saha is a critically acclaimed journalist who received the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for his coverage of the Kashmir unrest of 2016. His debut book No Land’s People was published by HarperCollins in 2021.

Commissioned by Rishav Thakur, reviewed by Niyati Shenoy and produced with editorial assistance from Tara Giangrande.