What's next for the 4 million

India has effectively stripped four million people in Assam of citizenship, sparking fears of mass deportations of Muslims from the northeastern state.

But authorities assured that those who could not make it to the draft list will not face "immediate deportation or be arrested". People will be given time to file for corrections, Indian officials said.

The definitive list will be announced in December.

The National Register of Citizens (NRC) published its final draft of citizens on Monday, and ruled that of the 32.9 million population of the state, only 28.9 million names were included in the final draft.

The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power on the promise to expel the so-called "illegal foreigners" and protect the rights of indigenous groups.

Critics say the move to strip the citizenship of Bengali origin people, most of whom are Muslims, is similar to Myanmar's removal of rights and protections for its Rohingya community. Muslims form one-third of the state's population.

What is the NRC list and who can be included?

Unique to Assam state, the NRC document was prepared in 1951 to distinguish Indian citizens from undocumented immigrants from what was then East Pakistan (which later became Bangladesh in 1971).

The cutoff date to be eligible for Indian citizenship is March 24, 1971, as per the Assam Accord signed in 1985.

The people or their descendants whose names appeared in the NRC 1951, or in any of the electoral rolls up to March 24, 1971, or in any of the other recognised official documents issued up until midnight of the same period should be included in the final draft.

Assam has witnessed prolonged protests against so-called foreigners, which includes both Hindus and Muslims.

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The arrival of millions of refugees to Assam in 1971 - when Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan after a bloody civil war - brought the issue of these so-called foreigners into national focus.

It ignited Assam's biggest and deadliest anti-foreigners agitation between the late-1970s to the mid-1980s. About 2,000 Muslims, including children, were massacred in a single day in Assam's Nellie village in 1983 at the height of the anti-foreigners agitation.