After the news of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam was published in 2019 and the proposal for an all-India National Register of Citizens by the Home Minister of India was announced, detention centres had finally become a part of the resistant imaginary of civil society groups and activist circles. Until then, this sensitization and recognition was limited to groups in Assam fighting for the civil liberties of people languishing in the detention centres for prolonged periods and some organisations in other metropolitan areas trying to produce data on it. With the passing of Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and the promise of NRC, there were widespread protests across India that foregrounded the demand that detention centres must go.

In their report Designed to Exclude, Amnesty International have recorded the experiences of a man named Abu Bakkar Siddiqui. In 2016, he appeared before a Foreigners Tribunal in Jorhat, Assam.

In his deposition, Abu Bakkar said that his grandfather’s name was Aper Ali Sheikh. To prove that his ancestors had been in India before 1971, Abu Bakkar submitted 1966 and 1970 voter lists – in which the name of his grandfather was written as ‘Afer Ali Sheikh’.

As argued in the first part of this series, immigration detention is neither a recent development nor limited to Assam. It has been part of the punitive mechanism set up by immigration law, particularly Section 3(2)(e) of the Foreigners Act, 1946 and para 11(2) of The Foreigners Order, 1948, since its inception.

Recent detention centres are mandated under Amit Shah’s Model Detention Manual 2019, which was released on 9 January 2019, according to which one detention camp should exist in one the city or district where a major immigration check post is located and every member of a family should be housed in the same detention centre.

To foster engagement with the report, CPIL is hosting a series of events and symposia in collaboration with Parichay – The Blog . The flagship event will be a webinar on the key themes of the report, taking place on 5th December. Below is the full schedule:

• 18th November: Excerpts from ‘Securing Citizenship’ will be released on Parichay – The Blog. These excerpts are on the themes of legal recognition of statelessness, the rights of child detainees, and the socio-economic framework of rights for stateless persons. We invite you to reflect on these themes reflec

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