Of the 39 applicants under the Citizenship Amendment Act in Assam, two have been granted Indian citizenship so far, the state’s Parliamentary Affairs Minister Chandra Mohan Patowary told the Assembly on Monday, PTI reported.

The Citizenship Amendment Act is aimed to provide a fast track to citizenship to refugees from six minority religious communities, except Muslims, from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the condition that they have lived in India for six years and have entered the country by December 31, 2014.

The Act was passed by Parliament in December 2019. The Union government notified the rules under the Act in March 2024.

Standing in for Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who also holds the home portfolio, Patowary told the Assembly on Monday that of the 39 applications, 18 are being examined.

“The remaining 19 applications were ‘closed’ but the applicants can apply for citizenship again,” said the minister.

He also stated that between 2021 and 2024, 156 Bangladeshi citizens were caught entering Assam without required documents.

The number increased to 57 in 2022 from 51 in 2021, before dipping to 22 in 2023. It increased to 26 in 2024 amid a political crisis in Bangladesh.

In August, Bangladesh’s former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned as the prime minister and fled to India after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government.

Following the collapse of the Hasina government, several parts of Bangladesh reported incidents of violence against religious minorities.

Patowary told the Assembly that the Bangladesh border was being guarded by the Assam Police and the Border Security Force. “However, challenges in some border lines, like the river border in Sribhumi district, are there and the government is looking into use of scientific means to seal these parts effectively,” he said.

The notification of the rules under the Citizenship Amendment Act had come despite it being widely criticised for discriminating against Muslims. The law had sparked massive protests across the country in 2019 and 2020.

Indian Muslims fear that the law could be used, along with the nationwide National Register of Citizens, to harass and disenfranchise them. The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to identify undocumented immigrants.

While protests against the Act in the rest of India revolved around the law’s alleged anti-Muslim bias, ethnic groups in the northeastern states feared they would be physically and culturally swamped by migrants from Bangladesh as a result of the law.

In March 2024, the Assam chief minister said that the Act would be a “fiasco” in his state, claiming that it would see the lowest number of applications.

After the Act was passed in Parliament, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had said that “lakhs and crores” of people would benefit from the provision. Shah, however, did not explain how he had arrived at the numbers.

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