In Assam, a northeastern Indian state bordering Bangladesh, nearly 1.9 million people remain suspended in bureaucratic limbo, officially excluded from the country's citizenship rolls but with no formal document explaining why, and no clear legal path to challenge their exclusion. The Indian government has now told the Supreme Court that it still has not issued the rejection slips these people need to even begin fighting for recognition as Indian citizens.

The admission came in proceedings before the Supreme Court concerning the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a controversial exercise completed in Assam in August 2019 that was meant to definitively separate genuine Indian citizens from undocumented immigrants, particularly those who may have crossed from Bangladesh. The final list excluded roughly 1.9 million applicants out of more than 33 million who applied, but six years later, the government has yet to formally tell most of these people, in writing, why they were left out.

A Catch in the System

The bureaucratic gap is not a minor technicality. Under the process established for the NRC, individuals excluded from the register are entitled to challenge their exclusion before Foreigners' Tribunals, quasi-judicial bodies set up specifically to adjudicate disputes over citizenship status in Assam. But to file such an appeal, a person needs a formal rejection order, a document that states the specific grounds on which the authorities deemed their claim to citizenship unproven.

Without that paperwork, there is effectively no tribunal to appeal to and no case to make. The result is a population of nearly two million people who exist in a kind of administrative shadow: not declared foreigners, but not confirmed as citizens either, and unable to compel a legal process that might resolve the question either way.

Without rejection documents, those excluded cannot pursue legal remedies before foreigners' tribunals, leaving their citizenship status unresolved indefinitely.

Why This Matters

The stakes for those caught in this gap are severe. Assam's Foreigners' Tribunals have the power to declare individuals as foreigners, a designation that can lead to loss of voting rights, detention in holding centers, and in some cases, deportation proceedings, even though India has no formal repatriation agreement with Bangladesh for such cases. Rights groups have long warned that the NRC process, intended to resolve decades of political tension in Assam over migration, risks rendering vast numbers of poor, rural, and often illiterate residents stateless in practice, even if not in law.

Many of those excluded from the list are from marginalized communities, including Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus, as well as indigenous tribal populations, who often lack access to the kind of generational paperwork (land records, birth certificates, electoral rolls dating back decades) that the NRC process demanded as proof of ancestry and residency before 1971, the year of the Bangladesh Liberation War and a watershed date in Assam's citizenship disputes.

A History of Contested Citizenship

Assam's anxieties over migration are not new. The region has seen recurring unrest over the status of migrants from what is now Bangladesh since well before the country's 1971 independence, and the Assam Accord of 1985 first set 1971 as the cutoff date for determining citizenship, a commitment that eventually led to the court-monitored NRC update decades later. The exercise was framed as a technical, data-driven solution to a politically explosive question: who truly belongs in Assam, and who does not.

Instead, the rollout has been marked by confusion, errors, and prolonged uncertainty. Reports of names mistakenly excluded, families split across the list with some members included and others not, and widespread anxiety among the poor have accompanied the register since its publication. The absence of rejection slips compounds this uncertainty: it means that even the limited legal recourse promised to those left out exists only on paper.

Due Process in Question

Legal experts and civil society groups have pointed to the delay as emblematic of a deeper structural problem: a system that excludes people first and explains why only much later, if at all. For the people affected, many of whom have spent years, and in some cases their life savings, gathering documents to prove a claim to citizenship inherited from their parents and grandparents, the lack of formal closure means the process that was supposed to settle their status has instead left it indefinitely open.

The Supreme Court's engagement with the issue suggests continued judicial scrutiny of how the government manages the aftermath of an exercise it undertook under the court's own supervision. But for the 1.9 million people still waiting for a piece of paper that would let them defend themselves, the central question, whether they are citizens of India, remains unanswered.