In season of NRC, flashback to life and death in the shadow of constant fear of deportation
Thoombil Ahammed did not live to witness the trauma inflicted by the National Register of Citizens in Assam, hundreds of miles away. But his own life was spent under the shadow of a constant fear of jail and deportation, a fear now visiting 19 lakh residents of Assam who have been left out of the NRC. Had he been alive, Ahammed would have been 89 today. An illiterate ex-migrant worker, he died 10 years ago in his native Thirunavaya in Kerala’s Malappuram district after a decades-long, fruitless battle to regain his lost Indian citizenship. Ahammed was among 700-odd Muslims from north Kerala who worked for a living in Pakistan around the time of Independence, and could never convince the Indian authorities after their return that they were Indians. Some of the 700 had migrated to Karachi or Lahore just before Independence. Many had ventured there in search of a living shortly after the Partition, at a time when it had probably not sunk in that Pakistan was now a different...
