India presses Assam tribunal to declare Muslims non-citizens: NYT

NEW YORK: Members of official tribunals, set up in Assam to decide who was an Indian citizen and who was not, have said they felt pressured to declare Muslims non-citizens as the government seeks to expel illegal migrants, according to a dispatch published in The New York Times Saturday.

The newspaper said it interviewed one current and five former members of the Assam tribunals that review suspected foreigners.

The five former members said they had felt pressured by the government to declare Muslims to be non-citizens, with three of them saying that they were fired because they did not do so.

"I was punished," Mamoni Rajkumari, a 54-year-old lawyer who spent nearly two years on the tribunal and was among the dismissed members, was quoted as saying by the Times.

In addition to the tribunals, which Assam has operated for decades, the state has also recently completed a broader, separate review of every resident's paperwork to determine if they were citizens.

That review found that nearly two million of Assam's 33 million residents, many of them desperately poor, were possibly foreigners.

Now this group, which is disproportionately Muslim, is potentially stateless, the dispatch said.

"What's happening in Assam is a preview of what may be coming to India as a whole as Prime Minister Narendra Modi tries to pull the country away from its foundation as a secular, multicultural nation and turn it into a more overtly Hindu state,” The Times correspondents — Karan Deep Singh and Suhasini Raj — wrote in their joint dispatch.

Assam state and central government officials declined to comment, according to the report.

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has its roots in a Hindu nationalist worldview, and during last year’s national elections, party leaders vowed to apply the same type of citizenship checks used in Assam to the rest of India, The Times said, while noting Modi’s recent denial.

In December, the Indian government passed a sweeping new immigration law that gives a fast track to citizenship for undocumented migrants from nearby countries as long as they are Hindu or one of five other religions — only Muslims were excluded.

“The upshot is that any Hindus left off Assam’s citizenship lists after its broad review, or declared by tribunals to be foreigners, will likely be affirmed as citizens because of the new immigration law.