GUWAHATI: A woman from Assam claimed an immigration official at the Mumbai airport asked her if she had made it to the National Register of Citizens (NRC).
The woman, Archismita Choudhury, said she had suffered the ignominy on Sunday at around 6:30 am upon landing from Bangkok.
“#PSA #NRC #RT Something really disturbing happened today as I was landed in #India, coming back into #immigration. The official made small talk with me, as usual. Asked me, ‘So you’re from #Guwahati?’ I said yes. He asked me if my name had come in the #NRClist,” the woman tweeted on Sunday.
She further wrote: “He said, ‘Oh, good. We have orders from the government to not let any people whose names are not in the #NRC to leave/come back into the country’. #India which is really scary to me, we have now effectively stripped citizenship from a section of society”.
Choudhury, who has not yet lodged any complaint, told this newspaper she had no idea if the immigration official had said it in a lighter vein.
“He did not show any order nor did I ask for it,” she said.
She also said that given the situation she was faced with, people were worried and they wanted the government to clarify if there was indeed an order which the immigration official spoke about.
She works for an NGO called “Point of View” in Mumbai. She said she had gone to Thailand on an assignment from her office.
In another tweet, the woman wrote: “So what is the #IndianGovt going to do? Not let them go home? Take them into detention centres? And the worst part is, I have an #indianpassport that’s operational since about 2014. So nothing is a safeguard. What if my name, by chance, had not been included in the #NRC?”
Assam’s Home Department said it had no knowledge on whether people left out of the NRC are to be screened at international entry and exit points.