Rashminara Begum, Goalpara District, 2017
Detention Timeline Case Study #15 [written in Bangla by Kamal Chakraborty, edited and further translated into English by Riya]
During 1997, the Election Commissioner of Assam identified or rather marked many citizens as 'D’-Voters or Doubtful Voters, i.e., suspected foreigners. The people marked as Doubtful Voters were mainly Bengali, Koch Rajbongshi, Nepali, Kasia and many Tea-Garden Workers of Assam. The Election Commission of Assam sent the said list of doubtful voters to Border Police in respective districts of Assam.
From January 5, 1998, marking out Doubtful Voters and compiling the D-Voters' List officially started in Assam. As per the clauses of the Assam Accord, people who have entered Assam from East Pakistan till midnight of March 24, 1971, will be considered citizens of Assam and India. But from March 25, 1971, if anyone migrates into Assam, India, they will not be deemed citizens and will be treated as foreigners. The cut-off date is following the Independence Day of Bangladesh, and since their independence, whoever moved from Bangladesh to India will be considered a foreigner.
As we have seen, most of the people identified as "doubtful voters", "suspicious citizens" were eventually identified as Indians, as most of the issues were due to errors in the list or documentation. Still, the rest of the people who failed to prove their citizenship were sent to detention camps.
People in Assam have become foreigners due to various reasons; curiously, one of the reasons had been floods. An annual occurrence in Assam, floods, leads to colossal catastrophe every year. We hardly had a year where we were safe from floods and related crises. Many doubtful citizens are cases where they are made into foreigners through these floods. Rashminara Begum was also declared a foreigner in her own country due to floods. Rashminara's house was destroyed in the 2004 floods in Assam.
Along with her house, she lost many of her essential documents. Rashminara's grandfather, the Late Haji Roz Mohammad, was a freedom fighter for India and led Congress Party at one point in history. He was a citizen of India by birth, and his name is even present in the 1965 Voter's List. But even after that, due to lack and loss of documents of her parents and grandparents’ identity, his granddaughter, Rashiminara, ended up locked in the Kokrajhar Detention Camp.
Rashimanara lived in a village in the Goalpara District of Assam. On October 31 2016, Goalpara Foreigners' Tribunal No. 2 declared her a foreigner through a unilateral verdict. And on November 9, 2016, she was taken to the detention camp. She was three months pregnant back then. Even after multiple requests and appeal that she can't be incarcerated in this condition, they couldn't convince the police and authorities. When the police came to take Rashminara away, her four-year-old daughter, Moriom, hid under the bed, frightened. Police forcefully took away Rashminara from her home and locked her up.
The granddaughter of a freedom-fighter of India lived her whole pregnancy in the detention camp, barely getting to eat and sharing cramped up prison space with criminals. When her husband visited her with home-cooked food, she was not even allowed to eat that. While living under this harsh condition, on April 29, 2017, Rashminara gave birth to a child in the Kokrajhar Civil Hospital. The child was named Nazifa Yasmeen.
Even though she lost her documents in the floods, thanks to her family and CJP1, who came to her rescue and made sure she was released from the detention camp. On May 22 2017, after a month since she gave birth, Rashminara was released from Kokrajhar Detention Camp on bail on the grounds that she needed to take care of her newborn, and that is how she went back home with her infant child.
Such cases are now endless in Assam, where Indians are thrown into detention camps for no rhyme or reason, and it is up to us to figure out ways to get them out of such situations and cases.
Translator’s Note: Her case is still ongoing in the supreme court of India. The discrepancy in the date of birth in her school leaving certificate was cited as a reason behind the declaration of her as a foreigner, and because of the flood, she was unable to produce documents regarding her lineage. Here is an exclusive video interview of her speaking about her case with CJP. She and her family lost most of their assets and property trying to fight the case.
[This is the 15th Case Study from the book আসামে নাগরিকত্ব হরণের দহনলিপি // Transliteration: Assam-e Nagorikottwo Horoner Dohonlipi by Kamal Chakraborty. The book was first published in February 2021 by Kotha Bikolpo Pariwar, Silchar, Assam. To know more about the book and this translation project or contact the translator or the author, click here. If you want to order this original book in Bangla, you can get it from the People’s Book Society, College Street in Kolkata. Contact Number: 033-22199256; instead, you may also contact the author or the translator. ]