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Declared Illegal Immigrants, Detained For 18 Months, Then Found To Be Indian: An Assam Muslim Family’s Trauma -Sanskrita Bharadwaj

-Article-14.com

Nur and Sahera Hussain spent 18 months at a detention centre for illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Assam. Sahera kept their two minor children with her in the jail-like facility. A year since they were found to be bonafide Indian citizens and released, they are struggling to rebuild their lives. Tens of thousands have similarly left Assam’s detention centres, or are waiting for a tribunal verdict, still haunted by fears of dispossession and statelessness

Guwahati: On a cold winter morning in February 2022, Nur Hussain zipped open a fraying backpack that held sheafs of documents. “I can show you all the documents we have got that prove we are Indians,” said Nur, 38, as his wife Sahera Begum, 27, looked on.

Their two children sat on a wooden single bed in their one-room tin shanty deep inside Narengi, a suburb of Assam’s capital city. It had been just over a year since they had been released from a detention centre in Goalpara district, 134 km west of Guwahati, where they had been kept for 18 months on grounds that they were illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. 

When Hussain and Sahera were arrested, they had been forced to take their two children, now aged  8 and 9 years, along with them. “We were scared to leave them alone,” Sahera said.

The trauma of the long detention with their children while they faced the prospect of  statelessness was behind them now, but Hussain and Sahera were still struggling to piece their life together. When Article 14 contacted the couple, they spoke of the challenges in having their elder son re-admitted to a school from which they had to pull him out. 

Their plight is not an isolated account but mirrored those of tens of thousands embroiled in citizenship issues in Assam. 

When Assam’s updated National Register Of Citizens (NRC) was published in August 2019, as many as 1.9 million people were left out of the list and faced an uncertain future. The NRC is a register of Indian citizens, first published in Assam in 1951 after the Census that year.

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