Wednesday 6 May 2020

CoViD 19: A case for releasing inmates of Assam detention camps

All the six detention centers meant for declared foreign nationals in the northeastern state of India are inside congested prisons with no concept of social distancing. Detainees have hardly any rights and no waged work or parole. They must be released in the process of decongestion of prisons. 

By Arijit Sen 

Illustration by Priya Kuriyan
Attempts are on across India to try and prevent the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. There’s a lockdown in place. Physical distancing, a luxury for many, is imperative, and so is personal hygiene. In this fight, poor migrants and daily wage laborers have been dehumanized. Treated with indignity, they have been stranded without work, money, food or a roof above their heads, left to fend for themselves. The lockdownunplanned and sudden, has been a lethal blow for them.

In the first week of the lockdown, 27 Indians died according to the National Campaign Against Torture. Inside the detention centers meant to incarcerate foreigners in Assam in India’s northeast, this tale of horror assumes an even more terrible face. The hunt for foreigners or illegal migrants in Assam has been going on for many years. From 1979 to 1985, Assam witnessed a widespread and violent anti-foreigner movement that demanded detection of foreigners, their deletion from voter lists and their deportation to neighboring Bangladesh. The implicit assumption was equating foreigners with Bangladeshis. The Assam agitation ended with the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985, which led to special provisions to determine Indian citizenship that was were only applicable to Assam. The agitation also had a demand to use the National Register of Citizens (NRC) 1951 that was based on the census of the same year to create a legal list of citizens. That demand for an NRC re-emerged and was set in motion in 2014, after the Supreme Court directed the state government to update the NRC list. Those not on the list have to face Foreigners’ Tribunals to prove their citizenship. In Assam, the Border Police and the State Election Commission can send notices to citizens suspected to be foreigners. The burden of proof lies on those marked as alleged foreigners; a failure to do so, leads them to the detention centers. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA) also lies within this chase for foreigners.

The detainees, packed in overcrowded rooms, are vulnerable at the best of times. Now it’s even worse. On 25 March 2020, a Guwahati-based organization called Justice and Liberty Initiative submitted a representation before the Chief Justice of India, seeking the release of all detainees, all of them in custody after being declared foreign nationals.

Lawyer Aman Wadud, who heads the organization, told me, that they can’t be sitting ducks for an infection that the entire world is trying to fight. “Detention centers are crowded. When the entire country is practicing social distancing, why should detainees live in crowded places? Often people are detained and sent to detention centers, what if they carry contagious diseases? Under any circumstance detaining declared foreigners, the way it is done in Assam, is unreasonable. In these testing times, let a historical wrong be corrected.”

Detainees face punishment meant for criminals. In crowded prisons, rights of detainees are erased every day to the point of being non-existent.There are 802 detainees lodged in six detention centers across Assam. At least ten people died in these centers in 2019 alone. There has been a total of 30 deaths since 2016 in Assam. People who have spent time in the centers agree that they are worse than hell. There is no segregation between undertrials, convicts and detainees. There is overcrowding and absence of basic hygiene. Detainees face punishment meant for criminals. In crowded prisons, rights of detainees are erased every day to the point of being non-existent. The centers are almost like spaces of legal exception and indifference. A 2018 report on the six detention centers in Assam submitted by a former special monitor to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Harsh Mander, clearly established how these centers are overcrowded. Mander resigned and made the report public after no action was taken by the NHRC. The report pointed out that the state did not make any distinction between detention centers and jails. The detention centers are in fact inside jail premises and the detainees add to the number of people who are incarcerated. According to the latest statistics available with the Ministry of Home Affairs’ National Crime Records Bureau, the general occupancy rates in all jails in Assam are at 93.2 per cent. In district jails of Assam, the percentage is at 103.03. Silchar, Goalpara, Tezpur, Kokrajhar, Dibrugarh, and Jorhat are all district jails inside which the detention centers are situated. A six-feet social distancing is an impossibility in such circumstances of congestion.

“Reaching the camp, I saw that there was no proper food, we didn’t get any bathing soap or oil or any such thing. We used to only get soaps that are used to wash clothes, the cheap ones. They used to give us food, which was fit for dogs and cats,” Ashraf Ali, a former detainee at the Goalpara detention center in Assam, told me when we met some time ago.

With him was his neighbor Kismat. Both of them had been sent to the same detention center, one of six in Assam meant for people declared as foreign nationals by the Foreigners’ Tribunals. That these tribunals exist to serve the government’s cause and not those of the people is an open secret.

“The room had a capacity of 40 people, but when we reached there it was filled with around 120 people. There was no space, we had to live on top of one another,” Kismat told me. “Ashraf and I slept next to the bathroom. It was dirty, we couldn’t sleep at all. Each of us had around two-two-and-a-half-feet of space. We were threatened. The convicts get much bigger beds. At that time, we were all put together – we shared space with convicts, all mixed. Each day the numbers increased. It was very hot, there was a fan, but it didn’t work. There was no space or peace.”

The rooms Kismat mentioned were roughly 80 feet by 21 feet–for 120 people. Ashraf and Kismat have left, but nothing has changed in the six detention centers, even in 2020.

Technically, declared foreigners are detained not as a punishment but to wait before they are deported to their alleged country of citizenship. It’s like a waiting hall, Wadud adds, “but it is apparent that deportation is not foreseeable. In the last six years only four declared foreigners have been deported. If deportation is not possible, why detain them? Hence we feel that they should be released from the detention centers.”

The treatment of detainees follows the pattern of stigmatization faced by people suspected to be foreigners in Assam for decades. There have been innumerable instances of genuine citizens being marked as “suspects,” as “foreigners” and then being harassed by a mob.All these detainees are tried under The Foreigners Act 1946, which provides for non-incarcerative alternatives such as requiring a person to reside at a particular place, imposing restrictions on movement, requiring the person to check in with authorities periodically, prohibiting the person from associating with certain people or engaging in certain activities. Yet, as pointed out by Amnesty International, detention has become the default option in Assam. The government plans to set up ten more detention centers. The treatment of detainees follows the pattern of stigmatization faced by people suspected to be foreigners in Assam for decades. There have been innumerable instances of genuine citizens being marked as “suspects,” as “foreigners” and then being harassed by a mob. There are a hundred Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam, which decide if a person is a foreigner or not (or Indian or not). The burden of proof is on the person suspected to be a foreigner, or an infiltrator. Before this, a person suspected of being an illegal migrant was tried under the Illegal Migration (Determination by Tribunal) Act 1983 that was enacted as a response to the Assam agitation. The burden of proof was then on the state agency or whoever accused a person as being a foreigner. This was challenged before the Supreme Court and struck down, in 2005, as being too lenient.

This process of finding an illegal migrant has been in the spotlight because of a citizenship drive called the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that puts together a legal list of citizens. The process has been found to be deeply biased and in violation of basic constitutional rights granted to all Indian citizens: 1.9 million people in Assam have been left out of it and have to prove their citizenship. At the end of the process there is the prospect of overcrowded detention centers and statelessness for thousands.

Why can’t detainees be released?

The Supreme Court of India recently took suo motu cognizance of a writ-petition on overcrowding at prisons in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. The Court underlined that in India’s 1,339 prisons, there are at least 466,084 inmates and, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, the occupancy rate is at 117.6 %. The Court further noted that in closed spaces such as prisons the chances of the COVID-19 virus spreading is high. It puts at risk not only the prisoners — old and new — but every single person associated with the prison. “We are of the opinion that there is an imminent need to take steps on an urgent basis to prevent the contagion of COVID-19 virus in our prisons,” the Court said.

The state of Uttar Pradesh, where overcrowding stands at 176.5%, has decided to release 11,000 prisoners from 71 facilities. This includes 8,500 undertrials and 2,500 convicts. All of them, face jail terms of seven years or less and hence, according to the Supreme Court’s instructions, are eligible for release. Maharashtra has decided to release 11,000 prisoners from its 60 jails. Prisoners have also been released from Delhi’s Tihar Jail. In West Bengal, 3,076 prisoners have been released. Assam has also released 722 undertrials.

In a 2013 judgment (Thana Singh versus Central Bureau of Narcotics), the Supreme Court made an important observation about a person in a prison awaiting trial. The plight of the undertrial, said the Court, gains focus “only on a solicitous enquiry by this Court, and soon after, quickly fades into the backdrop.” In this context, the story of Machan Lalung in Assam is relevant. A member of the Tiwa community in Arunachal Pradesh, Machan was in prison for 54 years without any specific charge or facing trial. He was released in 2005 and died two years later. India’s undertrial population (the third highest in Asia) and those who are in the six detention centers of Assam face the same indifference with which Machan was treated. It is ironic that it has come to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic to bring focus back on these lives in incarceration.

Detainees should be released on personal recognizance bond irrespective of how many years they were in detention because they are not criminals.The recent Supreme Court order says that prisons across India are overcrowded thus social distancing is an impossibility. The Court underlines that “contagious viruses such as COVID-19 virus proliferate in closed spaces such as prisons. Studies also establish that prison inmates are highly prone to contagious viruses. The rate of ingress and egress in prisons is very high, especially since persons (accused, convicts, detenues etc.) are brought to the prisons on a daily basis.” Detainees inside these prisons cannot be the exception to that observation. When it comes to detainees, the Assam government in its White Paper on Foreigners’ Issue (published on 20 October 2012 when there were only three detention centers) approved the use of detention for those declared as ‘“irregular foreigners”’ to restrict their movements and to ensure that they “do not perform the act of vanishing.” The reason was to keep a tab on individuals declared as foreigners, but for this detention is not required, says advocate Oliullah Laskar. “It can be done if they are released on bail.” Both Oliullah and Wadud agree that there has been no initiative on the part of the Government of India in respect of their deportation. During our interview, Oliullah recalls a Supreme Court panel on prison conditions headed by Justice Amitav Roy set up in 2018. It had recommended, among other things, that people who are otherwise entitled to bail and are unable to arrange surety should be released on a Personal Recognizance Bond.This is important in the context of former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi’s direction to release detainees who were in detention for more than three years on a surety of INR 200,000. In a recent decision, the Supreme Court also held that bail cannot be made conditional upon heavy deposits beyond the financial capacity of an applicant for bail. (Dhanapal versus State, (2019) 6 SCC 743). Detainees should be released on personal recognizance bond irrespective of how many years they were in detention because they are not criminals. So far, Assam has only released undertrials.

A few months ago, I visited the site for an upcoming detention center in Assam’s Goalpara district. The project is in a 300,000-square-feet area and is designed to house 3,000 detainees — women, children and men. It will be the largest detention center in India: unreal, dystopian; high walls, watchtowers, searchlights; the signs of a dehumanized space ready to take away and wipe out rights. The place reminded me of a conversation with a doctor who was treating detainees at a center in Assam two years ago. “Most of the detainees suffer from depression,” he told me. “The main shortcomings in detention centers are that the environment is not healthy. They are not criminals, and yet the jail security guards treat them as criminals.” Former detainees, I met, had stories of fellow detainees suffering from brain-short disease — a word they use for acute psychosis, or even madness.
“Inside [the center where I was detained] there were 30-40 women in the room. There were very old people. 50-, 60-, even 80-year old people. There were young children too with their mothers. People used to cry a lot. Some of the women went hungry. There was immense sadness,” Rashminara Begum, a former detainee told me about two years ago, while recalling her time at in a detention center.
Photo by Arijit Sen
In December 2019, I met Manikjan Bibi and Ashida Bibi in Bongaigaon. Manikjan was sent to a detention center by a Foreigners Tribunal and had been there for four years. She was released only after the Supreme Court’s direction to release those detainees who had spent more than three years in detention. She has to report to the local police station every week. Her name appeared on the final list of the National Register of Citizens but was removed after “‘someone”’ filed an objection. “At the detention center, I felt like I was in a graveyard. I have documents. I was born in India. My father and grandfather are Indians. I don’t know what else I should do,” she told me. Manikjan’s neighbor Ashida Bibi was also sent to a detention center for a year. Her husband died while she was inside, and she was not allowed to attend his funeral despite her requests. Ashida now works as a daily wage laborer. “I have all the documents,” she insists, “I still don’t know why I was sent to a detention center. My life has been destroyed.”

Inside the detention centers there are many others whose lives have been destroyed.  They are stuck without any clue as to why they are there and are desperate to get out of the congested rooms.

According to Dr. Saptak Sarkar, a junior resident at Diamond Harbour Medical College and Hospital in West Bengal, congested rooms will fail to maintain all the criteria specified by either the Center for Disease Control for Interim Management in Correctional or Detention facilities or by the Ministry of Health in India for the COVID-19 prevention. “The virus mainly transmits through droplets emitting from other persons’ cough or sneezes; from direct contact or contact with used object and body fluid of COVID-19 positive individuals. Hence, the practice of social distancing and maintenance of proper hygiene in camps can prevent the spread many folds if not cease the spread for good.” It is therefore imperative need to free the detainees.

In response to the current emergency, there has also been a call from another NGO, the Committee for Justice and Peace, to convert that site for the new detention center into a hospital to treat COVID-19 patients, a sensible idea at a time when dignity and hope for the poor seem to be absent from lockdown policies. In addition to this, if the government has a change of heart and releases the detainees as Wadud demands, then perhaps this moment of crisis could be a small step towards something good.

Justice and Liberty Initiative’s application will be heard by the Supreme Court on 13 April 2020. In another petitionfiled by detainee Rajubala Das, the Court has issued notices to the Central Government and the Assam Government to file their reply and the matter will again be considered on the same date.

In Assam, lives have been lost, migrants have been stigmatized, people viewed with suspicion in the citizenship debate. This crisis, though, can be an opportunity, a page-turner for the detainees in Assam. Will the people in power do the right thing, though?
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Arijit Sen is an independent journalist based in Kolkata. Over the years he has been covering the northeast as a reporter and researcher, apart from traveling the region during a stint with Amnesty International. He tweets @senarijit

The essay was first published in the Polis Project and it is reposted here verbatim for wider dissemination. The original piece can be accessed here.

Sunday 29 April 2018

Immigration and demographic transformation of Assam

Susanta Krishna Dass studied the problem of immigration and demographic transformation of Assam and published a paper with the findings that:

(1) Since 1951, the rate of increase of Assam's population has been much higher than that of the country as a whole or of any state or province. But unlike in other states, this heavy increase has been due to (a) an acceleration of the natural rate of increase; (b) influx of Hindu refugees from East Pakistan; and (c) heavier migration of Indians from the rest of the country.

(2) The tremendous swelling in the number of the, Assamese speaking population during 1911-31 as a consequence of people belonging to other language groups adopting Assamese language is a unique instance of its kind.

(3) Apprehensions about the infiltration of Bangladeshi or East Pakistani Muslims into Assam appear not to be supported by facts. The fact is that while it was mainly the Bengali Muslims, motivated by economic as well as political factors, who migrated to Assam between 1891 and 1947, such migration as has taken place' since 1947, almost entirely due to political reasons, has been of Bengali Hindus.

On the specific problem of Muslim infiltration he had to say:

There is a general and widely held apprehension, both in Assam and in the rest of the country, about 'Muslim infiltration' in the state. "The frustration is further fueled by fears that in the not too distant future, they may be swamped by 'foreign nationals', mostly Muslims from Bangladesh". It is presumed that such Muslim 'infiltrators' into Assam got assimilated with the Assamese speaking population following the practice of their predecessors.

If this presumption is correct, two things must follow. First, being an addition to the bonafide Muslim, nationals living in Assam, and given their natural rate of increase which is generally higher than that of the Hindus, there should have been a steep rise in the Muslim population of Assam, at least at a rate higher than that of the Muslim population in the rest of the country. Secondly, since these are supposed to have adopted Assamese, there should have been an equally steep hike in the Assamese speaking population. It has been found above that between 1951-71, there was no hike in the Assamese speaking population and the rate of increase was quite normal in the decade 1961-71. This part of the presumption is thus not tenable.

Table 9 presents the distribution of Assam's population by religion, all other conditions remaining same as those of Table 7. The Table shows that between 1951-71, Muslim population of Assam varied almost at par with its Hindu counterpart. There was no hike. This is further confirmed by the fact that during the decade 1961-71, the Muslim population declined by --0.74 per cent of the total population of the state, the link relative rate of variation also being lower than that for the Hindus and the Christians. This, along with the slow natural rate of increase of the Assamese speaking population, shows that the apprehension of 'infiltration' of 'Bengali Muslims' between 1951-71 is not statistically
valid. An interesting corroborating factor that emerges out of Table 9 is that other than between 1911-31, the increase of the Muslim population was never higher than that of its Hindu counterpart. This tallies with the huge immigration of Bengali Muslim cultivators
that took place between 1911-31.

When the distribution of population by religion of Assam for the decade 1961-71 is compared with that of India, it is found that (i) the Hindu population of India as percentage of total population declined during this period by --0.78 per cent while that of Assam increased by 1.18 per cent; (ii) the Muslim population of India went up by 0.50 per cent while that of Assam declined by --0.74 per cent; (iii) the Christian population of Assam increased at a faster rate than that of India and (iv) rate of increase was lowest for the Muslims of Assam compared to the Hindus and the Christians. All these are evident from Table 10.

These lower figures for the Muslim population of Assam in all respects compared to those for the Indian Muslims also confirms that apprehensions about 'infiltration' of 'Bangladeshi Muslims' are not factually tenable. This also reveals that since the people opting for adoption, namely, the Bengali Muslims, have become scarce, the Assamese language has failed to swell since 1951.


Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 15, No. 19 (May 10, 1980), pp. 850-859

Friday 7 April 2017

Law relating to cow slaughter in Assam

They have started cow vigilatism in Assam also. According to a report, three people, including a minor, were arrested from Jorhat town in Assam on April 4 for carrying beef and thereby hurting the religious sentiments of some people. The first incident is by police in the name of law enforcement. But there are concerns that the private groups of vigilantes may start to go on the rampage like in the states of North India.

So, it is better to have a look at the law relating to cow slaughter in Assam.

In North East India there is no law prohibiting or regulating cow slaughter in the states of Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Tripura and Nagaland.

But not in Assam. In the state there is a state legislation called the Assam Cattle Preservation Act, 1950 that prohibits slaughter of certain types of cattle. The Act defines “cattle” as `Bulls, bullocks, cows, calves, male and female buffaloes and buffalo calves. Section 5 provides that the cattle can only be slaughtered on a certificate of ‘fit for slaughter’ given by a veterinary officer for the area if cattle is over 14 years of age or has become permanently incapacitated for work or breeding due to injury, deformity or any incurable disease and according to section 6 such cattle can be slaughtered only in places specified for this purpose. The offence under the Act may attract punishment of imprisonment up to maximum of 6 months or fine of up to Rs 1,000 or both and it is a cognisable offence.

However, section 13 empowers the state government to to impose, exempt from the operation of this Act, the slaughter of any cattle for any religious, ceremonial, medical research or any other purposes. It also states that “the operation of the Act will not be applicable to the slaughter of any cattle on the occasion of Id-uz-Zuha festival on such conditions as the State Government may specify regarding privacy”.

It is obvious that the Act does not absolutely prohibit slaughter of cow. It only regulates cattle slaughter. But the provisions are vulnerable to be misused. The problem is that they don't much care for the laws. The law nowhere prohibits carrying and eating of beef.

Sunday 26 March 2017

Muslim women voting for Yogi Adityanath should be the last nail in the coffin of triple talaq

It is claimed that many Muslim women in UP voted for Yogi Adityanath's BJP. Yes, the Yogi whose supporters, in his presence, asked Hindus to excavate graves of Muslim women and rape their dead bodies. They voted him, it is said, because Adityanath promised to protect them from the scrouge of triple talaq.

If there is even an iota of truth in this claim it should have dealt a huge blow along the spine, if they have any, of the community compelling them to seriously work on the issue of triple talaq and other laws and practices oppressive and unjust to women.

I don't see any reasons to disbelief this claim as something similar happened during the first part of 20th century. This was before passing of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939. Muslim law as it was practised at that time didn't provide for ways to get rid of husbands even if it was not possible for the women to continue to live with their husbands except by committing suicide, or becoming apostate. The later was far more easier as Christian missionaries also came to their rescue. Women only need to utter some words declaring their unbelief of Islam. Muftis would declare them apostate and consequently their marriages dissolved. Women increasingly resrted to this device.

This dealt a huge blow to the Muslim leaders and intellectuals of the time. The philosopher and poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal led a campaign for reforms of relevant parts of the Muslim law forcing a conservative Deobandi Mufti like Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi to revise the laws/fatwas. In 1931, after several years of extensive consultations with muftis in India and abroad, he published a long fatwa entitled "al-Hilat al-Najiza li'l-Halilat al-'Ajiza" (A Successful Legal Device for the Helpless Wife). In the revised fatwa, Maulana Thanvi argued that apostasy did not annul the marriage contract and could not be used as a legal device. He agreed that judicial divorce might be used to provide relief to Hanafi Muslim women, invoking Maliki doctrine in support of this point. (See Muhammad Khalid Masud, "Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas" (Harvard University Press, 1996) Chapter Sixteen, pp. 193-203.)

This booklet provided the basis of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939. The Act provides for ten grounds for Muslim women to obtain a decree of the dissolution of marriage from a court of law. A decree for dissolving marriage made avaialable for the reasons that for a term of four years the particulars about the husband are unknown, the woman has been abandoned by the husband or he failed to provide maintenance for the woman for a term of two years, the husband has married another woman contravening the provisions of Muslim Family laws Ordinance, 1961, the husband has been subject to imprisonment for a term of seven years or more etc., the nonperformance of marital obligations, impotency, insanity, leprosy, virulent venereal disease, cruelty etc. or any other legal causes can be taken as ground for getting divorce. This Act is still in force.

It is obvious that this time there is no Muslim intellectual who has the courage to follow the foot steps of Allama Iqbal and lead a campaign and force the likes of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi to revisit the laws and abolish triple talaq and polygamy.


Friday 3 July 2015

Assam: Farce of NRC updation may lead millions to statelessness

Updating process of NRC (National Register of Citizens) is going on in Assam. Those who have their names in 1951 NRC, any electoral rolls issued upto 1971 or any other of the 14 documents mentioned in application form are eligible to be included in the updated NRC.

Parts of 1951 NRC and some electoral rolls of pre-1971 period have been made available online and termed "legacy data".

The NRC which is under preparation is not a new NRC. It is an updating process of 1951 NRC which was prepared on the basis of census data of 1951. However, section 15 of the Census Act, 1948 says that records of census are not admissible in evidence notwithstanding anything contrary in the India Evidence Act, 1872. Moreover, 1951 NRC data for many areas of the state are not available. Not prepared at all or subsequently destroyed.

Not all electoral rolls upto 1971 are available. Only electoral rolls of 1966 and 1971 have been made available online. But they also don't cover the whole of Assam. For many areas electoral roll of 1966 is not available.
Legacy data for the districts of the United Khasi and Jaintia Hills, the Naga Hills and the Mizo Hills, which were part of Assam until they were separated in 1972 are not made available.

Apart from variations in spelling of the names and other anomalies in legacy data it has now came to light that names of many people are not found. Adivasi organisations are claiming that around 80% of their people does not have names in legacy data while authorities says that only about 10% does not have. My guesstimate is that about 20% of people of all communities may not find their names in legacy data.

The other 14 documents that can be submitted must be pre-1971 origin. How can one accept that poor people of villages in this flood affected state to preserve their pre-1971 papers. Assam is the state with highest IDPs in the world. Then, there are lakhs of landless and homeless people.

This farce of updation of NRC based on an inadmissible document, if carried to its conclusion and is taken as the basis of citizenship, may drive about 20% of about 31 million people to statelessness.