Stateless in your Own Country

A thesis by Esha Mitra

A look into the lives of declared foreigners in the North East Indian state of Assam

“In all these years I’ve never had any interaction with the police, I could never have thought something like this would happen to me, I got scared, all of a sudden this attack,” 54-year-old farmer and fisherman Abdul Kalam said.

One afternoon when he went to the market he was detained by Assam's Border Police (a police division responsible for apprehending illegal immigrants) and subsequently spent three months at a detention centre. Kalam was declared a foreigner by the state’s Foreigners Tribunal in 2017. This means that the court believed that Kalam could not prove he was an Indian citizen. Kalam says he knows no other home apart from Assam, India. His case was being handled by a lawyer who had forgotten to file certain documents with the court, because of which he was detained in February 2023, says Kalam. Kalam belongs to the Bengali Muslim community in Assam. In Assam the persons being declared foreigners are disproportionately members of the Bengali community, lawyers and activists say. The roots of ethnic strife in Assam were sown around the time when there was migration from today's Bangladesh into Assam during the years leading up to and following the creation of Bangladesh as a separate country in 1971. Kalam’s wife, Ashiya Khatun, is also a declared foreigner however she was not detained. Kalam being the sole breadwinner of the family, Ashiya Khatun struggled to survive in his absence. Kalam’s story is not unique. Hundreds of people have spent time in Assam’s detention centres because they were declared not Indian, declared a foreigner, and accused of illegally migrating to the country, according to government records. Many of these people are uneducated and often don’t have sufficient legal documents to be able to fight their case once they have been accused of being a foreigner. They are also often economically impoverished and thus don’t have the means to hire good lawyers, says Aman Wadud, a human rights lawyer who took on Kalam’s case in Assam’s highest court pro-bono. While, like Kalam, they may have known no home apart from India, they’re unable to fight their way back to being an Indian citizen.