The book, depicting the pain and suffering of those left out of the NRC in Assam, sets up official arguments and figures as misleading.
Poison Paperwork
The ‘legacy documents’ sought from the vulnerable were a terrible burden on them
photo by PTI
A few weeks after the 2012 Bodoland anti-Muslim riots, I was in Assam for the first time, reporting on the aftermath. That riot, like many others in Assam, was a manifestation of the xenophobic politics in Assam since independence, in the name of illegal immigration and “suspicious” citizens. I have since followed the development in Assam, which has only worsened as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) is amended.
Assam has received constant media attention over the years in the wake of the Supreme Court-monitored amendment to the NRC. However, there is a huge gap in understanding the ground reality of man-made devastation, which is otherwise considered a sensitive matter by most of the Assamese nationalists. No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam NRC Crisis, written by Guwahati-based journalist Abhishek Saha, hopes to bridge this gap by documenting the “human crisis facing Assam”.
The author’s grandparents had migrated to Assam from the then East…
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