Almost 2 million people in India's Assam state are in fear of being stateless after a draft list was published stripping people of their citizenship
Nearly 2 million people have been left off a list of citizens released in India's northeastern state of Assam. The list includes the names of the people who could prove they were living in the country before 1971 while the rest are"ineligible."
A total of 31.1 million people were included in a National Register of Citizens , but 1.9 million were deemed ineligible, according to the Assam government. A large chunk of those excluded were expected to be Muslims. Security was beefed up in Assam ahead of the release of the NRC, with some 20,000 extra personnel brought in and gatherings banned in some locations. There were no disturbances reported on Saturday however.Only those who can demonstrate that they or their forebears were in India before 1971 could be included in the list.
In January India's lower house passed legislation that grants citizenship to people who moved to India as recently as six years ago – as long as they are not Muslims.Home Minister Amit Shah, Modi's right-hand-man, has called for the 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".On August 5 New Delhi suspended the autonomy of Indian-administered Kashmir.
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. 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.
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