In India’s Assam, a Rohingya-like refugee crisis in the making

Altaf Hossain has been distraught the past couple of months. He’s always thought he was Indian, but is now being told the country doesn’t think of him as one of its own. His name, he has learned, is missing from a new citizenship registry being drawn up by the government of his home state of Assam, where millions of people are in danger of being disenfranchised.

“I am not in the first list, the authorities have supposedly found a mismatch in my family tree. My family has lived in Assam since 1942 and now I can suddenly become stateless,” said Hossain, a shopkeeper in Assam’s western district of Dhubri bordering Bangladesh.

Imtiaz Ahmed, a farmer, is in a similar situation. He says his land records date back to his grandfather but the authorities insist something is amiss. “This registry update is a cruel joke,” he said.

Hossain and Ahmed are among five million residents – mostly Muslims of Bengali extraction – in the troubled north-eastern state facing expulsion as the provincial government puts the final touches on its National Register of Citizens (NRC), due in about four months.

The government’s disenfranchising of those whom Assam now says are foreigners could trigger a crisis like that facing the Rohingya in Myanmar. That crisis erupted after Rakhine state disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Muslims through a new citizenship law that took effect in 1982.