Saifulla Sarkar, who runs a pharmacy in Oudubi, a village in Lower Assam’s Bongaigaon district, recalls the summer of 2015 as being full of...
Saifulla Sarkar, who runs a pharmacy in Oudubi, a village in Lower Assam’s Bongaigaon district, recalls the summer of 2015 as being full of frenzied activity. “Everyone was busy getting their documents in place,” he said. “All of us had the papers, but it was a question of locating and arranging them – finding out which of the siblings had the land documents of their grandfather; getting previously bought land registered formally, things like that.”
Like the rest of Assam, Oudubi’s residents were preparing to apply to be counted as Indian citizens that summer. Assam’s National Register of Citizens, compiled in 1951, was being finally updated after a series of mishaps. Assamese nationalists had long demanded it – the NRC was seen as a means to sieve Indian citizens from undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, who Assamese groups claim were overrunning the state.
Muslims of Bengali origin living in Assam – a community routinely branded as “illegal migrants” – were more than eager to go through the citizenship test. “We wanted the NRC because we wanted to establish once and for all that we are Indians, we are Assamese, that we have the documents to prove it,” said Sarkar. “It was going to be our shot at a life...
