A man lodged in the Goalpara detention centre in Assam died on Friday night, Northeast Now reported on Saturday. Naresh Koch, declared a “foreigner”, was taken to the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital, where he died on Friday. Koch had fallen ill 10 days ago.
Koch was declared a foreigner by a tribunal in June 2017. He is 29th such “foreigner” to have died in an Assam detention centre in the past three years, Hindustan Times reported.
Reacting to the development, Kaliabor Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi tweeted: “Often the poor and marginalised bear the brunt when they are forced to showcase documents to the satisfaction of the administration. It doesn’t matter which religion you belong to.”
The final list of the National Register of Citizens was published in Assam on August 31 last year. It left out 19 lakh people, or 6% of Assam’s population. People excluded from the list have the option of applying to Foreigners’ Tribunals established in the state, within a period of 120 days.
Doctors at the Gauhati Medical College and Hospital said Koch died due to health complications, The Hindu reported. They added that he was brought from Goalpara to Guwahati 10 days ago in critical condition. “The man suffered a stroke and died in the hospital,” Goalpara’s Superintendent of Police Sushanta Biswa Sarma said. “He was from the Mornoi area [near Sainik School, Goalpara].”
Officials at the detention centre said Koch was admitted to the camp in March 2018 after a tribunal in Goalpara district marked him a foreigner.
Goalpara holds one of the six detention centres in Assam, where around 1,000 “foreigners” have been lodged. At least 29 people, including Koch, have died so far in these centres or in hospitals.
On November 27, the Centre had told the Rajya Sabha that 988 “foreigners” have been lodged in six detention centres in Assam as on November 22. Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai said that from 2016 to October 13, 2019, as many as 28 detainees died in the detention centres or in hospitals.
However, in December, amid nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that there were no detention centres in the country.
The Citizenship Amendment Act, approved by Parliament on December 11, makes citizenship smoother for refugees from six minority religious communities from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, provided they have lived in India for six years and entered the country before December 31, 2014. The Act has been widely criticised for excluding Muslims, leading to protests against it. The government has also proposed a nationwide NRC exercise.
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