Even Before NRC, Mumbai's Bengali-Speaking Muslims Spent Years Trying to Prove Citizenship

'...Noorjahan Mandal*, a 33-year-old domestic worker from Mumbai’s Reay Road area, sits listlessly among the crowd, clutching a huge pile of documents that she has meticulously assembled over the past nine years to help her prove her nationality. A matted ration card issued in early 2000 shows that she has been living in Mumbai for close to two decades. Her school-leaving certificate claims she has studied till Class Seven in a district-run school in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas. Her laminated Aadhaar card too declares her a Mumbai resident... Mumbai’s process of screening and segregating Bengali-speaking Muslims has been an old one, much before the frenzy around the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) was triggered in Assam. While the Foreigners Act and the Passport Act apply to any foreign nationals entering and residing in India without proper legal documentation, historically, the state has been seen using it primarily against those it’s suspected to be undocumented immigrants who crossed over from Bangladesh. From the 1990s onward, the Shiv Sena has milked this Bangladeshi bogey...'

[Full article on The Wire.]