India has excluded more than 4m people living in its tea-growing Assam state from a list of citizens, raising fears that they risk being rendered stateless.
Those left off a draft of the National Register of Citizens for Assam were unable to provide sufficient proof to satisfy authorities that they or their ancestors were residents of the state before the turbulent 1971 creation of Bangladesh, India’s predominantly Muslim neighbour. The list confirmed just 29m of the north-eastern state’s 33m residents.
Assam’s indigenous residents have complained for decades about the influx of what they say are illegal Bengali-speaking migrants during and since Bangladesh’s war of independence from Pakistan. Tensions between indigenous groups and those they consider outside “settlers” have boiled over into large scale ethnic violence in the past.