Delhi's Citizenship List Excludes 1.9 Million Muslims. Courts Approved It.

On the morning of March 14, 2026, in a cramped legal office in Delhi's Jangpura neighbourhood, a junior advocate named Arjun Mehta opened an email attachment that had arrived without warning from a source he had never met. The subject line read only: "You should see this." Inside were 247 pages of internal correspondence from India's Ministry of Home Affairs, dated between August 2019 and January 2024, detailing the implementation protocols for the National Register of Citizens—the government's nationwide project to verify the citizenship of India's 1.4 billion people.

Mehta had spent three years challenging the NRC in the Supreme Court on behalf of Muslim petitioners who had been excluded from preliminary citizenship lists. The documents he was reading showed something his legal briefs had long argued but never proven: that the exclusion was not incidental but designed. On page 67, a memo from Joint Secretary Rajiv Kumar to state-level registrars outlined "acceptable documentation standards" that effectively required property deeds, birth certificates, or school records dating to before 1971—documents that India's poorest and most marginalised communities, disproportionately Muslim, were least likely to possess.

"I knew we had a problem," Mehta told The Editorial in an interview last month. "I didn't know we had proof."

The Editorial has reviewed the documents Mehta received, as well as additional materials obtained from two current officials in the Ministry of Home Affairs and one former district magistrate in Assam, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the NRC process publicly. Together, the documents and interviews reveal a systematic effort to use citizenship verification as a tool of religious and political exclusion—and show how India's judiciary, despite mounting constitutional concerns, has allowed the process to proceed.

The Assam Pilot: A Test Case for Exclusion

The National Register of Citizens began as a regional project in Assam, India's northeastern border state, where anxiety over undocumented migration from Bangladesh had fuelled ethnic tensions for decades. The Assam Accord of 1985, signed after six years of violent protests, promised to identify and deport illegal immigrants who had entered after March 24, 1971—the eve of Bangladesh's independence war.

But when the updated NRC was published in Assam in August 2019, the results shocked even its architects. Of 33 million applicants, 1.9 million were excluded from the final list—meaning they could not prove their citizenship to the satisfaction of NRC officials. The government had expected to identify a population of illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. Instead, the excluded population was religiously mixed: approximately 1.2 million were Muslim, but 700,000 were Hindu, many of them Bengali-speaking communities that had lived in Assam for generations.

The discrepancy created a political problem for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which had championed the NRC as a way to remove Muslim "infiltrators" while protecting Hindu refugees. In December 2019, the government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which offered fast-track citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—but explicitly excluded Muslims. The CAA, critics argued, was designed to rescue the Hindu citizens accidentally caught by the NRC, while leaving Muslims stateless.

What the Documents Show

The documents obtained by The Editorial span five years and include correspondence between the Ministry of Home Affairs, the office of the Registrar General of India, and state-level NRC coordinators in Assam, West Bengal, and Uttar Pradesh. They show a deliberate tightening of evidentiary standards that disproportionately affected Muslim applicants.

A memo dated November 12, 2019, from the office of Registrar General Sailesh, circulated to all state NRC coordinators, instructed officials to "exercise heightened scrutiny" of applications from districts with "historically high Muslim populations," specifically naming Dhubri, Barpeta, and Nagaon in Assam. The memo cited concerns about "demographic alteration" but offered no legal basis for differential treatment by religion.

A second set of documents, dated between March and July 2020, shows that NRC verification officers were instructed to reject applications if there were minor discrepancies in spelling, birthdate, or address between legacy documents and current identification—a standard that, according to two former verification officers who spoke to The Editorial, was applied inconsistently. "If your name was Mohammad and the legacy document said Mohammed, that was enough," said one officer, who worked in Barpeta district and requested anonymity. "But I saw Hindu applicants with worse mismatches get approved."

The Ministry of Home Affairs declined to respond to specific questions about the documents. In a written statement, a spokesperson said: "The NRC is a statutory process governed by the Citizenship Act, 1955, and the Citizenship Rules, 2003. All procedures have been applied uniformly and without regard to religion, caste, or creed. Allegations to the contrary are baseless and politically motivated."

The Supreme Court's Role

Since 2019, more than 400 petitions challenging the NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act have been filed in the Supreme Court of India. The cases raise fundamental constitutional questions: whether a law that explicitly discriminates on the basis of religion violates Article 14 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees equality before the law; and whether the NRC process violates Article 21, which protects life and liberty.

The Court has not ruled on the merits. Instead, it has postponed hearings 23 times since December 2019, according to records reviewed by The Editorial. The most recent postponement, on April 8, 2026, moved the next hearing to October 2026—seven years after the Assam NRC was published.

Legal scholars argue that the delays have allowed the government to expand the NRC pilot to other states without judicial oversight. In January 2024, the Ministry of Home Affairs announced that West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand would begin preliminary NRC enrollment by mid-2026. Together, these states are home to more than 90 million Muslims—nearly a third of India's Muslim population.

Gautam Bhatia, a constitutional lawyer who has represented petitioners challenging the CAA, told The Editorial that the Court's inaction amounts to tacit endorsement. "The Supreme Court understands that this is the most consequential case it will hear this decade," Bhatia said. "Every postponement is a choice. The question is: why are they making it?"

The Detention Camps That Already Exist

While legal challenges have stalled, the infrastructure for detaining those excluded from the NRC has quietly expanded. Assam currently operates six detention centres, which hold individuals declared "foreigners" by quasi-judicial Foreigners Tribunals. As of March 2026, these centres held 1,147 people, according to data obtained by The Editorial under the Right to Information Act. Ninety-one percent are Muslim.

The largest facility, in Goalpara district, was built in 2019 with capacity for 3,000 detainees. It remains largely empty, but budget documents reviewed by The Editorial show that the Assam government requested ₹4.6 billion ($55 million) in the 2025–2026 fiscal year for "expansion of detention infrastructure"—enough to build facilities for an additional 10,000 people.

Human rights organisations have documented severe conditions inside existing detention centres. A 2024 report by Amnesty International India found that detainees, including children, were held indefinitely without trial, often for years, because Bangladesh refuses to accept deportees who cannot prove Bangladeshi citizenship. Seventeen detainees have died in custody since 2019, according to government records obtained by the Assam Human Rights Commission.

How the System Was Designed to Fail

The documents obtained by The Editorial reveal a verification process structured to produce mass exclusions. NRC applicants were required to prove an unbroken documentary chain linking them to a family member listed in the 1951 National Register of Citizens or in electoral rolls up to March 24, 1971. For most Indians, such records do not exist. Birth registration was not compulsory in India until 1969, and even today only 89% of births are registered, according to the Registrar General of India.

NRC officials were permitted to reject applications on minor clerical grounds. A 2021 study by the Abdul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies found that 34% of exclusions in Assam resulted from spelling discrepancies, incorrect birthdates (often by a single day), or mismatched addresses—errors common in handwritten records from the 1950s and 1960s. Applicants had the right to appeal to Foreigners Tribunals, but the tribunals themselves have been criticised as procedurally flawed. A 2019 investigation by the online publication Scroll.in found that many tribunal judges were hired on short-term contracts and faced monthly quotas for "foreigner" declarations.

The former district magistrate who spoke to The Editorial described the process as "Kafkaesque." "You had people whose parents and grandparents were born in Assam, who had voted in every election since 1977, being told they were foreigners because a document from 1965 spelled their village differently," the official said. "And if you were Muslim, the scrutiny was ten times worse."

What Comes Next

The National Register of Citizens has been suspended in Assam since 2019, pending Supreme Court review. But the Ministry of Home Affairs has continued to develop the administrative infrastructure for a nationwide rollout. In February 2025, the government launched a pilot program in 12 districts across West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, testing digital enrollment systems and biometric verification. Officials told The Editorial that full implementation in these states is scheduled to begin in November 2026.

Political opposition has been muted. The Congress party, India's principal opposition force, supported the original NRC concept in its 2019 election manifesto, and has been reluctant to challenge it directly for fear of appearing soft on illegal immigration. Regional parties in West Bengal and Assam have criticised implementation details but not the project's premise.

International observers have raised alarms. In March 2026, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees warned that the NRC, combined with the CAA, could render millions of Muslims stateless—a status that would violate the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons, to which India is not a party. The U.S. State Department's 2025 Human Rights Report on India noted "significant concerns" about the citizenship verification process and its impact on religious minorities.

For Arjun Mehta, the advocate who first received the leaked documents, the question is no longer whether the NRC was designed to exclude Muslims—the evidence, he believes, is conclusive. The question is whether India's courts will act on that evidence before the system becomes irreversible. "We have the documents," he said. "We have the testimony. We have the data. What we don't have is time."

The Supreme Court has scheduled its next hearing on the NRC challenges for October 14, 2026. By then, enrollment in West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh will be eight months underway.