In the 1960s, a special police force began operating in the state with the sole purpose of identifying undocumented immigrants; quasi-judicial “foreigners tribunals” started adjudicating on citizenship around the same time, and since 1997 the federal Election Commission has found some voters to be what it describes as “doubtful.” These hearings involve travel, sometimes a lawyer, and always, debilitatingly so, money. Hussain, the Nellie resident, has been summoned to more than a dozen such hearings to prove his citizenship. Umar Ali, a septuagenarian in the town, has been summoned even more times than that. Abdul Qadir and Shah Alam have both been to a half-dozen each. They all lost family members in the Nellie massacre.

The weaponizing of paperwork by the state has shades of the Windrush scandal in Britain, or of Donald Trump’s policy against asylum seekers in the United States. But the hostility toward Bengali Muslims in Assam—not unlike that toward Muslims in general throughout India—has sustained itself for so long that it appears to be an incurable, societal malaise.

Sahimon Bibi and Ayesha Bewa lived two doors down from each other in Chakkar, a slum community in Dhubri, a short distance along the Brahmaputra River from Bangladesh. Bewa, a lifelong resident of Assam, has tried to kill herself four times in the past six months—first she tried hanging herself in her ramshackle house, and then, when parts of the state flooded this year, she stepped into neck-deep water before being rescued.

She has not applied to be on the NRC, meaning she is likely to be left off the list, and worries that the police might show up any day, pick her up, and take her someplace from which she might never return. “Where am I going to get the money to hire a lawyer?” she asks. When those already left out of the NRC are declared foreigners by these tribunals, they will be put into detention centers—six are currently operational in Assam’s jails. The government wants to build 10 more. Around the time the government opened applications for the register, she was sick. Her husband had died in 2001, and her son has undiagnosed mental-health issues. Her case should be straightforward: She has bank accounts and government identity documents, and her father’s name appears on a 1966 voter list. Yet by the time she had recovered from her illness and become aware of the NRC, all she knew was that people were being snatched away because of it.

Bibi applied but, certain that she would be declared a foreigner, killed herself.

Bewa, along with everyone else left out, will probably now be brought before one of the foreigners tribunals. One hundred such tribunals operate in Assam, and 200 more will be opened soon. The members who preside over these trials are hired on contracts, which aren’t renewed if they do not brand enough people as foreigners, the members themselves have said before the state’s high court. An analysis of five such tribunals conducted by Vice News showed that 9 out of every 10 cases were against Muslims, who also happened to be more than twice as likely as Hindus to be declared foreigners.