Assam, Dec 15: A 104-year-old man in Cachar district of Assam died before being able to prove Indian citizenship. He was detained in 2018 after being declared a foreigner from Bangladesh.
About six months ago, Nyuti Das remembers her father Chandrahar Das bending over her brother’s phone, his one good eye — and the rest of him — completely absorbed by a video of a speech of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Then he looked at Nyuti and said, smiling: “Modi aamar bhogowan (Modi is my god)… He will solve everything. The citizenship law is here. We will all become Indian.”
Two months later in March, Das was picked up from his residence in Borai Basti village of Silchar by Assam Police personnel and taken to the detention center at the Central Jail, Silchar. It is one of the six detention centers for illegal foreigners being run out of jails in the state.
Amid continuing criticism of Assam’s illegal foreigners’ detention regime, the Gauhati High Court, in June, asked the state government to submit an action taken report on steps taken to set up detention centers outside jails. The state’s first exclusive detention center is currently under construction in Goalpara’s Matia village.
Das was unhealthy, frail, and could barely walk while he was in detention. In June, as news of his detention made it to some newspapers, Kamal Chakraborty of the Unconditional Citizenship Demand Forum, an advocacy group that demands unconditional citizenship for partition victims, approached the district officials citing Das’ ill health.
Das was immediately shifted to a hospital. Days later, he was released on bail as the Foreigners Tribunal set aside the earlier ex-parte opinion and set to examine the case afresh.
Chowdhury said Das’s claim of citizenship rested on a refugee registration certificate issued in 1966 in Tripura’s Agartala, which notes that he was born in Comilla in the then East Pakistan.
Das’s status as a foreigner had a ripple effect. His three children and grandchildren are out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), which is being updated in Assam to identify illegal migrants. The final list was published in 2019 and excluded over 1.9 million names.
Daughter Nyuti Das said her father knew little about the system that declared him to be a foreigner.
The passage of CAA in 2019 raised Das’s hopes. But, the law is still waiting for the framing of rules amid opposition from various quarters including sub-nationalist groups in Assam.
