D for: Doubt, Democracy, Disability, and Death

Kader Ali will never speak to me now.

He hardly could the last time I met him, in November 2025. Only the feeble sound of a cough rattled inside his small house with a tin roof. Even the clucking of a rooster chasing some chickens in the front yard sounded ominous. Inside, a bedridden Kader was lying on a wooden cot, looking visibly worse.

Earlier he could walk without help, remember things from the past, and talk a little in his frail voice. But by November he was bedridden, his paralysis was worse, and he could barely move his hands. Kader was conscious though, still battling for life as bravely as he had for years now for his right to live in the land of his birth.

“Some fifteen days ago, he developed a fever and blood levels in his body were going down.” Kader’s 33-year-old son Shahidul Islam was speaking to us, standing at the verandah of their home in Assam’s Gamariguri village. “He can’t eat, talk or move now. We aren’t sure how long he will stay with us,” he said.

Kader was still conscious, with eyes wide open, as if holding on to some hope. Which, however, turned out to be as fleeting as the last rays of the sun that crept in via the only door and through a little crevice in his tin roof.

Within days of our visit, Kader was gone. It was November 18, 2025. He was 66.

I remember Shahidul speaking to me during that last visit. “We cannot manage the expense if we were to keep him in the hospital. He does not have the Ayushman Bharat card to avail free treatment.” Shahidul, who migrates for work, had been at home then for more than 10 months to look after his ailing father. An added loss of an income of Rs. 20,000 every month for a family already in deep emotional and financial distress.

Kader suffered his first stroke in 2019. Three of his sons who migrate to work, either to coffee plantations in Kerala or as drivers in Arunachal, were at home. But they didn’t take their father to the hospital then. They had bigger worries. Kader was fighting his case against ‘Doubtful’ or D-voter status in the Foreigners’ Tribunal (FT). The FT in Barpeta had already declared both his wives Ajimon Nesa, 46, and Marjina Khatun in her early fifties, as foreigners.

They were in the middle of challenging the verdict in the Gauhati High Court, the updated final draft of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was out, and the names of all the family members had been removed from it.

“Being in the middle of contesting the D-voter cases, we did not think of taking him to the hospital,” says 33-year-old Mohidul Islam. Even though not related to them, Mohidul is treated by the family as a 'grandson'. “It was not a major stroke. Villagers suggested that the local healer can treat the ‘one-side illness.’ We took him there, he became stable after the treatment but remained paralysed.”

The trials of Kader and his family began in1997. The year when the election commission of India ordered an intensive revision or ‘clean up’ of electoral rolls in the state, following more than a decade-long conflict among ethnic groups and violent massacres. This exercise to identify and remove non-citizens from its rolls saw a large section of Muslims and Hindu minorities in the state being marked doubtful voters. Residents of Assam under suspicion of being illegal immigrants.

The letter ‘D’ attached to their names in the rolls announced their doubtful citizenship. In1997, Kader and his wives were among the approximately 3.7 lakh such people in the state. The label stigmatised their identity, snatching away their right to participate in the nation’s democratic process.

Shahidul remembers his growing up days when life around his father, then a successful businessman in bamboo trading and the supplying of hide, had begun to change. “When I was in Class 10 [in 2010], I learnt for the first time that my father and both my mothers were D-voters. That is when I realized why my father constantly remained tense. He worked hard to earn and save as much as possible. While he tried to educate us, he was very cautious about buying things for us,” says Shahidul. “That is when I noticed how quickly he was aging.”

“I’ve grown ill fighting my wives’ and my foreigners’ cases,” an infirm Kader told me during one of my visits to his home in Assam’s Baksa district. “I will have to wait another five years before I can vote again.” He was referring to the FT case he had fought in 2019.

In 2018, almost 21 years after being classified as a D-voter, Kader and his wives received notices from the FT. There were about 100 of them operational in Assam at that time. Foreigners’ Tribunals were established in the state in 1964, in response to long-festering social and political unrest on the illegal immigrants’ issue. They opined on the status of a person suspected to be a ‘foreigner’ in cases brought to them through the border police or the election commission.

“Until 2005, the complainant, the state, was required to give a clear and plausible evidence to establish that the accused was a foreigner,” says Oliullah Laskar, an advocate at the Gauhati High Court. “However, Supreme Court judgement (2005) struck down the 1983 law, shifting the burden of proof on the accused themselves.”

Kader couldn’t remember the exact number of hearings he had to attend at the FT. All he knew was that every month he was going there and also visiting lawyers and various government offices to collect documents proving his ancestral lineage.

“After we got the notices, he suddenly changed. He would go out to work for a day and stay at home for the next two days,” his wife Ajimon recollects. “We spent whatever money we had and sold our 8-bigha land to fight the three cases. Arranging all the documents starting from 1951 NRC and all the voter lists after that cost us heavily,” she says.

Those in citizenship trials must produce certified voter’s list copies of their fathers, or of themselves – if they had voted before 1966. These and other legal documents have to be certified by the issuing authority.

The 1951 NRC recorded Kader’s father Yeakub Ali’s age as 9 years; but his age showed as 38 years in the 1967 voter list. Moreover, in the 1951 NRC Kader’s grandfather Ramjan Ali’s name was entered not as Ramjan but as Rajidfa Bibi, just as villagers used to call him. The FT opined that Kader had failed to prove that Rajidfa and Ramjan were one and the same person. It also concluded that the person listed in the 1951 NRC as Yeakub Ali s/o Rajidfa was not Kader’s father.

Citing such irregularities, the FT (no. 8) in Barpeta district declared in November 2019 that Kader was a “foreigner between January 1,1966 to March, 24,1971 streams.” The fate of Kader, therefore, was decided according to the Assam Accord (1985). The tripartite agreement that had also come to amend the citizenship act of 1955. Based on the cutoff date for citizenship, it removed voters like Kader from electoral rolls for a period of 10 years. Disenfranchised Kader then, was eligible to live in Assam but would have his right to vote restored in 2029 – if alive.

“I could establish my presence here, but they rejected my wives’ documents and declared them foreigners. I moved to the Gauhati High Court to challenge the FT order. In the process, I lost everything.” Kader was referring to losses in business, their land, and money. The last and most important loss was his good health after the stroke.

“Every hearing at the foreigner court meant we had to gather witnesses, bear their expenses and pay lawyers’ fees. The process left us destitute. Within a year he [Kader] became so stressed that he collapsed one day,” says Ajimon. Their neighbour, Baset Ali, 67, agrees. “They were doing well. But contesting the D-voter cases made them lose out on everything from business to health. After he fell ill, he just couldn’t recover.”

Kader’s health slowly forced him out of work. The family walked a tight rope, often relying on Shahidul’s income. But Kader was resolute. Even in that state he would travel 135 kilometres to Guwahati, taking an auto from his village to Barpeta town and then a bus. “Going through all the tension, yes, his paralysis got worse,” says Ajimon.

So did the political situation. The National Register of Citizens updation project that began in December 2014 reached fruition in August 2019. A final list was published, three months before Kader settled his case with the FT, and all 11 members of his family were among the over 1.9 million people excluded from the register. They would have 120 days to appeal after receiving the rejection slip confirming their exclusion. And Assam’s Foreigners’ Tribunal was to determine their citizenship.

“We also had to arrange the documents for the NRC,” says Shahidul. “Our names were included in the first draft of the NRC because we had the necessary documents like legacy proofs, linkage certificates by panchayats, certified copies of voter lists and all. But in the final draft, our entire family was removed because of D-voter cases against our parents.”

Between 2015 and 2017 Kader and his family members were also running around to get their NRC documents. They had to go to the Barpeta collectorate, and also to the NRC help desks to find their legacy data. Ajimon had to include her name in the land documents of her father. The long process was draining, especially as the documents needed for this were different from what the D-voter cases required.

Then the Supreme Court on July 2, 2018, ordered that D-voters, their descendants or people whose cases are pending at the FTs would not be included in the NRC, and the names of Kader’s 11 family members were dropped. That meant yet another round of trials for the family. The clearing of Kader’s citizenship case amidst the chaos brought little comfort. Ajimon and Marjina’s cases are continuing at the high court, and they are now on bail.

Kader got a second stroke in 2023. Following which, says Mohidul, they took him to local healers again. “There is no help for a D-voter, neither old age pension, nor government-aided treatment. Medical treatment being very expensive, we tried again with the healer for about three months.”

But when Kader didn’t improve, they did take him to the Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed Medical College and Hospital in the district headquarters of Barpeta, more than an hour’s drive from their village. The doctors, however, saw no chance of a recovery. Since then, Kader stayed at home, hobbling around on a bamboo stick.

In June 2025, tensions were high in Assam with the government’s “push back” plan, to deport alleged illegal immigrants. The state had left more than a hundred people stranded in no man’s land between the Indian and Bangladesh borders in May 2025. That included some still fighting citizenship cases. Which worried Kader – as his wives could also now be pushed into a foreign land. Any questions about their citizenship status and he would start crying. The distress took his life.

Kader’s tryst with citizenship lasted for 28 years of his life and ended in disability and finally his death. His wives’ nationality remains in dispute, and the shadow of citizenship trials haunt the family. “We remain in tension,” says Shahidul. “If my parents become foreigners, what will happen to us?”