'Jabeda Begum, a woman whose petition challenging the order of a tribunal that had declared her as a foreigner was dismissed by the Gauhati High Court, has gone into hiding, fearing that she will be sent to a detention centre. The family said that the police raided the house earlier this week even though they had said they will follow due procedure...
'The fate of over 1.9 million people who have been left out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam now rests with the Foreigners Tribunals. For the last 15 years, Foreigners Tribunals have wreaked havoc in Assam by arbitrarily denying people their citizenship. Riddled with bias, they have declared Indian citizens to be foreigners for minor spelling mistakes in their names, their inability to provide detailed documents or recall minute ancestral details dating back 50 years or more.
'...But last week the NRC data suddenly became inaccessible. The contract to manage the data processing was given to Indian information-technology giant Wipro. As news spread about the “data loss”, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a clarification that “there is a technical issue regarding visibility on Cloud”. The NRC website is hosted in the URL http://nrcassam.nic.in/ on a domain which is under the National Informatics Center, a Government of India entity.
'Assam’s Welfare of Minorities Minister Ranjit Dutta has confirmed the state’s plans to implement a census to identify Assam’s ‘khilonjiya’, or indigenous Muslim population, this year. On Tuesday, Dutta will meet with various representatives of the indigenous Assamese Muslim community to seek their “suggestions” in finalising the framework of the census... Rahman will be part of the meeting with the Welfare of Minorities & Development Department on Tuesday. He added that many indigenous Muslims have been wrongfully tagged D-voter or Doubtful-voter in Assam.
'Union minister of state for home Nityanand Rai on Tuesday told the Lok Sabha that the Assam government had been advised to release all non-Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh - "who have been forced to seek shelter in the state before December 31, 2014, with expired or without valid documents" - from detention centres...'
'The National Investigation Agency, according to a Hindu report, questioned IIT Guwahati teacher Arupjyoti Saikia for over four hours. It is being suspected that he was summoned due to his involvement in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, said reports. Saikia teaches history at IIT Guwahati and was questioned at an NIA office on the outskirts of Guwahati...'
'On December 30, amid the continuing stir against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Assam, Ajit Kumar Bhuyan resigned as the editor-in-chief of the popular satellite news channel Prag News. Bhuyan has been a prominent voice in the Assamese media that has unequivocally supported the ongoing protests. The resignation, according to his friends and colleagues, was a consequence of his consistent criticism of the Bharatiya Janata Party government over the new citizenship law...'
'As many as 450 houses were razed and over 3,000 people were evicted in Sootea in Assam’s Sonitpur district on 5-6 December 2019 after “a local legislator entered 10 villages in the area with bulldozers and paramilitary personnel,” Arab News reported... According to Arab News, 65-year-old Akkas Ali, a farmer who is staying at a nearby makeshift camp, said, “My fault is that I am not registered as a voter in the Sootea Assembly constituency where my village falls. I have my vote in the neighboring constituency.
'The Supreme Court has directed the Assam government to ensure that no children of parents whose names have been included in the updated list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) will be sent to detention centres or separated from their parents until an application filed by the Citizens for Justice & Peace, Mumbai is fully considered. CJP had filed an Intervention Application in the ASSAM NRC matter (Assam Public Works v/s Union of India) pointing out that hundreds of not hundreds of thousands of children had been excluded from the NRC when their parents had been included.
'The Supreme Court Monday sought an explanation from the Assam government over allegations that the new state coordinator of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), Hitesh Dev Sarma, has made communal statements on a social media platform before his appointment. Asking Sarma to explain his remarks, the court directed the government to look into the issue... Sarma had uploaded posts about issues related to the Citizenship Bill on Facebook. In a post on February 13, restricted only to his friends, he had said that there were “lakhs and lakhs of Bangladeshis in the NRC”.
