Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Assam NRC: Are India’s ‘unwanted people’
being driven to suicide?
Assam is a state in northeastern India known
for its wildlife, archeological sites, silk, and tea. It is bordered by Bhutan to
the north and Bangladesh to the south.
Recently, the state has been intensifying its
effort to identify who are locals and who are not. Those who migrated from its eastern neighbor Muslim-majority
Bangladesh, or East Pakistan before its independence in 1971 may lose their citizenship.
Four million people have already been excluded from the national register of
citizenship list and many of them are feared to face either detention or deportation
if they cannot prove their residence prior to 1971. It is a fatal blow to those
who have already lived in the state for more than a few decades. They have
nowhere to go once they lose their citizenship. Some of those in despair about
their future have killed themselves. India was a dreamland and has been their homeland.
Is this just a sort of legal procedure or ethnic
cleansing? Could the same thing happen to Hispanic Americans in the US?
Read the article and think how desperate they
were when they moved to India from their homeland.
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