Crossing The Line

The NRC’s threat to Bangladesh, and the India–Bangladesh relationship

- Afsan Chowdhury

“While we should not be worried, there is some anxiety after reading news reports,” AK Abdul Momen, the foreign minister of Bangladesh, told a television channel in July. He was speaking of the National Register of Citizens, the Indian government’s project to define and identify legal residents of the state of Assam—and, more importantly, to identify and make stateless those who it claims are illegal immigrants. Last year, the NRC provisionally identified around four million supposedly “illegal” people—almost exclusively Muslims—who in the official Indian narrative have been branded “Bengali” infiltrators, from across the border in Bangladesh. Momen’s cautious statement was reported as the first public admission of concern over the NRC by the Bangladesh government. Those the NRC had singled out, he said, had been living in Assam for over 75 years. “They are their citizens,” he insisted, “not ours.”

India has not said what it plans to do with those the NRC tags as outsiders and renders stateless. But in Bangladesh, few have any doubts as to what the eventual goal is—and many raise warnings in sharper terms than Momen did. Shaheen Afroze, a research director at a think tank under the country’s foreign ministry, told me that the Assamese Muslims targeted by the NRC “are not only an internal issue of India anymore, because their intended eviction destination is Bangladesh.”