Will Muslims in Assam Become Stateless?

Assam is a state in the northeastern part of India, adjacent to Bangladesh. During and after the war for Bangladeshi independence there was an illegal migration of Muslim refugees from Bangladesh into Assam. Now the state of Assam has produced a register of citizens that is intended to screen out illegal migrants, most of them Muslims. Residents not included on the register may become stateless as a result.

The following video and article discuss the controversy over the National Register of Citizens (RNC) in Assam. Some of the worried citizens not included in the register are clearly Hindus and not Muslims, so the potential victims are not exclusively Islamic.

The Indian subcontinent has evolved what is essentially a new dialect of the English language. English is the common tongue for India, and an indigenous version of the language has developed that is independent of British, American, Australian, and New Zealand dialects. There are two useful words in this video that have been added to our language by India: crore, which means ten million, and lakh, which means a hundred thousand. Both are derived from Sanskrit via Hindi.

Many thanks to Ava Lon for translating this related article from Les Observateurs (which presents excerpts from a longer article published by France 24/AFP):

Assam (India): Four million people under threat of losing their nationality

August 2, 2018

Following a census of the population in the State of Assam in North-East India, the authorities are planning to deprive four millions of people of their nationality, in a project presented on Monday [July 30]. NGOs are accusing the authorities of targeting the Muslim minority.

The project is sparking controversy. The Indian authorities say they want to combat illegal immigration from neighboring Bangladesh […] Opponents accuse the political powers of targeting the Muslim minority.

The National Register of Citizens (RNC) is counting the inhabitants of the State of Assam who were able to prove that their presence can be traced back to before 1971, the year, when millions of refugees arrived from Bangladesh, during the war for independence.

The fears manifested themselves, however, in the Hindu nationalists — Assam has been ruled since 2016 by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of Prime Minister Narendra Modi — taking advantage of this census […] in order to attack the Muslim minority of that State.

Over 30 million people have asked to be counted (32 million in 2015, according to Xinhua, meaning the entire population, according to Wikipedia). But about four million haven’t been put on the most recent RNC list[…].

Assam, where a third of the population is Muslim, is the only Indian State to create a register of citizens. […]

Human Rights organizations criticized this process, reckoning that it resembles the tragic fate of the Rohingya, who became the largest stateless population in the world after being deprived of their Burmese nationality in 1982. […]

3 thoughts on “Will Muslims in Assam Become Stateless?

  1. Blueprint of things to come. And so is what Whites in South Africa are going through. You think that Blacks in Paris and London will have regard for White aborigines?

  2. Being stateless is a pretty scary situation. The worst possibilities are fleshed out by BTraven in “The Death Ship”.
    https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://libcom.org/files/DeathShip.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjbtNG-uNPcAhXF44MKHaw7AW0QFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw1gW_tIzm9YSEC59yadZPj3

    But, a large Muslim population is a threat, particularly if they have a high birth rate. It might not be such a bad idea to deprive them of political rights, such as voting or government benefits. The pressures will increase to either assimilate and downplay Islam or reject Islam or move. Of course, who wants to move to Bangladesh? But the corrosive spread of Islam threatens the host countries and at some point, stopping it is a matter of survival.

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