India says it has been maintaining close communications with Bangladesh throughout the whole process over the draft list of citizens in the northeastern border state of Assam.

A spokesperson of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told the media in New Delhi on Thursday that they believe that the issue will not create a rift between the relations of the two countries.
He, however, evaded a direct answer to questions on whether those left out from the final list will be deported to Bangladesh.
The draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) released on Jul 30 excluded 4 million people from the state, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power for the first time in 2016 promising action against illegal immigrants.
Assam has the second highest percentage of Muslims among all states in Hindu-majority India.
“We have been maintaining close communications with Bangladesh from the very beginning. We have spoken before preparing the NRC draft as well as after its release,” MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said during the weekly media briefing on Thursday.
From the very outset, Delhi has assured Dhaka that it was merely a draft prepared on the Supreme Court’s orders, he said. “They have been told that the process to identify citizens in Assam is still continuing.”
Assam has been racked by waves of violence over the years as residents, including tribal groups, have clashed with both Hindu and Muslim settlers, whom they accuse of plundering resources and taking away jobs.
Scores of people were chased down and killed by machete-armed mobs intent on hounding out Muslim immigrants in 1983.
With the release of the draft NRC, calls resonated across the bordering state to deport the ‘illegal foreigners’ to Bangladesh.
Ruling BJP President Amit Shah said in parliament that the NRC was a process to identify illegal Bangladeshi trespassers stoking the calls for deportation.
Dhaka has maintained that NRC is India’s ‘internal matters’, but Thursday’s MEA media briefing made it clear that it was indeed a matter of concern for it and that it has raised the issue with Delhi.
“Bangladesh believes that NRC is entirely India’s internal matter and that it will not affect the relations between the two countries,” Kumar, an MEA joint secretary, said.