India is declaring millions of its citizens to be foreigners
The unlucky victims must then prove the opposite in special courts
IT IS HOTTER than Prague. It does not have the Czech capital’s cobbled squares or narrow streets but instead tin-roofed houses and paddies hemmed with palms and mango trees. Yet Franz Kafka would have felt quite at home in Assam. Since 2016 this hilly tea-growing state in India’s north-eastern corner has been compiling a National Register of Citizens (NRC). Billed as a scientific method for sorting pukka Indians from a suspected mass of unwanted Bangladeshi intruders, the seemingly banal administrative procedure has instead encoiled millions of people in a cruelly absurdist game.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Madness in the hills”
From the July 13th 2019 edition
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