Media coverage
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Media coverage
Title ‘They Are Manufacturing Foreigners’: How India Disenfranchises Muslims Persecution in a remote Indian province spawned Modi’s new draconian citizenship law. Degree of recognition International Media name/outlet The New York Times Media type Print Country/Territory United States Date 15/09/21 Description Abdul Kalam Azad, one of the poets, told me that when the N.R.C. process first began in 2010, a vast, impoverished majority were fearful of what might unfold. Huge public protests against the N.R.C. had taken place in Barpeta, with four demonstrators shot dead by the police. Azad and his friends and other educated Bengali Muslims, however, saw the N.R.C. as an opportunity, believing that, once complete, it would dispel any doubts over citizenship, giving Bengali Muslims definitive, state-sanctioned proof of belonging in Assam.
Many of the Miya poets were among the first generation to be formally educated — Azad himself is a former construction laborer who completed his undergraduate degree through a correspondence course and is now pursuing a doctorate — and they had faith in the power of papers, books and ideas. They tried to help those far more fearful of bureaucracy and the state, traveling to the chors — the shifting river islands along the Brahmaputra — to assist the poor, unschooled inhabitants with the arduous paperwork.
As the process unfolded and the cruelties of the system became more evident, Azad and his friends grew more doubtful. Their unease fed their self-assertion as “Miya” poets — their name, an honorific for Muslim males, is commonly used as a slur in Assam — and their verses, inspired by the radical poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and Mahmoud Darwish, were often written in a dialect spoken by Bengali Muslims. Although Assamese readers initially responded favorably, supportive figures were soon drowned out by hostile voices. After a Delhi-based human rights organization made a five-minute video of Miya poets reading their work in July 2019, four separate criminal complaints were filed against 10 of them. They were charged with posing a threat to national security, obstructing the N.R.C. process and defaming the Assamese people as “xenophobic in the eyes of the whole world.” A television host summed up the prevailing sentiment: “If anyone from outside Assam sees this video, they will think a second Rohingya ethnic cleansing has started.”
The charged atmosphere sent the poets into hiding — one was inundated with rape threats; another was warned that he would be killed — but by the time I visited them in Barpeta, their anxiety had given way to something like weariness. Between the first N.R.C. list, which excluded four million, and the final one, which excluded half that number, Azad realized that he and his colleagues had made a mistake in not challenging the N.R.C. from the very beginning. “None of us had the courage to oppose it,” Azad said. “At one point, I began to feel guilty about telling villagers to fill out the forms. We showed them a dream when it was a trap.”
A similar sentiment was expressed to me by Sulaiman Qasimi in Nellie, the place where, 30 years ago, 2,000 Muslims were massacred during the height of the agitation against so-called foreigners. Qasimi, who lost 12 members of his family that morning, had been listening while I spoke to a couple in their 80s who were incarcerated for almost five years after being declared foreigners. “Many Bengali Muslims aren’t highly educated,” Qasimi said. “They aren’t big businessmen or landlords, and that is why they are sent to detention centers. These cases exhaust all the resources of our people, which means they have nothing left to feed and educate their children, which in turn means their children will never have the education to break out of this cycle.”
That cycle was visible everywhere in Assam, but perhaps nowhere more starkly than on the river island I visited with Azad. Birds skimmed off the river as we went out in a long wooden boat with a makeshift engine, clumps of dirt drifting in the water as reminders of the provisional nature of the chors. We passed a rowboat carrying a family, a boy at each end pulling on an oar, two girls and the parents huddled in the middle with bags of rudimentary supplies.
On Kapastoli chor, there was no clinic or electricity. The school was a drab concrete structure in which a villager called Faizal Ali hanged himself when he didn’t find his name on the N.R.C. We met his two daughters, girls of 8 and 10 wearing clothes that were little better than rags. Their mother worked in Guwahati as a daily wage laborer. Their maternal grandfather, who had been declared a foreigner by a tribunal, had fled the island and was working as a rickshaw driver in Goalpara, where the first stand-alone detention center was being constructed. The girls had been taken in by extended family and made a living repairing fishing nets. They told Azad that they felt afraid to go near the school, knowing that their father died there.
As we walked on, a family invited us in for tea and told us that the original Kapastoli chor had been submerged years ago. The villagers gave this chor the same name when they moved here, a gesture strikingly human in its desire to maintain a sense of belonging but utterly futile in the face of the bureaucracy unleashed against them. Apart from the school and a concrete platform built as part of a government program, the state seemed utterly absent, and yet it was present everywhere as the all-encompassing regime of D voters, foreigners’ tribunals and the N.R.C.URL https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/magazine/india-assam-muslims.html Persons Abdul Azad