Updated: December 15, 2020 7:32:12 am
Das and his wife last week. Biswa Kalyan Purkayastha
About six months ago, Nyuti Das remembers his father Chandrahar Das bent over his brother’s phone, his one good eye, and the rest of him completely engrossed in a video of a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Then he looked at Nyuti and said, smiling: “Modi aamar bhogowan (Modi is my god)… He will solve everything. The citizenship law is here. We will all become Indians. “
On Sunday night, Chandrahar, 104, suffering from heart disease, who had spent three months in a detention camp for “foreigners” in Assam two years ago, died in his son’s ramshackle cabin in Boraibasti, in the Cachar district of Assam, still a “foreigner”.
Speaking on the phone from his home 30 km from Silchar, in the Barak Valley, dominated by the Hindu Bengali of Assam, Nyuti recalls the slight annoyance she felt whenever her father expressed such hope. Or he went to the porch of his house, looked at the Modi sign across the street, folded his hands in namaskar and bowed his head. “The law has come, it has been almost a year, but what has ‘God’ done?” she would ask him.
Nyuti adds: “All I wanted was to die an Indian… And we tried, we ran from court to court, from defenders to social workers, we presented all the papers. And so, he left. We are still ‘foreigners’ in the eyes of the law. The Act (Citizenship Amendment Act) did nothing for us. “
The Modi government has repeatedly emphasized that the CAA is meant to grant citizenship to people like Das, mostly Hindu minorities persecuted in their countries of residence, who emigrated to India. While the Act has broad support in the Barak Valley, other parts of Assam oppose it, who fear that granting citizenship rights to “outsiders” would change the essential nature of the state.
With the Assam Assembly elections looming, the BJP has started talking about the CAA again. However, as in the case of Das, the change has largely remained on paper, and even the rules of the Act have yet to be framed.
Silchar’s former congressional deputy Sushmita Dev, who visited Das’s family on Monday, says the Act is just a “tool.” “It is a means to an end. And the end is polarizing the Bengali Hindu vote. Even if the CAA is in effect, it does not assure citizenship to anyone. Why hasn’t the BJP helped any of the Bengali Hindus who are still in detention?
Silchar BJP MP, Dr. Rajdeep Roy, claims that the process has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “I offer my condolences to the grieving family, what has happened is very regrettable, but this pandemic is not in my hands … I also hoped that the rules and regulations regarding the CAA had already been framed”
He understands the anxiety of the Bengali Hindu community, adds Roy. “I belong to the same group, my grandfather emigrated from the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India.”
Das used to tell his children how he crossed from East Pakistan to Tripura because of the killings there. “This was in the 1950s or 1960s,” says his son Gouranga Das. While it is unclear how Das got to Assam, Gouranga says it was a difficult journey, as his father made a living selling moori (puffed rice) sides.
Then, one day in March 2018, some officials came to his home, took Das away, and took him to a detention center for foreigners in the Silchar District Jail. “We had received some notices, but we were unable to attend the hearings for numerous reasons, the main of which was that my father was old and ill,” says Gourango.
Das was granted bail in June 2018, but the family’s case is still in court and their children are appearing for hearings. “There was a problem with the authenticity of Tripura’s registration certificate,” says his defender, Souman Choudhry, of the delay, adding that Das’s children would still have to prove their citizenship.
Das’s family barely understands the legal jargon, only the foreign label continues.
In his final months, Das had fallen into deep dementia, the family says. In a way, it was a relief. “He ate, slept and rarely spoke. When he did, he talked about how his case would be solved because the Modi government would help him. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that he hadn’t moved at all, ”Nyuti says.
Das was cremated Sunday night with only his family present. Gourango fears that the worst is yet to come. “My father was older and that is why the case was covered by the media. But now that he’s gone, will anyone want to tell our story?
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