Millions of Muslims lose citizenship in Assam: Over 30 booked in Kerala for waving Pak flag

GUWAHATI, KERALA, India: Over 30 students from a college in Kerala were booked on Saturday for waving the Pakistani flag on the campus.

The incident took place when the students belonging to the Muslim Students Front (MSF) were carrying out a procession as part of union elections on Perambra Silver College campus.

Police in Kerala's Kozhikode district filed a case against them for waving a giant Pakistan flag on the college campus.

The students were booked under the relevant IPC sections 143, 147, 153 and 149. Further proceedings will be carried out after verifying the identity of students involved in the incident.

Reacting to the incidents, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed that terrorists had sneaked into the college and were trying to destabilise harmony in the state.

Meanwhile, almost two million people in northeast India majority of them Muslims — were left facing statelessness on Saturday after they were excluded from a citizenship list aimed at weeding out “foreign infiltrators”, in a process the central government wants to replicate nationwide.

A total of 31.1 million people were included in a National Register of Citizens (NRC), but 1.9 million were deemed ineligible, according to an official statement.

“31.1 million people now make up the final list, with 1.9 million excluded,” said Prateek Hajela, the coordinator of the state’s register. Any person who is not satisfied with the outcome of the claims and objections can file an appeal with the foreigners’ tribunals,” Hajela said in a statement, adding that everyone had received an adequate hearing.

Those excluded have 120 days to prove their citizenship at hundreds of regional quasi-judicial bodies known as foreigners’ tribunals. If ruled to be illegal immigrants there, they can appeal to higher courts.

Assam has long seen large influxes from elsewhere, including under British colonial rule and around Bangladesh´s 1971 war of independence when millions fled into India.

Resentment against illegal immigrants has simmered for years in Assam, one of India’s poorest states, with residents blaming outsiders, many said to come from neighboring Bangladesh, for stealing their jobs and land.

Shahibul Haque Shikdar, a Muslim college teacher, was distraught after two of his children made it to the list but he was left out. “Even my father´s name is there in the final NRC but I have been left out,” the 39-year-old told AFP. Officials checked documents submitted by roughly 33 million people.

“Everyone in my family is on the list but not me,” said Munwara Khatun, accompanied by two grandchildren and her husband, Sahar Ali, at a registration center in Assam’s central district of Nagaon. “How can that be?”

Her 65-year-old spouse, a farmer, said the draft list had also omitted her, prompting them to provide authorities with documents ranging from land records to her voter identification and the Aadhaar identification number of Indian residents.

Some of the two dozen people at the center said officials had asked them to go to court to get included on the register. “They are saying go to court,” said car mechanic Ritesh Sutradhar, 45, who had been left out along with his wife. “But who will pay for all that?”

Anxious residents had started queuing up since early morning, braving rain and bad weather to check their names on the list. Only those who can demonstrate they or their forebears were in India before 1971 could be included in the list.

But navigating the complex process is a huge challenge for many in a flood-prone poor region of high illiteracy where many lack documentation. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi´s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party runs Assam, and critics say the NRC process reflects the BJP´s goal to serve only its co-religionists.

In January India´s lower house passed a legislation that would grant citizenship to people who moved to India as recently as six years ago — as long as they are not Muslims. This has stoked fears among India´s 170 million Muslim minority for their future.

Home Minister Amit Shah, Modi´s right-hand-man, has called for ejection of “termites” and said before the BJP´s thumping re-election victory in May that it would “run a countrywide campaign to send back the infiltrators”.

Activists say the tribunal members are often underqualified and are subject to “performance” targets, and that the process has been riddled with inconsistencies and errors.

Instances of people being declared foreigners because of clerical errors, such as differences in the spelling of names, are “appallingly common”, Amnesty International said Saturday. Local lawmaker Ananta Kumar Malo, whose name was missing from the list, said he was appalled by the process.

“There are some problems with the system, otherwise how can they exclude my name?” he said. The number of mistakes and the fact that those left off the NRC were expected to include large numbers of Bengali-speaking Hindus has also turned some in the BJP against the process.

With many “genuine Indians” left off, the party is mulling a “fresh strategy on how we can drive out the illegal migrants”, said Himanta Biswa Sarma, a local BJP minister. Camps and suicides: Those rejected by the tribunals who have exhausted all other legal avenues can be declared foreigners and — in theory — be placed in one of six detention centres for possible deportation, although Bangladesh is yet to signal its cooperation.

Ten new such camps have been announced. One with space for 3,000 is being constructed in Goalpara, west of Assam´s biggest city Guwahati. The camps currently hold 1,135 people, according to the state government, and have been operating for years.

Nur Mohammad, 65, spent almost 10 years in one such camp until a Supreme Court order saw him released this month. “I was born here and lived in Assam all my life. I don´t know if my name will be in the NRC or not,” he said.

Media reports say there have been more than 40 suicides caused by concern over the NRC. Reacting to the development, Prime Minister Imran Khan warned the world that illegal annexation of Indian Held Kashmir (IHK) was part of a wider policy to target Muslims.

In a twitter message, Khan said reports in Indian and international media on Modi government’s ethnic cleansing of Muslims should ring alarm bells across the world. The tweet is significant in the backdrop of reports in Indian media regarding the contentious so-called National Registration of Citizens (NRC) that has declared at least 1.9 million people — mostly Muslims — as ‘illegal residents’ and their Indian nationality has been denied.