From the evening of August 3, thousands across Assam received notices from the office of the National Register of Citizens. They were to appear for a fresh round of hearings to ascertain their citizenship. Many got about 24 hours notice. Entire villages in Lower Assam were emptied as people rushed to hearings that were often hundreds of kilometres away. The next evening, one of the buses loaded with anxious NRC applicants met with an accident, injuring several people.

It is one of the many tragedies which have peppered the updating of the NRC, meant to be a list of genuine Indian citizens living in Assam. One of the stated aims of the exercise is to detect “illegal migrants” allegedly living in the state. To be considered a citizen in Assam, applicants had to prove they or their ancestors had lived in the country before 1971. They also had to provide proof that they were related to the pre-1971 ancestor.

A draft list was published on July 31, 2018, leaving out over 40 lakh applicants. Over the last year, they made fresh claims to citizenship. Objections to names entered in the draft list were also heard. The process has been marked by inconsistencies, arbitrary rule changes and accusations of bias which put the citizenship of millions at risk. This weekend’s episode was a case in point.

The Supreme Court recently rejected the Central and state governments’ plea for a fresh round of verifications. It cited a document filed in a sealed envelope by NRC state coordinator Prateek Hajela, which claimed that 27%, or 80 lakh applicants, had already gone through a fresh round of scrutiny over the past year.

Why, then, were thousands called again?

The official explanation, that these were people who attended claims and objections hearings and could not prove their citizenship beyond doubt, seems inadequate. At least some of the people that Scroll.in spoke to said they had not been summoned over the last year.

Instructions issued by the NRC coordinator suggest that these hearings are meant to check for the “misuse of legacy data”. Legacy data proves a pre-1971 ancestor lived in the country. Several families, those of five siblings of the same father, for instance, may have named a common ancestor. This web of relations was plotted on a family tree. The NRC conducted family tree hearings, where all those who had used the same legacy data were required to turn up and identify each other.

But these checks were not conducted evenly. Those who belonged to communities defined as indigenous to the state were filed away as “original inhabitants” and few were put through family tree verifications. A large chunk of those who fell outside this category did. They also faced two additional investigations. And that was before the draft was published. Going by the NRC’s explanation, those summoned this week had gone through another round of hearings last year.

Why are some families required to eternally keep proving their citizenship?

Release of exclusion data

It does not help the credibility of the process that the notices emerged right after the state government made public confidential district-wise date of those excluded from the draft list. The Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government released it to make a fresh case for reverification.

The NRC was riddled with errors, the BJP argued, because districts sharing a border with Bangladesh had relatively low exclusion rates, which went against years of common sense that they must be teeming with “foreigners”. The BJP also admitted that it felt Hindus were “disproportionately targeted” over Muslims. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of those who received last-minute summons belonged to the minority community.

The perception that the office of the NRC was succumbing to political pressures might have been dispelled if the hearings were conducted in a less slapdash, more rule-based manner. Enumerating officials insist that NRC rules allow local functionaries to reverify people at any point in the process. But the rules also stipulate that applicants be given 15 days’ notice and not 24-odd hours to make it to hearings over 300 km away in some cases. Those recovering from accidents have no chance of reaching now.

Which begs the final question, by making it so hard, is the state trying to exclude citizens it does not want?