On October 20, 2018, a civil society organisation in Assam called Axom Nagarik Samaj (ANS) released a 15-page pamphlet titled ‘Why NRC?’ at the Guwahati Press Club. The purpose of its release, according to the preface is this: “…in view of the fact that desperate and disturbing narratives are being circulated to create confusion among people over this matter by various vested interests, nationally and internationally, disregarding the existential problems faced by the indigenous communities of the state since the British occupation of the region in the nineteenth century.” 

The updating of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) began in Assam in February 2015 under the supervision of the Supreme Court of India. However, a complete draft of the register came out in July last year. Following this, ANS, which is a group of Assam’s journalists, academics, retired bureaucrats and lawyers, among others, felt certain inconsistencies had emerged between the actual state of affairs and what made the headlines. 

Speaking at the release of the pamphlet, Prasanta Rajguru, vice-president of ANS and editor of Amar Asom, a leading Assamese daily newspaper, says a section of the media, based outside Assam, misrepresents situations from time to time. He says, “Even some senior Indian politicians have maintained contradictory views about the NRC on different occasions, adding to the confusion.” 

The pamphlet, according to him, was an attempt to put things in a historical perspective. It was published with a hope to offer a better understanding of the NRC to people outside Assam. Rajguru is echoing the position shared by many of his colleagues in the state for some time now.

The updating of NRC in Assam has been a central topic of debate and discussion. When the final list came out on August 31, the issue received widespread coverage from the press, both within and outside India. 

However, many of these reports did not go down well with a large section of the media based in Assam. Their complaint, a recurring one, is that the portrayal of the state’s complex citizen-immigrant issue has been selective in its focus and has failed to see the bigger picture. 

Ajit Kumar Bhuyan, executive president of ANS and editor-in-chief of Prag News, a major Assamese news channel, asserts that the NRC cannot be seen as targeting any particular community including the Muslims, as perceived by many. He says it is important for journalists coming from outside Assam to understand the history of the issue. 

“The premise of the NRC needs to be traced back to 1979, the beginning of the Assam agitation against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. It was a mass movement which did not advocate any communal marker for separating citizens from illegal foreigners. The NRC too firmly upholds that spirit,” he adds.

Bhuyan, however, argues that the misinterpretation of the subject can partly be attributed to the stance adopted by different political parties over the decades. 

“Be it the Congress or the BJP, each political party has catered to the interests of some specific communities for keeping their vote bases secure. But the press, both national and international, should not see the NRC in those terms. It has its own history, one free of any party line, and that needs to be kept in mind,” he emphasises.

Rajguru too agrees with this view. He says, “Given the current political climate of communal binaries in India, the press from Delhi or the West perhaps gets tempted to understand the NRC issue in Assam through that lens. While there have been several episodes of communal violence in other parts [of the country], in the last few years, Assam and other regions in the North East have been mostly free of it. The NRC exercise has been largely peaceful with the participation of people across religious, ethnic and linguistic lines.”

The emphasis on the long history behind the NRC is a common narrative in Assam. Pointing to the Assam Accord of 1985, most political parties and civil society organisations invoke the March 24, 1971, NRC cut-off date as a hard-fought consensus among all stakeholders. 

Against this backdrop, while there is little contention over the NRC in principle, many have been very vocal about the human rights violations in revising the NRC and its related mechanisms. They feel that the local media of Assam has not sufficiently covered such issues.

Ankur Tamuliphukan, an independent researcher and newspaper columnist based in Guwahati, believes that similar factors influence the outlook of the national and regional media alike. “Just as a large section of the media based in Delhi or elsewhere gets influenced by the dominant political currents, it can be seen in the local space too. Therefore, the media in Assam, despite its best intentions, has largely adopted a sub-nationalist tone in keeping with the popular sentiment,” he said.

In doing so, Tamuliphukan argues that they fail to effectively engage with different aspects of the same story. “For example, if some journalist from Delhi tries to uphold the NRC as a strong step against illegal immigrants echoing the governing party’s rhetoric, someone from the Western press might see it mostly as a humanitarian crisis,” he added.

Likewise, he says that the Assamese media talks about human rights violations, but perhaps in a measured tone. “This is because the abuse of rights also has some other meaning for them. They tend to outline the historical context of people’s resistance against alleged immigration and exploitation of resources from outside the state,” Tamuliphukan continues. 

The observation is not unfounded even for some from the Assamese media. Nitumoni Saikia, editor-in-chief of Pratidin Time, one of Assam’s most viewed news channels, argues that while they may have some work to do, they should not be seen as entirely unfair. 

“We don’t deny that a few incidents of human rights violation [because of the NRC exercise] may have slipped from our gaze. But, in general, most newspapers and channels in the state have regularly reported on the systemic flaws of the exercise, poor conditions of detention centres, and anomalies of the Foreigners’ Tribunals. So, a sweeping generalisation of our role [as inconsiderate of human rights issues] is hard to accept,” he argues.

Saikia believes that there needs to be a dialogue between the press based out of the state and the larger narrative circulating in the national and international media platforms. 

“As journalists, we all have a responsibility of drawing attention to the humanitarian angle of the story. But the problem of illegal immigration also poses a threat to the rights and interests of dozens of communities living in Assam for centuries. The national and foreign press should adequately highlight this aspect as well,” he adds. 

Meanwhile, senior journalist Prasanta J Baruah, the executive editor of The Assam Tribune, the most circulated English daily in North East India, feels that there is a need for greater engagement to get clarity on the subject.

“Journalists and academics outside Assam need to understand this [the problem of illegal immigration] as a national problem, something which is not merely confined to Assam. They should see it as a failure of the state to protect its people against cross-border infiltration since the time of Independence. Simply, blaming the people of Assam as xenophobic for their resistance against illegal immigrants is, therefore, not a sound critique,” he argues.

When the NRC was published on August 31, 19,06,657 people were excluded out of the total of 3.30 crore applicants. Some members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and many other organisations in Assam have expressed disappointment over the outcome. Believing the figure of exclusion to be much less than what they had expected, all of them refuse to accept the current numbers. Some of them have even sought a 100 per cent re-verification of names. 

But some journalists in Assam feel that such an outcry does not help address the problem meaningfully. “Instead of debating over the numbers, the government and the organisations should focus on getting the errors rectified and bringing an end to the exercise. For forty years now, this issue [illegal immigration] has been exploited by all the political parties without giving any solution. Now that we finally have a document following a procedure monitored by the Supreme Court, we should accept it,” says Nitya Bora, editor of Asomiya Pratidin, a prominent Assamese daily. 

As per the notification of the government, those who have been excluded from the NRC will now get another opportunity to file an appeal before the state’s Foreigners’ Tribunals, a series of quasi-judicial institutions. The window for making such an appeal will be 120 days. The process is set to begin shortly.

Commenting on the fate of those who will be declared as illegal foreigners after exhausting the legal options, Prasanta Rajguru says they do not want such people to be treated differentially on the basis of their religion.

“By bringing the Citizenship Amendment Bill, the governing party wants to give citizenship to non-Muslim illegal foreigners detected by the NRC. But that is not the demand of the people of Assam. Irrespective of their background, we want all detected foreigners to be kept out of detention centres and allowed to work. We only want their voting rights to be curtailed,” he sums up.