258: Everything You Should Know About the National Register of Citizens - a podcast by The Quint

The final NRC list will be published on 31 August, and several lakhs of people could lose their right to be called Indian citizens.
The National Register of Citizens goes way back to 1951. The NRC was created in 1951 as a list of Indian citizens in Assam to prevent “unabated” migration from then-east Pakistan which is now Bangladesh.
This list was supposed to be updated but didn’t. The situation came to a head in 1985, when the centre, the Assam govt and people who were part of an anti-foreigner movement entered an agreement called the Assam Accord, which would deport all “foreigners” in Assam. Who were the foreigners? Anyone who couldn’t prove that they lived in Assam before 24 March 1971, which was the day the Bangladesh war began.
But is this enough to qualify someone as a foreigner? What does the NRC entail? How many of them will be included in this list? And how many people will lose the right to call themselves Indians?
For this podcast we spoke to several residents of Assam whose families have been affected by the NRC and Sanjoy Hazarika the Director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. Tune in!

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