Dilip Simeon's blog

"Salman Khan Gets Bail For Rs 50,000, A Labourer In Detention In Assam Has To Pay Rs 2 Lakh," an activist said, pointing out the unfair burden on Assam's poor The sole remaining photograph of Hibaz Ali is a grainy image of his face squeezed into a framed collage with a caption calling him a martyr. When the All Assam Minority Students’ Association (AAMSU) presented this college to Ali’s aging parents, Kaleshan and Lal Bano, they told them their son’s sacrifice would not go in vain.  That was in July 2010, when Ali was one of four people who died when the police opened fire on protestors demonstrating against the updation of Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) in the state’s Barpeta district.  Soon after Ali’s death, a Congress Member of Parliament named Himanta Biswa Sarma visited the family and promised a government job for a family member. Nine years later this weekend, on August 20 2019, the final version of the NRC was published — leaving 19 lakh of ...

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has warned that there could be “bloodbath and civil war” in the country over the implementation of the  National Register of Citizens  (NRC) in Assam. It would be foolhardy to dismiss this as a knee-jerk reaction to the threat of the  Bharatiya Janata Party  (BJP) implementing  NRC  in her state.  The BJP came to power on a security agenda of making India immune to internal and external threats – but its policies have initiated processes that will probably increase instability. In its pursuit of a unitary state the Modi government may in fact have created conditions for potential civil war in Assam and  Jammu and Kashmir.  The party and its government seem to have become victims of their own narrative. The BJP obsession with illegal Bangladeshi immigrants extends beyond Assam. In 1995, along with its ideologically fraternal party, the Shiv Sena, it attempted to expel Bengali-speaking Muslims from...

A two day People’s Tribunal on Contested Citizenship in Assam: Constitutional Processes and Human Cost, was held on September 7 & 8 at the Indian Society of International Law, Delhi. The tribunal witnessed presentations from exerts including academics, senior advocates and activists as well as extensive testimonies from the affected people of Assam. The key issues that were discussed at the tribunal were land culture and migration, the evolution of citizenship in India, NRC in Assam and Constitutional Processes, Foreigners Tribunals in Assam, Detention centres inAssam and the consequences of Extension of NRC to other parts of India. The key themes that that were examined after each session were the role of the judiciary, the human costs and the consequences of the process extending to the rest of the country. The second day also had a panel discussion among senior advocates and activists sharing their reflection on contested citizenship in Assam. The Tribunal was co organi...

When she was one, Suro Devi was rescued by a sewer cleaner from a rubbish dump in Assam, northeast India. When the state of Assam started a massive exercise to  register its citizens  in 2015, Suro Devi did not have a birth certificate, information about her parents, a voter list with her name on it, or anything to prove that she had lived in Assam before 25 March 1971. She seemed destined to be left off the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and become stateless, and perhaps spend the rest of her days in a detention camp. Thousands In Lawyer Fees, Debts: A Nightmare Awaits Assam’s Poor Left Out of NRC // Assams new detention centres But Zamser Ali, a citizenship rights activist based in Assam’s capital, Guwahati, heard about Devi’s case. He knew that documents were not the only thing that could prove your origins. He managed to track down five eyewitnesses to her rescue from the dump. And in August, when the draft NRC was published, Devi’s name appeared on it. “You h...

At a public tribunal held in Delhi on September 8-9, 2019, victims of the NRC process in Assam testified in gripping detail to the long-lasting and extreme hardships to which they had been exposed. Families were separated, and either incarcerated or put in detention centres , by an entirely arbitrary quasi-judicial process, leading to deprivation, deaths, and even suicides.  Over the past week, what had so far been confined to expressions of deep anxiety in limited sections of print media and on websites by concerned citizens has spilled on to the streets, with injuries sustained, blood drawn, and properties damaged across India. An atmosphere of siege, fear, and anger pervades many universities and large areas of some states. This is only the initial toll of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Assam detention centres Agenda for Social Democracy The CAA appears to be ultra vires of the Constitution of India, specifically Articles 14, 21 and 25. While legal and constitutional ...

Mass internment camps did not begin or end with the Nazis – today they are everywhere from China to Europe to the US. How can we stop their spread? By Daniel Trilling At the start of the 21st century, the following things did not exist. In the US, a large network of purpose-built immigration prisons, some of which are run for profit. In western China,  “political education” camps  designed to hold hundreds of thousands of people, supported by high-tech surveillance. In Syria, a  prison complex  dedicated to torture and mass execution... In north-east India, a  detention centre  capable of holding 3,000 people who may have lived in the country for decades but are unable to prove they are citizens. In Myanmar, rural  encampments  where thousands of people are being  forced to live on the basis of their ethnicity. On islands and deserts at the edges of wealthy regions – Greece’s Aegean islands, the Negev Desert in Israel, the Pacific Oce...

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF INDIA: INDIA DOES NOT NEED THE CAA-NPR-NRIC 9 January 2020 Dear Fellow Citizens of India, Over the past few weeks, many of you have been understandably agitated over the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 ("CAA"). Your fears have been compounded by the contradictory and confusing statements made by spokespersons of the Government of India on the implementation of the National Register of Indian Citizens ("NRIC"),   Though that government now seeks to delink the National Population Register (“NPR”) from the NRIC, we, the Constitutional Conduct Group, comprising former civil servants from the All-India and Central Services committed to the Constitution of India, consider it our duty to inform you that the three issues are linked, acquaint you with the facts regarding the NPR, NRIC and the CAA and emphasise why these measures need to be resolutely opposed. For easy comprehension, we are listing the issues ...

In a heartbreaking instance of man succumbing to hopelessness, Ashrab Ali, a 93 year old man, was found dead in Assam’s Kamrup district after someone filed an objection application against the inclusion of his name in the National Register of Citizens (NRC). His family alleges he committed suicide by consuming poison. “His name was in the final draft of NRC published last year but someone put an objection against him and he had to attend a hearing on May 23 in Rangia (about 100 km away). After the hearing, his biometrics were taken and that scared him because some people in the village told him that biometric details are taken from suspected foreigners whom police might put in a detention camp,” Fazlur Rehman, a family member, told  Indian Express . The family says that he was disturbed after attending the hearing and feared he would be dragged away to a detention camp. He also feared how his family’s citizenship status would now be questioned if his citizenship could not b...

The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the protection of a national government, transferred the whole matter to the police. Hannah Arendt in 1948  Over the past three years, 3.29 crore, (32.9 million) people in Assam have submitted a bewildering array of documents to prove they are Indian citizens - a process that sounds like a routine bureau-cratic practice, but in reality has disrupted the lives of millions. On Monday, it emerged that over 12 percent, or 40 lakh, of those who applied have been excluded.  Of these, Hajela said 2.48 lakh were persons declared foreigners by 100 tribunals across the state, or marked doubtful voters by the election commission, and their descendants were automatically excluded from the NRC process. In the hour-long press conference, officials said those excluded would not be subject to punitive action, detention or deportation — yet. Satyendra Garg, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, quoted Mini...

The speech focusing on Nanak’s teachings in context of the detention centres existing around the world was delivered by former Attorney General of British Columbia and former Canada Federal Minister Ujjal Dosanjh. WITH CHIEF Justice of India Sharad Arvind Bobde seated on the dais, the stories of Auschwitz concentration camp and about the “silence” surrounding the existence of detention centres in Assam and outside India found a noticeable mention at an international conference celebrating 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev on Saturday in  Chandigarh . German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem “first they came for….” was also read at the event organised by Bar Council of Punjab and Haryana. The speech focusing on Nanak’s teachings in context of the detention centres existing around the world was delivered by former Attorney General of British Columbia and former Canada Federal Minister Ujjal Dosanjh.  Beginning his speech with a reference to the anniversa...

NB : In his book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ,  Milan Kundera described the Soviet puppet President of Czechoslovakia as the President of Forgetting. Delhi's 'guardians of the law' may suitably be renamed the pet monkeys of the Sangh Parivar; of whom the unwritten rule in contemporary India remains: Don't See Evil, Don't Say Evil, Don't Hear Evil. DS     Why are retired IPS officers attacking Julio Ribeiro for seeking fair probe into Delhi riots?   Twenty six  retired IPS officers write to oppose Ribeiro’s letter to Delhi Police commissioner asking him to probe riots investigation.  Doubts in my original open letter not addressed: Ribeiro . More on Julio Ribeiro's rebuke to Delhi Police....  MHA claims it has no data on Assam Detention Camp inmates!  :  Oddly enough the data had been regularly made available in multiple submissions before the Assam state assembly, and the fact that the same data was provided in the winter sessio...

Isaac Chotiner interviews Professor Niraja Jayal Last week, India  adopted  new legislation called the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gives undocumented immigrants of several faiths a path to citizenship but excludes Muslims, who make up about fifteen per cent of the country’s population. The law is part of a pattern of persecution of Muslims carried out by Indian Prime Minister  Narendra Modi  and his Bharatiya Janata Party, who seek to  transform India  from an avowedly secular, pluralistic country into a Hindu one. This past August, Modi revoked the autonomy of India’s only Muslim-majority state,  Kashmir , and flooded it with troops, in an ongoing siege. In Assam, another state with a large Muslim population, the government implemented the National Register of Citizens, which forced people to  prove  or lose their citizenship status. Immigrants whose citizenship was stripped by the state are already being sent to detention cam...

From Jairus Banaji’s Facebook post, December 20,  2019 India’s ruling duo live on a different planet from the mass of Indians, so completely divorced are they from the lives of the vast majority who struggle to make ends meet. They love the company of Mukeshbhai and Mehulbhai, love to dress expensively and to strut around like peacocks, waving to cameras. One loves to travel and is obsessed with embracing powerful male heads of state (as long as the cameras are watching). The other obviously eats very well, unlike 85% of Indians, and tells us human rights are irrelevant. This sets the clock of modern society back several centuries, to before the days when the rights of the individual began to matter.  They both seriously think they can arrogate the power of life and death over many millions of their fellow citizens by having the right to decide who is and isn’t a citizen, who will and will not be stateless. Basically this is because they see their citizens (*all* c...

Two recent events suggest that the Indian Republic could be hurtling down a slippery slope. Both relate to Uttar Pradesh but have national consequences. One is the Varanasi court judgement opening up the Vishwanath-Gyanvapi Mosque dispute. The other comes from adjoining Allahabad where the High Court has red-flagged the misuse of the National Security Act. Most of the cases are against members of the minority community. Efforts to corner the Muslim community in India appear to be unrelenting. Less than 18 months after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the Hindu petitioners in the Ram Janmabhoomi- Babri Masjid  land dispute in Ayodhya, another smouldering ember from Hindutva’s agenda is being stoked to life. A Varanasi court has ordered the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to ascertain “whether the religious structure standing at present at the disputed site is a superimposition, alteration or addition or there is a structural overlapping of any kind, with or over, any reli...