Why Assam’s detention centre is filling up again
A Gauhati High Court order and Chief Minister Himanta Sarma’s strident campaign in Jharkhand is behind the renewed crackdown, say lawyers and activists.
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For several Mondays in August, Gulzar Ali accompanied his 65-year-old father to the police station to answer the summons of the border police.
“They took his signature and allowed him to return every time,” said Gulzar Ali, who lives in a village in lower Assam’s Barpeta district, which is home to a significant number of Muslims of Bengali-origin.
On September 2, however, his father, Kitab Ali, went to the police station alone. From there, he was taken to the office of the superintendent of police in Barpeta district. “I rushed to the SP office and found that many others had been detained with him,” Gulzar said.
A few hours later, Kitab Ali and 27 other people, including nine women, were loaded onto a bus and taken to a detention centre in Goalpara district. Officially called the Matia transit camp, it currently holds all of Assam’s declared foreigners, many of whom are Bengali-origin Muslims.
A renewed crackdown by the Assam government on residents like Ali, who failed to prove their citizenship before foreigners’ tribunals, is filling up the Matia detention centre in Goalpara district. All of the 28 people sent to the centre in September were Bengali-origin Muslims.
The community’s presence in Assam dates back to more than a century, when...
