Assam government’s what’s in a name attitude; renames detention centres as transit camps

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet, wrote William Shakespeare in Romeo Juliet. The Assam Government may not have not heard of William Shakespeare and definitely not heard of the little poem, from which the couplet has been extracted, but has surely heard the couplet in Hindi films.

This is clear from the fact that the Assam Government has decided to change the name of the detention camps for “foreigners” to transit camps. The camp, though called by another name, shall still remain a detention centre. The detention centres were setup to house residents declared foreign nationals under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), though the Union Government had been denying the existence of such camps in the country.

Assam has six detention centres, which are to be renamed and are located in Dibrugarh, Goalpara, Jorhat, Kokrajhar, Silchar and Tezpur.

The centres in Kokrajhar, Slichar and Tezpur have 22 child detainees. According to government records, between December 23, 2009 and June 30, 2021 2,551 people were declared non-Indian citizens by the Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs).