Assam: The ‘doubtful Indians’ left out of the election

Tanya Laskar, a lawyer in Assam who handles citizenship cases, says there are other challenges as well.

“A big question is whether people would have documents to show when they had come to India,” Ms Laskar says.

“We are mostly talking about people who come from marginalised communities in a state that has annual floods. You are talking of people who have fled during war and you are imagining they are fleeing with documents?”

People affected by the exercise, who are mostly poor, say they feel lost and fearful about their future.

Haricharan Das recalls the day police came to his house in 2017 and declared him a D-voter.

“I had no idea what that meant or how my name entered the list,” he says. “But I had to cooperate.”

Seven years on, he is still fighting to prove his citizenship, with very little knowledge of the case.

His house has a trunk full of documents, but when the BBC asked him to show a copy of his court documents, he ruffled through the disarrayed pile for half an hour and failed to produce anything.

“I am not even sure who my lawyer is,” he says.

In rare instances, those who have already been declared foreigners by a tribunal have found their name on the electoral rolls.

Monindra Das, 64, says he voted in the ongoing election despite spending two years in a detention camp. He was temporarily released in 2022.

The case, which has dragged on for more than two decades, has drained the family’s finances.

His 27-year-old son Birendra Das says he was forced to drop out of college because his parents had no money.