Assam NRC list: Fear of 'foreigner' tag is driving people to suicide

There have been 21 such suicides in Assam since 2015 when the process of updating the National Register for Citizens to weed out illegal immigrants from the state began

It was a rainy September afternoon in this remote village in Baksa, a district of the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) in western Assam. Outside a small tin-roofed mud house, Santi Rani Chand, a frail 72-year-old clad in a white saree, sat on a wooden bench recalling her youngest son’s suicide.

Binay Chand, 32, had hanged himself from a mango tree in a neighbour’s backyard in September 2018. “Are you from Guwahati?” she asked this reporter, tears streaming down her face. “There is a lawyer there. Can you take me to him? My son sacrificed his life because