GOALPARA: For the past four years, 30-year-old social activist Shajahan Ali Ahmed had been busy helping poor, illiterate Muslim families in Barpeta Road put their NRC papers in order. A document accepted as proof one day could suddenly be held inadmissible the next. The rules kept changing. And Shajahan kept up. He made sure these families did too. Last month he found that he did not make it to the NRC.“I can’t think of anything else. I am a citizen. I had all the documents to prove it. But I’m not on the NRC,” said Ahmed. If papers submitted to claim inclusion in the NRC are not enough, how is one to put together new evidence of citizenship? It’s back to square one. “I don’t know what will happen next. What if the tribunal says I’m a foreigner?” asked Ahmed. No one can say for sure. Not yet.But about 90 km away, Renu Bala Hajong has a clearer view of what could happen if a tribunal decided someone was a “foreigner”. Renu was eight when her family fled strife-torn East Pakistan to settle at the little-known village of Matia in Goalpara district. That was in 1964. In the past few months, she saw Matia turn into a metonymic extension of the fear and anxiety surrounding Assam ’s citizenship tests. Located about 14 km from Goalpara town, it is where a mega detention centre is coming up on a 2,88,000 sq ft plot surrounded by teak forests at a cost of Rs 46.5 crore. The centre will have the capacity to house about 3,000 detainees and should be ready by the end of this year.It is in this detention centre’s shadow that 64-year-old Renu lives. Like hundreds who entered India from East Pakistan in the 1960s, Renu had submitted her refugee certificate to claim inclusion in the NRC. That didn’t cut it. “The refugee certificate is all I have. I don’t have any money. I can’t keep fighting. Every time I step out, I wonder if I will have to end up in the detention centre that is coming up,” she said.The government insists the new detention centre has nothing to do with the NRC. “Declared foreigners in the existing detention centres and convicted foreigners (those who accept they are foreigners) will be moved to the Matia centre,” said Ashutosh Agnihotri, commissioner and secretary (home).Yet, members to head more than 200 foreigners’ tribunals being set up to supplement the existing 100 were recruited in the weeks leading up to publication of the NRC (the final target is 500 foreigners’ tribunals). And there is the inter-dependence of citizenship determination exercises in Assam. A person who was declared foreigner by or had a citizenship case pending at a tribunal was automatically excluded from the NRC.If a higher court were to clear them now, would they be able to apply for inclusion in the NRC again? What about those born after 2015, when applications for NRC inclusion were closed? Will those excluded from the NRC and, subsequently, declared foreigners by a tribunal be sent to detention right away? Or will the administration wait while they file appeals in higher courts before taking any action?Guidelines are still to be framed. And these are just gaps in the NRC process. Then, there’s the detention system, which has always operated independently in Assam – even without the NRC in the picture. Whether or not one gets thrown into detention depends on what a foreigners’ tribunal says. After receiving the rejection notice from NRC, the excluded person has to appeal before the tribunal within the 120-day window. The process has not started yet.Until now, detention centres in Assam operated out of jails in Goalpara, Tezpur, Jorhat, Dibrugarh, Silchar and Kokrajhar. Families separated, no support for the elderly or those with mental health issues and barely any access to legal aid – these detention centres do not meet any globally accepted norm.So, after years of outrage over “sub-human” conditions of detention centres for illegal migrants in Assam, as Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi put it, the Centre came up with two solutions – a standalone detention centre and conditional release of those who have completed a fixed term in them.But several questions crop up again. For instance, what happens to those who have completed their term, are released on bail but, subsequently, not held as Indian citizens by higher courts? Or convicted non-nationals, who have admitted to entering India illegally and are ready to go back?Five days before the NRC was published, nine detainees were released after the Supreme Court allowed those who have completed three years in detention camps to be released on bail after furnishing surety bonds of Rs 1 lakh each from two Indian citizens and biometric details. They have to report to the local police station regularly while they fight the legal battle to prove their citizenship in higher courts. State government officials say they have identified 300 detainees who meet the criteria as of now.“The address authorities at Goalpara detention camp had was that of my residence at Krishnai. I don’t have a Bangladesh address, though the tribunal verdict would imply so. Here I am, at my home in Assam. Why didn’t they send me to Bangladesh then?” asks Rabi Dey, 54, who was one of them.This irony of belonging frames all citizenship debates. Just 11 km from the sprawling Matia centre is Subrata Dey’s modest house. In March last year, police picked up Subrata, then 37 years old, at Ashudubi village in Krishnai after a foreigners’ tribunal declared he was a non-national. He was taken to the detention centre in Goalpara jail. Two months later, he died of a heart attack. His death in detention hit headlines and after a few angry debates and worried discussions faded out of public memory.It’s been more than a year now. Subrata’s wife Kamini, 35, makes Rs 60 a day by stitching together recycled plastic bags. Their son Vicky, 18, has dropped out of school and works at a garment shop in Dhupdhara, 30 km from home, for Rs 5,000 a month. Their daughter, Shweta, is nine.In death, Subrata was no more a “Bangladeshi”. His 68-year-old mother Anima said, “They sent my son’s body to Ashudubi. They should have sent it to Bangladesh. But how could they? I am here, his family is here, he had been here all his life.”Some 100 km away, the same questions were being asked by Amrit Das’s family. The 70-year-old used to run a snacks shop at Barpeta Road town. His name had been on voter lists since 1961, well before the 1971 cut-off for determining citizenship. In 2017, he was declared a foreigner and taken to the Goalpara detention camp. His family challenged the tribunal verdict but the Gauhati high court upheld the decision. In April this year, he died in detention. His family initially refused to accept Amrit’s body when it was brought to his Ward 10 home. “Send his body to the country he belonged to,” a family member had said.Humanitarian aspects aside, re-situating a person’s locus of belonging is not simple legally either. There has been a clamour to deport “illegal” migrants, but India and Bangladesh do not have a repatriation treaty. Besides, for removal from state, a person has to be acknowledged as a citizen by the purported country of origin to which they would be deported. Logistical challenges of the exercise are not lost on the administration. In the absence of guidelines governing detainees, policies have been made up along the way.Rashminara Begum, 36, is a freedom fighter’s daughter. In 2016, she was three months pregnant when she was declared a non-national. “My father fought for India’s Independence. But, somehow, I became a Bangladeshi,” said Rashminara. Nazifa Yasmin, her daughter, was born in a detention centre and would have spent the first few years of her life there had Rashminara not been released on bail on humanitarian grounds. She has been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since her time in detention. “I pray to Allah that no one encounter the hell I went through in detention,” she said.