Women ‘Worst Victims’ of NRC: Gendered and Discriminatory Nature of the Register Revealed

'The 1.9 million people in Assam excluded from the August 31 final list of National Register of Citizens are scrambling once again to furnish documents to prove their citizenship to the government. Property deeds, birth certificates, educational records and spelling mistakes are all being called into question.

Amidst stories of physical and mental distress emerging once more from Assam, many have begun to question the state’s threat of statelessness that many say is also highly gendered in nature.

Women in Assam are finding the burden to produce documents too heavy to bear, reveals a fact-finding research trip by Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression. Having historically faced exclusion due to patriarchal norms that have kept them from holding entitlements to land or lineage, many women in the state are unable to produce the “legacy documents” that have now been deemed necessary for citizenship.

“They are the worst kind of victims, I believe,” says Nisha Biswas, convener of WSS. “Once again, their autonomy has been refused and in this patriarchal system they were told that their in-laws’ families, into which they are married, were their own. They have disinherited their parental family, but now they have to go to their parental family to produce documents regarding legacy.”...'

[Continue reading on The Citizen.]