Violence through census and citizenship: India and Myanmar

Kaamil Ahmed
Dec 22, 2019 · 4 min read
A Rohingya’s citizenship card, stamped in Myanmar’s 1978 military operation against the minority, described as a census

Suddenly, the city was swarmed by uniforms. They examined the features on the faces of every citizen on the street and whoever they found suspicious, whoever they deemed alien, was detained. They were carted off to a warehouse and asked, then and there, to prove they belonged. If they couldn’t, they were arrested.

This was the beginning of Operation Nagamin, the military operation Myanmar called a census, launched against the Rohingya in 1978. But it is what many fear could happen to almost 2 million people living in India — and perhaps more afterwards.

Operation Nagamin was launched in Sittwe city and spread to the countryside of Rakhine state, sending 200,000 Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh in fear. This so-called census was described as a way of finding out who was a supposed infiltrator from Bangladesh but ignored that many families did not have the paperwork to prove their ties to the only land they had ever known, or didn’t know the language needed to explain it to the officers. It was followed with a citizenship law that restricted citizenship to a list of ethnic groups — the Rohingya were excluded. Since then, they have been stateless, and each round of violence against them has become more intense. Now, more Rohingya live in Bangladesh as refugees than in Myanmar.

Four decades after Nagamin, India has now implemented something with similarities that have disturbed the country’s Muslim population and especially those living in its northeast. India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeatedly targeted that population during the 2014 election campaign that brought him to power, calling them illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who should have their “bags packed” when he came to power. One of those occasions was after 32 Bengali Muslims were killed in Assam in May 2014. It was not the first time the community had been targeted in Assam — in 1983, the Nellie massacre killed thousands in a matter of hours.

At the same time, Modi promised to grant citizenship to Hindu minorities fleeing neighbouring countries. The new citizenship amendment acts upon that promise, promising fast-tracked citizenship to immigrants from a list of religions — Muslims excluded. The reason it scares people is because of how it fits in with India’s plans for a count of all its citizens, which will require they prove they belong. What happens if they do not have the paperwork? It is an inevitability in rural areas.

In 2017, a court ruling essentially cut off a whole section of the population by deciding the village-level residency certificates could not be used to prove their link to the land. The goalposts have, and can, move.

So far, this counting process, known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC), has only been applied in Assam. It excluded almost 2 million people, many of them Muslim but including Hindus and indigenous groups, and India has since been building detention centres.

READ: Reuters report on how people excluded from the NRC are building detention centres they could themselves be sent to (Zeba Siddiqui)

These policies and laws jar with the history of colonisation and the way boundaries were drawn when the British left a region it had disfigured. Bangladesh’s northern Sylhet region was attached to Assam under the British administration but voted to rejoin East Bengal (which was becoming East Pakistan) in a referendum in 1947. Still, a part of Sylhet remained in Assam, and therefore India, and the movement of people is never as smooth as the movement of borders. Bengali-speaking Muslims on the Assamese side of the border doesn’t mean they were not always there. That indigenous groups have been excluded by the NRC in Assam shows the conflict between India’s system demanding paperwork and the reality for many rural citizens. India set an 120 day deadline for people to appeal before they are detained — the question many have is what they will do if they can’t prove they belong?

And that question is now being asked all over India. In West Bengal, where again Modi’s government separates between Muslims and Hindus in an area that historically was just Bengal, home to both, as well as the capital Delhi. India’s NRC is due to be carried out around the country.

READ: Restless Beings background on Assam’s NRC and timeline of anti-Muslim violence

According to Restless Beings, an advocacy group that has worked on both the Rohingya and the Assamese NRC, at least 1,000 people have been detained in Assam since the NRC.

After weeks of protests, where Indian forces have killed dozens of protesters across the country and rounded up far more, Modi has tried to ease the building pressure. He did so by blaming the opposition and claiming the policies will not have the effect on Muslims that many fear. He said there had been no talks or steps towards implementing the NRC anywhere beyond Assam. That contradicted what his own party and minister Amit Shah have been saying, however.

“First we will pass the Citizenship Amendment bill and ensure that all the refugees from the neighbouring nations get the Indian citizenship. After that NRC will be made and we will detect and deport every infiltrator from our motherland” — Amit Shah, May 2019

TheMarginal

Stories from society’s margins

Kaamil Ahmed

Written by

Freelance journalist and photographer workng mostly on #Rohingya, Israel-Palestine.

TheMarginal

Stories from society’s margins

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