A couple of weeks before the final National Register of Citizens, a list of Indian citizens in Assam, was scheduled to be published, a number of PDF documents—all titled, “NRC: The Other Story”—began to circulate on social media. The documents, which used the official NRC authority’s logo and were marked as “copy for circulation,” contained lists of individuals, mainly journalists and activists, who according to the list’s anonymous authors, opposed the NRC. One of these lists was titled, “Journalists involved in the anti NRC propaganda” and contained the names of ten journalists, among whom I was one. The list described me as “a vocal opponent of the NRC because he feels there are no illegal immigrants in Assam.” It added, “He is also planning to write book on NRC.”
This is entirely untrue. I have never said there are no illegal migrants in Assam, nor do I plan to write any book on the NRC. I became critical of the NRC exercise as it became clear that the process was causing great suffering to poor people across communities, many of them quite clearly Indian citizens, who are being victimised by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic process. There are lakhs of human lives at stake—the final NRC list published on 31 August excluded over 19 lakh applicants—and I have consistently maintained that this human dimension must be kept in mind. For this, I have earned the ire of the chauvinists who drew up the list.
The PDF list targeted nine other journalists, starting with Ipsita Chakravarty who writes for the news website Scroll. It described her as “a Bengali chauvinist.” The same descriptor—Bengali chauvinist—was used for the former BBC correspondent Subir Bhaumik and another Scroll journalist, Shoaib Daniyal. However, the Scroll’s Guwahati correspondent, Arunabh Saikia, who has done excellent and often highly critical reporting on the NRC, was left out of the list—probably because he is Assamese, and therefore cannot be labelled a Bengali chauvinist.
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