NRC - That's All For Now, Folks

The NRC in its final form is the pariah nobody wants in assam. So, what happens to the over 1.9 million ‘foreigners’ now?

- Anupam Bordoloi

Some stories remain unfinished; the plot goes awry, the end fal­ters, the twist in the tale never comes. But still it makes for fas­cinating reading. Like the story of the NRC in Assam—nearly 35years in the pipeline and four years in the making. Yet, when the “end” came on August 31, it appeared that the con­tentious National Register of Citizens has only found a new beginning. The cast and characters remain the same, but the plot is likely to change. “I rem­ ember a line from the Pirates of the Caribbean...‘nothing personal..., it’s just good business’. The NRC and the issue of illegal migration are just like that...so many shops run on these iss­ues; for political parties, organisa­tions and groups...the show must go on for them,” says a school teacher in Guwahati who identified himself by his first name, Abhijit.

The sense of cynicism and bitterness are not his alone in Assam today. And therein lies the crux of the entire issue. Within hours of the publication of the final NRC list, identifying just over 1.9 million people as suspected foreigners, the NRC turned into a pariah for many, most of them vocal supporters of the exercise till the last moment. They suddenly discovered that the long, winding process to identify “illegal immigrants” in the state was, after all, too faulty to throw up a true picture of the so-called “demographic invasion”, which was at the root of the awakening against illegal immigration in the late 1970s.