Who belongs where? The dilemmas of the CAA-NRC for the trans community in India

Conversations about the CAA are back, as are apprehensions around the vague laws governing the NRC. But how does this impact the trans community?

It was five in the morning on the first day of February in 2020, when Dipto Laskar (name changed to protect identity), a 32-year-old Muslim trans man currently living in the Burdwan city of West Bengal, received a phone call from an unknown number. Ever since he moved out of his family home in Assam’s Bongaigaon three years earlier, he hadn’t received many calls, fewer even at such ungodly hours.

Laskar remembers the phone ringing with an unusual urgency. It was an old friend from Bongaigaon, who had managed to find his new number to call and inform him that a few months ago, his father had been declared “a foreigner” by the Foreigners’ Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body unique to the state of Assam set up under the Foreigners Act (1946) and Foreigners (Tribunal) Order (1961). It determines if a person living in the country is an Indian or foreign national, under the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—a list of Indian citizens living in the state, which identifies foreign nationals in Assam, a state bordering Bangladesh.

Despite not being a morning person, Laskar recalls being wide awake as the words seeped into his ear, and took over his entire being, suspending him in a state of paralysis. “‘What will happen to me now?’ I remember thinking. Forget proof of my citizenship, even my Voter ID, Aadhaar and PAN cards had proven difficult to update back then,” he says. The process to update the Assam NRC began after an order was passed by the Supreme Court of India in 2013, with the state’s nearly 33 million people having to prove that they were Indian nationals before 24 March 1971. The final list was released on 31 August 2019, with nearly 1.9 million applicants failing to make the cut.

According to Harshit Anand, a Delhi-based advocate working at the Supreme Court, anyone who is excluded from the NRC, who “may be a trans person, trans-Muslim, or cis-gender person—there are no special provisions made for them under the law.” Therefore, regardless of one’s gender or religious identity, the only method of redressal in case of an error is “to challenge the decision before the Foreigners Tribunal, and then follow subsequent courses of appeal if the first challenge fails.”

For a faction as vulnerable and invisibilised as the trans community in India, this process adds to the tedium, and compounds their emotional, mental and financial burdens. The struggle to make a decent living for a trans person in the country is not unknown; for Laskar, the wait to find a stable job that could pay for the bare minimum took five years. “I was 25, had no money because no one was willing to employ a trans man, and updating each of those documents with my new identity meant spending at least ₹5,000 each,” Laskar says, his voice choking into a squeak. From 2017 until 2021, he had done odd jobs as a restaurant server, grocery shop accountant, and what-have-you, saving every penny he could eke out after paying rent of ₹1,500 a month to live in a corner of a dingy tenement. The money would go into reclaiming and building a life in the identity that was always truly his; that would grant him the body of a man—being assigned female at birth—while the soul was always of one. This meant spending a fortune on not just cementing his true gender identity on paper through government and official documents, but also through hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery.

“It took me years to get my new name and gender updated on my identity cards. They all finally came through in 2021-22, but even that won’t be enough to prove my citizenship,” Laskar says. He is referring to the National Population Register (NPR), or a database of Indian citizens with their demographic and biometric data, coupled with the National Register of Citizens (NRC)—a state protocol that mandates Indian citizens to prove that their or their family’s citizenship goes as far back as 1971 for Assam, and 1950 for the rest of India, with supporting documents—and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The CAA, which was first introduced in the Lok Sabha as the Citizenship Amendment Bill in 2016 by amending the Citizenship Act of 1955, was reintroduced by Home Minister Amit Shah in the Lok Sabha in 2019, and passed in both the houses as an act on 10 December the same year.

The CAA-NRC in Assam 

On paper, the CAA aims to provide Indian citizenship to undocumented immigrants who entered India on or before 31 December 2014. It was passed for migrants of six different religions— Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian—from the neighbouring states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, all Muslim-majority nations. The list includes all but Muslims, thereby effectively banning members of the community from acquiring citizenship in India.

“I think I am the unluckiest of the lot,” scoffs Laskar. “I mean, not only am I Muslim, but I am also a trans man. Who would want me? In a strange way, the pandemic put this worry on the backburner for a while, but now with the NDA back at the Centre, they will certainly go back to implementing it more aggressively.”

In his experience, the tribunals in Assam were undecided on what was adequate evidence of residence to prove the citizenship of a person, and the documents mandated would change on the whims of the presiding officials. “You’re asking for documents from people in a country who barely know how to read or write?” asks Laskar. “My grandparents don’t even know when they were born. They only know they left their home in Sylhet (in present-day Bangladesh) sometime in the 1960s and settled in Assam. You want refugees to bother about paperwork when they didn’t even have a home to call their own?”

Is the CAA indeed linked to the NRC?

According to the 2011 Census, Assam has a population of over 11,000 trans individuals (the All Assam Transgender Association, however, pegs it at 20,000). Among them, over 2,000 had been left out of the Assam NRC in 2019 on account of choosing the transgender option, which didn’t help their cause since their supporting documents needed to establish the individual’s name prior to 1971 through legacy and lineage. However, the ones who did make it to the list, did so with their dead names and old identities. Laskar was among them.

He has been working a stable corporate job for over a year now, and finally earns enough to afford a one-room flat in a middle-class neighbourhood. He sounds comfortable in his deep voice, and is happy with how his beard has grown, after having successfully undergone expensive and harrowing gender-reaffirming procedures. If his family saw him today, they would barely be able to recognise him, he says. “I know my parents are physically alive, but we have been dead to each other for seven years now,” he says. "This is my home now, the one in Assam isn't."

The fates of millions of immigrants from the listed neighbouring nations hang in the balance at the behest of the implementation of the CAA—since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has returned to form the government at the centre as a part of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)—with an unspecified number of Hindu immigrants from Bangladesh already being granted citizenship under the CAA in West Bengal, Uttarakhand, and Haryana, according to a Ministry of Home Affairs statement on 29 May 2024.

The BJP-led NDA government has pitched the CAA as an “inclusionary” act that explicitly grants citizenship to immigrants persecuted on religious grounds from neighbouring Muslim nations, stating that a nation-wide NRC is not linked to the CAA under their new manifesto.

However, there has been significant doublespeak on the issue, inciting anxiety among vulnerable minorities. On 22 December 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said at a rally in Delhi—only days after the CAA-NRC protests took over the national capital’s Shaheen Bagh—that his government, ever since they came to power in 2014, had not discussed the NRC. “We only had to implement it in Assam to follow Supreme Court directives,” he said. This, however, contradicted Shah’s public statement merely days earlier, on 10 December in the Parliament, where he stated that the NRC will definitely be implemented across India. At a rally on 3 December in Jharkhand, he even set a deadline for the same—2024. “Every infiltrator will be identified and expelled before the next election,” he said.

Therefore, while on paper the NRC is not conducted on religious grounds—and members of any faith can be left out owing to lack of adequate documentation (in Assam, for instance, out of over 32.9 million applicants for the NRC, approximately 31 million made it to the final list with at least 1.9 million exclusions, many of whom are Hindus)—the ones left out of the register will be faced with the prospect of being labelled “foreigners” on Indian soil. This, in turn, would bring them under the purview of the CAA. But the CAA only provides Indian citizenship to non-Muslim illegal immigrants, which essentially means that Muslim immigrants will be left out, if and when the NRC is rolled out.

Transpersons on thin ice in Bengal

The ambiguity surrounding the nation-wide CAA-NRC—as Assam continues to fill its detention centres with “declared foreigners” housed under the most barbaric conditions—has roused concerns among vulnerable sections, especially in a state like West Bengal that has historically witnessed steady migrations from across its border with Bangladesh.

“If we get left out of the NRC and are thrown into those detention centres, it would only mean death for us,” says Shaan Chowdhury, a trans man from Bengal. Chowdhury, 27, lives in an isolated corner of his home in Uttarpara. Assigned female at birth, even though Chowdhury has a family on paper, he leads a solitary life at home. “My mother is transphobic. Every time I want to speak to her about my sexuality she says she is feeling unwell. My father is indifferent, I don’t know what he thinks about me. Only my brother, nine years younger to me, seems to be on my side,” he says.

For the past three years, Chowdhury has been working as an assistant pharmacist at a pharmacy chain in his hometown. On some days he works in the morning, on others he works evenings. But every day, he returns home to a deafening silence. “I ran away from home with my former girlfriend in 2021 and lived in a rented apartment with her in Uttarpara,” says Chowdhury. “How that relationship ended is a whole different story for another day, but now that I earn a steady income, I have somewhat been granted some space in my own home,” he says.

Despite work granting him more freedom, it hasn’t been a cakewalk. Nearly a year ago, his Voter ID, Aadhaar and PAN cards were updated to carry his new name and gender. As Anand also points out, “any mismatch in the name (in government documents) can be reported and subsequently corrected,”—a process Chowdhury has already undertaken. But in spite of that, it’s been a struggle to convince his employers to do the same. “I sent the first email putting in the request to update my gender in October last year. It’s been eight months and my emails have gone unanswered. You think I stand a chance if the NRC-CAA is implemented?” asks Chowdhury.

In Assam, the admissible documents to register oneself on the NRC did not include the usual proofs of identity like passport, Aadhar, PAN card or Voter ID. Instead, documents issued before the midnight of 24 March 1971, which states the name of the person or their ancestor in order to prove their familial or ancestral residence in Assam up to midnight of 24 March 1971, were mandated. In case the document carries the name of an ancestor, the applicant will have to provide documents that establish their relationship with said ancestor—like a birth certificate, land document, board or university certificate, among other “legally acceptable documents”. 

The decision on what documents will be permissible in the event of a nation-wide NRC, however, is still pending. But Assam’s precedence inspires little hope in Chowdhury. “These apprehensions are present across the whole trans community. My employers haven’t managed to update my work ID; how will I get the civic bodies and my school to not just update my gender, but also my name in my old certificates?” he asks.

The contested idea of home

The roof above Chowdhury’s head isn’t a certainty either. He wonders if his family will step up and help him procure proof of his citizenship with documents like their family home’s land lease or ration card if push comes to shove. “I definitely have my doubts,” he thinks out loud.

“There has been news about detention centres coming up in states like Karnataka. I know the government is now saying that they won’t implement the NRC in conjunction with the CAA, but they will do all of that.” He recalls the time he had left home to live with his former partner—a time when the dust on the last rounds of the CAA-NRC debate hadn’t entirely settled—and had severed ties with his family, to pause for a moment. “If our relationship had survived and I hadn’t come back to my home, whatever little chances I have now of proving my identity wouldn’t even be there.”

For trans persons like Chowdhury, the CAA-NRC spells a double whammy, as the NPR, and subsequently, the NRC, would have their dead names and old identities registered under them, like it was for Laskar. Chowdhury’s current partner, Debangshi Biswas, a 23-year-old trans woman from Madhyamgram, fears the same fate.

Biswas, assigned male at birth, is pursuing her masters in Bengali from the University of Calcutta, while working a job at a multinational company in the social development sector to support herself and her mother.

While her mother has been supportive of her sexuality from the start, never discriminating between her and her cis-het elder sister (who has been married for 16 years), Biswas’s father—who passed away in January this year—had been hostile, even violent towards his “non-normative” sexual expressions and identity. “We lived in a joint family set-up, where my cousins and the extended family constantly provoked my father against me,” she says.

It came to a head during the middle of the second COVID-19 lockdown in July 2021, when her cousin colluded with her father to physically assault her with a fishing rod, and throw her out of their family home. “My cousin said that I can’t be carrying out my ‘obscenities’ in ‘her home’. This is my home too, but she called it ‘her home’,” says Biswas.

Her sister and brother-in-law, also living in Madhyamgram, took her in, until she found her way back home with the help of the local police’s intervention. But her tribulations did not end there. Members of her extended family cut their water connections and conspired against Biswas and her family by spreading vile rumours about her sexuality to their neighbours, which effectively left them cornered within their own community. “My father had a stationery shop at our home. Once I came back home, people stopped buying from our shop completely. From the time I came home till about February 2022, we hadn’t made a sale of even ten rupees,” recalls Biswas.

This social ostracisation left the family paralysed in more ways than one. First, it burnt through the Biswas’ meagre savings within months. Consequently, it led to Biswas’s father suffering a cardiac arrest in February that year. “We admitted my father at a private hospital and spent whatever assets we had on his treatment within a week of that, after which we considered selling off the shop, for which we would need the consent of our larger family, but they refused to grant us that,” she says. Left with no option but to look for cheaper treatment alternatives after her father suffered a second cardiac arrest a week later, Biswas moved her father to a government facility. A few weeks down the line, he would come back home, having fully recovered.

“That’s when I started working a job and supporting my family, and that is when my father started to come around and accept me,” she says. But after her father’s death, Biswas and her mother have gone back to living their solitary lives in a corner of their ancestral home. “I know my mother will support me, but given the structure of my family, if the CAA-NRC were to come for us, how exactly will I prove my citizenship based on my ancestry? Who will step up for me?” she asks.

Biswas laughs almost defiantly when asked about her apprehensions regarding the conversations on citizenship being revived during the general elections earlier this year. “We [trans persons] don’t even have basic human dignity or rights. We aren’t even an important vote bank for any political party or government because we have been invisibilised to such an extent for centuries. You think the CAA-NRC is our main concern at this point?” she scoffs. “When the time comes, we will have to take to the streets and fight for our lives then as well, because no one else will do that for us. So many of our trans brothers and sisters don’t even have a roof over their heads, and these regimes threaten us with CAA-NRC? Do you think they are even thinking about us trans people when they talk about these laws? Please, that’s a joke. No one thinks about  us. We’ll be left to rot in corners whenever these laws are implemented, and believe me, they will be,” Biswas signs off.

Featured image: Debangshi Biswas, by Swastik Pal

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