From the border states, mechanisms of exclusion could now spread across India

Speaking from the Red Fort on August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that “demographic change” in India’s border regions poses a crisis for national security and threatens the country’s unity and progress. He claimed that infiltrators are altering India’s demography through a “well-thought-out conspiracy” and announced a high-level mission to tackle it.

Coinciding with the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar and the detentions in several states of Bengali-speaking Muslims claimed to be “illegal Bangladeshis”, Modi’s announcement demonstrates how the rhetoric about allegedly unauthorised immigration is playing out across the country.

Debates about identity, belonging and citizenship have long been fiercely contested in border states, especially Assam. Now, the mechanisms of exclusion, once confined to borders, have reached the mainland, influencing governance and shaping society.

The practices developed by state institutions and authorities in Assam aimed at identifying and expelling individuals labelled as infiltrators are being reflected in the mechanisms used for the Bihar voter roll revision and to detain Bengali Muslim workers.

A key part of the process adopted in Assam to verify belonging has been scrutinising the documents of those suspected of being outsiders – even though the Indian government has emphasised that no single document definitively proves citizenship.

In Bihar and with the detention of Bengali workers, the essence is the same: someone’s belonging is called into question and their documents are scrutinised. This process often results in marginal groups being disenfranchised and excluded from citizenship.

It seems that such legal and bureaucratic procedures are now being extended nationwide. If Modi follows through on his promise to address the purported demographic shifts he claims have been caused by infiltration, exercises to verify documents are likely to become more frequent.

Using documents to exclude

Assam, since colonial times, has experienced large waves of migration from the region that is now Bangladesh, a nation that came into being only in 1971. This has sparked vigorous ethnonationalist campaigns aimed at defending Assamese identity and removing perceived outsiders.

Claims of demographic change are often based on disputed statistical estimates and widespread claims that entire communities are foreigners due to their ethnolinguistic identities. In Assam, a potent narrative against “illegal migrants”, coupled with sustained legal and bureaucratic efforts to detect and expel such individuals, has long been a feature of the socio-political landscape.

Several initiatives have been implemented in recent decades to determine who qualifies as a citizen – and who does not.

In 2019, the updated National Register of Citizens – a mammoth exercise that asked Assam’s over three crore residents to prove their citizenship – excluded 19 lakh applicants. Alongside this, Foreigners Tribunals, quasi-judicial institutions unique to Assam that have been operating since the 1980s, have excluded around 130,000 persons from Indian citizenship to date.

Both these exercises aim to determine Indian citizenship based on the cut-off date of 1971 by adjudicating documents. They have pushed lakhs who claim to be Indian citizens towards statelessness. In these exercises, the determination of citizenship hinges on a relentless cycle of producing documents that, taken together, establish identity, lineage and family history.

These include entries in electoral rolls going back decades, land ownership papers and certificates from school or the village panchayat. In these exercises, people have often faced exclusion due to inconsistencies in their documents, such as minor variations in the spellings of their names or a mismatch in age.

The document-centric model seen in Assam is being replicated in other places. In Bihar, to be included on the fresh electoral rolls, individuals must present one of 11 documents. Bengali-speaking Muslim labourers in several states are being asked to produce a variety of documents to prove they are not Bangladeshi.

But as Assam has shown, proving identity via documents has inherent challenges. These difficulties stem from structural challenges with documentation in India – the low prevalence of birth certificates among marginalised groups or lower literacy rates leading to limited access to education certificates.

Women often lack essential documents that establish lineage because of circumstances such as not being sent to school, being excluded from family property records or marrying before being listed on the electoral rolls with their parents.

A Lokniti-CSDS survey noted that for individuals positioned lower on the social ladder, documentary requirements to establish identity may prove to be “daunting and exclusionary”.

The Election Commission has claimed that it is essential to revise the electoral roll in Bihar because, among other reasons, “the names of foreign illegal immigrants” are present in the current list. The strict documentary requirements set by the commission have sparked debates over whether this is not just a process of including voters on the rolls but to actually verify their citizenship.

For instance, the commission’s list of admissible documents did not include Aadhaar cards, which almost all citizens hold. Instead, it made them scramble to obtain residential and caste certificates. Opposition leaders alleged that the revision was actually an attempt to replicate through the back door Assam’s National Register of Citizens. Those applying to be included in the register had to produce a thicket of documents, which many simply did not possess.

On September 8, the Supreme Court ordered the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar as the 12th document, which can be used to prove identity.

The parallels between the Bihar Special Intensive Revision and events in Assam go beyond the similarities with the National Register of Citizens. In Assam, electoral rolls, their revisions and citizenship have long been intertwined. A key allegation that fuelled the “anti-foreigner” movement that wracked the state for six years from 1979 was that unauthorised migrants were getting themselves added to the voter rolls.

Subsequent revisions aimed at identifying and removing allegedly illegal foreigners led to the introduction in 1997 of a category of “D-voters”. Individuals suspected by the election authorities of being doubtful citizens were marked D in the rolls, pending clearance from the tribunals.

Government data shows around one lakh D-voters remain on Assam’s rolls today. Many were never informed why they were marked D nor summoned to defend their status in a tribunal. In 2019, Right to Information queries on the D status of scores of individuals showed that the Election Commission has no records explaining why they were marked as such.

The Supreme Court’s directive to the Election Commission in August to publish reasons for excluding over 65 lakh voters in Bihar stands in contrast with the lack of transparency and accountability in the D-voter mechanism.

This lack of accountability has largely gone unquestioned in Assam, not only in the D-voter issue but also in the National Register of Citizens: the 19 lakh excluded people have been stuck in a legal limbo, with the Supreme Court, which practically led the exercise, staying silent on the process.

When identity becomes a suspect

Document-driven scrutiny has now been extended into law enforcement practices as well. The same obsession with checking, being sceptical and rejecting documents was reported to have occurred during raids targeting Bengali Muslim workers in various states.

Poor, working-class individuals belonging to a specific religion and speaking a particular language were detained after raids and asked to prove their identity with documents. The police are reported to have refused to accept commonly held IDs and demanded additional papers, often those that many may not typically have.

For example, in Odisha, the police reportedly rejected school certificates, voter ID cards and Aadhar, insisting on birth certificates instead.

Many who failed to convince the authorities were forced into Bangladesh, either across the land borders or forced off boats into the sea near Bangladeshi territory.

Bangladesh has since sent back several of those deported to India. West Bengal, meanwhile, has petitioned the Supreme Court to stop migrant workers from the state being detained on false charges of being undocumented Bangladeshi nationals and forcibly deported despite holding valid Indian documents.

Bringing the borders home

With Assam and West Bengal heading to polls next year, questions of citizenship and belonging will undoubtedly become more intense. Modi’s Independence Day announcement effectively linked debates restricted to the border states to the wider political discourse.

It is a reminder that keenly observing the state’s behaviour at the margins and the exercises it undertakes to include and exclude at the peripheries offers keener insight into the processes unfolding across the mainland.

Abhishek Saha is doing his DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam’s NRC Crisis.