Das and his wife last week. Biswa Kalyan Purkayastha
On Sunday evening, Chandrahar, 104, suffering from a heart disease, who had spent three months in a detention camp for “foreigners” in Assam two years ago, died in his son’s run-down cottage in Boraibasti in Assam’s Cachar district — still a “foreigner”.
Breaking down, Nyuti Das, his daughter, said “Modi aamar bhogowan (Modi is my god)… He will solve everything. The citizenship law is here. We will all become Indian.”
She adds, “All he wanted was to die an Indian… And we tried, we ran from court to court, from advocates to social workers, submitted all the papers. And just like that, he’s gone. We are still ‘foreigners’ in the eyes of the law. The Act (Citizenship Amendment Act) did nothing for us.”
“The law has come, it has been nearly a year, but what has ‘God’ done?” she would ask him.
The Modi government has repeatedly emphasised that the CAA is meant to give citizenship to people like Das, largely Hindu persecuted minorities in their countries of residence, who migrated to India.
Former Silchar Congress MP Sushmita Dev, who visited Das’s family on Monday, says the Act is just a “tool”. “It’s a means to an end. And the end is polarising the Hindu Bengali vote. Even if the CAA was in effect, it doesn’t assure citizenship to anybody. Why has the BJP not helped any of the Hindu Bengalis who are still in detention?”
Das was granted bail in June 2018, but the family’s case is still on in court, his children appearing for hearings. Das’s family barely understands the legal jargon, only that the label of foreigners continues.
— source indianexpress.com | Dec 15, 2020