CJP FOR ASSAM

CJP has already helped at least 12 lakh people out of the 36 lakh that submitted claim applications to be included in the final NRC. But our work doesn’t stop here. Our volunteer motivators are working day and night to collect data of all those who have been excluded, so that CJP’s national legal team can raise the matter in the Supreme Court of India.

Additionally, we are trying to secure the release of detention camp inmates who have completed the requisite amount of time in captivity and are therefore eligible for release as per two SC orders from May 2019 and April 2020. Many if not all the falsely implicated detainees also hail from impoverished backgrounds. The period of incarceration and the formalities around the releases have pushed families into further poverty posing a challenge to them, and us, after their release. CJP is poised to launch a modest rehabilitation programme for the most needy among the detainees that will be geared towards a sustainable means of income generation.

With your help we want to:

• Continue with all efforts to get people released from Detention Camps

• Provide released detainees with rations, essentials and a sustainable means of livelihood

• Continue our efforts, in the courts, tribunals, higher courts and beyond to help a vast and unlettered population navigate a huge humanitarian citizenship crisis. The new year brought some good news on January 6, 2020 when the SC in response to our intervention application ruled that no child will be sent to detention camps.

• Prepare a wider team of paralegals to help the widest possible numbers of people to file comprehensive appeals against the NRC exclusion.

When over 1 crore people were excluded from the partial draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that was published in Assam on December 31, 2017, CJP swung into action. From keenly combing through reports and studies by eminent scholars on the subject to sending our own fact finding team to ascertain ground realities in June 2018, to mobilizing a team of nearly 1000 local volunteers to aid the hapless, impoverished and unlettered people through the process of filing claims in wake of exclusion from the complete draft released on July 30, 2018, CJP remained committed to ensuring that no genuine Indian citizen suffered.

In 2019, as a part of our Citizens for Assam campaign, we took a delegation of eminent lawyers and journalists to Assam to showcase the plight of Indians in the state. In August 2019, CJP, determined to make sure that no genuine Indian citizen suffers, moved Supreme Court asking for it to take a closer look at the idea of citizenship, the definition of illegal immigrant and also the wider concerns about decedents of people whose citizenship is under the scanner.

We are currently working to help secure the release of people who have spent more than three years in a detention camp in accordance with a May 2019 order of the Supreme Court. In fact, an April 2020 SC order has reduced the time served requirement to two years in wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have also been supplying food items like grains, pulses, oil etc. to the families of these detainees as the sudden loss of their meagre incomes due to the lockdown had also pushed them to the brink of starvation. Now, we intend to help them find sustainable means of livelihood. More information about out Assam campaign may be found here.

ASSAM

Widespread suspicion about who is and isn't a citizen, heightened by the exclusion of over 19 lakh people from the National Register of Citizens 2019, is fueling a humanitarian crisis in Assam.