The last two weeks have seen massive and for the most part, peaceful protests in response to the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, and the repeatedly stated objective of the government to build a “National Register for Citizens” along the lines of the one recently executed with ineptitude and horrific disregard for human rights in Assam.
The protests have been unique in India’s independent history in that many of them have been led by students, civil society, and a variety of community organizations, without (in many cases) any active involvement from opposition parties. They have brought tens of thousands of ordinary people cutting across a variety of social fault lines onto the streets in a rare demonstration of solidarity to reaffirm basic constitutional ideals. Noted author Amit Chaudhuri has called these protests “such as haven’t been seen since the freedom struggle”.
I have been among those who have participated in these protests, and have witnessed them with incredulity and a gradually deepening sense of reassurance that our citizenry, including those who are comfortably insulated from these issues by virtue of their positions of social privilege, actually cares about the future and the ideals of the country. How Bangalore, where the educated classes and it’s youth, characteristically shy of stepping out of their comfort zones of shopping malls and gated communities, has stepped out on to the streets in huge numbers to be counted among those who said, “I cannot be silent any more”.
After two weeks of these protests, on Dec 22, during an election rally for the upcoming elections to the Delhi State Assembly, the Prime Minister appeared to back down on the immediacy of the NRC, and claimed that it “has not even been discussed since 2014”. This is completely at odds with statements made by his own Home Minister, Mr Amit Shah, who as recently as on Dec 10, on the floor of the Lok Sabha said “Maan kar chaliye NRC ane wala hai” (just take it for granted that the NRC is coming). There are numerous other examples where he has connected the CAA with the NRC in rally after election rally, all of which have been well documented by several media houses, including an excellent collection by The Wire.
While this contradiction is making headlines, what is getting less coverage is the Prime Minister comment in the same speech where he disavowed the existence of Detention Camps, and even tried to make a joke out it, suggesting with a smirk that they are the figment of the imagination of “Urban Naxals”. The truth is the construction and maintenance of detention camps have been documented at length by contemporary reportage, and even happens to be documented on the Lok Sabha’s own website. Unfortunately, in the timid news environment we live in, it seems like he will get away with it. The next day, there was only one prominent English daily that came close to calling him a liar.
How do we explain the PM’s statement? One possibility is that we accept that there have been no formal discussions on the topic. In that case, Mr Shah has prematurely let the cat out of the bag as to the real intention behind the combination of the CAA and NRC, for which we must thank him. While the political value of such statements with respect to the BJPs vote bank is obvious, it is very hard to see how the Home Minister might have acted without tacit or explicit approval from the PM. If that reality is murky and disturbing, the alternative, which is that the PM lied in a planned speech with a potential audience of a billion people with no accountability, is horrifying.
What these brazen denials do is further deepen the trust deficit between the government and an increasingly large section of the people. The leadership likely doesn’t care, because a multi-year project to label anyone who chooses to reject their politics and policies as a public enemy (the “urban naxals” alluded to earlier) has met with resounding success as evidenced by widespread hate on social media and the comments sections of popular national dailies that target the government’s critics.
While the leadership may not care, a lot of people do. In the interests of accountability, a healthy democracy must always maintain a trust deficit between citizens and government. Too little trust is problematic, since various systems (e.g. the criminal justice system) rely on some level of trust. Without it we are condemned to incidents like the extra-judicial “encounter” killings of suspected rapists in Hyderabad, egged on and applauded by a worryingly large section of society. To an extent, we all need to trust government to “do the right thing”. But there is a line that separates that trust from becoming belief. “Followers” of Modi (as opposed to his “supporters” --- and it is important to make that distinction) who have “belief” in him put a host of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights that even they take for granted today, at serious risk. “Blind belief in authority”, Albert Einstein said while reflecting on times eerily similar to the present day, “is the greatest enemy of truth”.
The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 can be looked at in isolation, as the current leadership, taken by surprise at the severity of the push back from civil society, would have us do today. However, the more pragmatic approach right now demands that we analyze it in the context of a potential nation-wide NRC, without being beguiled by the Prime Ministers dubious and confusing reassurances.
Shekhar Gupta, a well-known journalist on his program “Cut the Clutter” described the CAA as a missile, and the NRC as a warhead that could create untold destruction. Without the CAA, the NRC is doomed to face a backlash from the Hindu vote bank no matter how the failed Assam process is tweaked. In the reality that is India, any process that is aimed at excluding potential illegal migrants will necessarily exclude large swathes of our genuine population. Tightening the norms for proving citizenship risks mass exclusion, as we have seen pitifully play out in Assam, where 2 million people are today at the risk of statelessness, and much to the horror of the BJP, 60% of them turned out to be Hindu. Those excluded face either detention camps or years of chasing the tail of our judicial system trying to prove existential legitimacy, instead of pursuing incidental goals like life, liberty, and happiness. Either way, those excluded have been condemned by the state to face severe restrictions on personal liberty, irrespective of whether they are migrants or not. Heart rending stories have been surfacing from Assam, where families have been separated: mother from child, husband from wife, on the suspicion that they are illegal immigrants. In an answer to a question in parliament, it was disclosed that 28 people have died in detention camps that current house about a 1000 people. This is a matter of public record, irrespective of what the PM may say. While this has backfired on the BJP in Assam, it is clear this would be an unmitigated disaster both socially and electorally, if it is simply scaled up to a national level.
In order to avoid this political apocalypse, one option is to loosen the norms that define citizenship; however, this risks almost everyone getting included and we will end up living as one happy nation, migrants and all. But that serves no practical or political end. (Or maybe it does, like demonetization, where “followers”, not “supporters” will say, “oh well, at least he tried”, and will overlook the Tughlaqian expenditure and monumental waste in human resources to execute the project).
Bottomline, the CAA is a critical to preventing the NRC warhead from blowing up at the front door of the BJPs newly constructed national headquarters.
For minorities from neighbouring Islamic countries, the act does two things. First, it removes the illegal tag from their status in India. Existing rules (pre-Dec 2019) required that, irrespective of religion, you could apply for citizenship after continuous legal residence of 11 years. Second, for these minorities, the domicile requirement has been reduced to 5 years. With the loss of the illegal tag, that means any non-Muslim migrant who has lived in India for 5 years or more, automatically qualifies for citizenship irrespective of whether they were “illegal” in the first place. The same benefit does not apply to Muslim migrants even if they entered India for a variety of reasons, one of which could in fact include religious persecution. Several commentators and the so called "CAA awareness" drive of the government argues that the path to citizenship has not been taken away for them and that they can still apply using the “old rules”, happily ignoring the fact that most of them they can’t, since the onus of proving legal residence (for 11 years in their case) remains on them, while for non-Muslims, the state has taken on that burden and given them a free pass.
Now with the CAA as the law of the land (pending notification, and a potential Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality), how should we anticipate the NRC playing out? In theory, migrant non-Muslims should have little cause for fear. However, this is not obvious, since the CAA is silent on how the migrant is, if at all, expected to prove that she is from one of the listed Islamic countries. In fact, for that matter, the CAA is silent on how the migrant, if at all, is expected to prove she is Hindu (or any one of the other exempt religions). The idea that a bureaucrat will have the power to decide for an individual whether her claim of a certain religious identity is bona fide seems like a dangerous proposition, one that is almost crying out for misuse of official power. Setting that question of identity aside, how would a migrant prove her country of origin, when she has spent years living in India, and has likely done her best to erase any evidence of having come from another country? Certain sections may have documentation, such as a school leaving certificate, or a college degree, but the vast majority will not.
Keeping the above compulsions in mind, in order to gain a politically favorable NRC result and avoid the Assam debacle on a national scale, it seems fair to hypothesize that the process will not require much formal documentation at all. After all, the correction of a historical injustice to a section of society cannot be achieved by making the same section run pillar to post of the famed Indian bureaucracy. In such a scenario, the only differentiating factor would come down to religious identity, not a combination of religious identity and country of origin. The rules will apply equally to non-migrants who will need to prove themselves to the state. In the absence of appropriate documentation, if they don’t want to be faced with the threat of detention camps, they will declare themselves as foreigners from one of those three countries, and if they are accepted by the powers that be as non-Muslim, and can show proof of domicile for 5 years (which is easier to do), they will walk through the pearly gates of the NRC. While the idea that genuine Indians may have to declare themselves as foreigners in order to remain Indian is ridiculous enough, it needs to be understood that based on the current level of information, no such escape route, contrived as it might be, is available for the average Indian Muslim.
To counter the current protests, in recent days the government has launched a campaign to underline the fact that “genuine Indian Muslims have nothing to worry about”. However, the statements are short on detail, and do not explain why under the current CAA and envisaged NRC exercise, the possibility of mass disenfranchisement and delegitimization of Indian Muslims is not real.
One side of this debate places faith in the government and argues that we should “wait and watch”. No government should be given that latitude, irrespective of what ideology they belong to. Silence is complicity. If you don’t want your children to ask where you were when this country took a giant stride towards a Hindu Rashtra, and till such time questions such as these remain unanswered, all those who value the principles on which this country was founded must demand that the Citizenship Amendment Act be repealed. Next, we must demand a clear public statement from the Prime Minister that the NRC will not be implemented while his government is in office.
And finally, truth matters. If either of them have any respect for the trust that the public placed in them, Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah must own responsibility for misleading the country on the NRC and detention camps, and must resign immediately.
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