While the CAB violates our Constitution, both in letter and in spirit, the NRC, which will follow next, will lead to an unmitigated and wholly intentional disaster

One of the most interesting phrases that I have come across in recent times is “the idea of India.” Popularised by a book with the same name written by Sunil Khilnani, the expression is inclusionary in nature. There is no straightjacket answer as to what constitutes this idea of India. It means different things to different people. My idea of India is the wonderful experiment we undertook when our country was born as a Constitutional democracy. An experiment where we, as Indians, promised ourselves to abide by and stick to the principles of democracy and secularism when the world thought we could not.

When the British thought that India, with its diverse populace and terrain, could never blossom into a secular democratic republic, we promised ourselves that we would not wilt before a majoritarian dictatorship. This past week, we saw a glimmer of that very idea, if only for a fleeting moment. The image of Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee and his French-American wife Esther Duflo in traditional Indian attire accepting the Nobel Prize for Economics for their ground-breaking work on how to tackle poverty, showed how no matter where you’re from, if you open your heart to India and show a desire to make the country better, it will open itself to you, too.

This idea of India, however, largely took a beating this past week. As I write this article, both Houses of Parliament have approved the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). While there’s still no clarity on what the idea of India exactly is, there should be little debate about what it is not. What India is not (or was not) is a country where we treat our very own people as second-class citizens, purely on the basis of religion. What it is not, is a country where we segregate, discriminate and terrify sections of our populace. In a week where the clampdown on the only Muslim majority State in our country went into its fourth month and where the Right-wing BJP Government decided to bulldoze one of the most divisive legislations in recent memory through Parliament, it appears that we have awoken to a different nation altogether.

Amit Shah, the Home Minister of the country, while introducing the CAB, invoked memories of Partition while speaking about the Bill. Partition was one of the bloodiest chapters in Indian history. Even since then arose two nations. One that decided to reject plurality and multiplicity, which eventually took it down a dark and tumultuous path. The other chose to embrace plurality and took the brave decision to make strides towards a hopeful future. However, acts in the past five years have blurred the lines between these two countries. For a party that attacks critics of its rule as sympathisers of Pakistan, it is actually the BJP’s hateful and exclusionary rhetoric that bears an eerie resemblance to the voices that were heard during the birth of Pakistan.

The CAB seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955, and make it easier for non-Muslim immigrants from India’s three Muslim-majority neighbours to become citizens of India. It does so by making it easier for illegal immigrants — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan — eligible for citizenship of India. Under the Citizenship Act (as it currently stands), one of the requirements is that the applicant must have resided in India for 11 of the past 14 years. The CAB reduces this threshold from 11 to six years for the applicants from the abovementioned religions and regions.

There are many issues with the CAB. For one, if the objective (as is stated) is to protect those who have come to India seeking refuge from religious persecution, then why does the Government only deal with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh? Why has it left out other countries where there is widespread religious persecution? The other problem is that a large number of Muslims are persecuted in these countries, too. For example, the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan. Why then have these sects of Muslims been excluded?

The reason is that the tone, action and agenda of this Government are to divide the country along religious lines, where we start to identify ourselves less as Indians and more with our religion. It was a tactic adopted by the British, too. Many legal luminaries have cogently argued that the CAB violates the right to equality as guaranteed under our Constitution by making religion the basis of citizenship even though the Constitution expressly bars such a distinction. The CAB, therefore, violates our Constitution, both in letter and in spirit.

If the problems ended here, it would have been one thing. But the CAB cannot be treated separately from the National Register of Citizens (NRC). If the CAB tells you about the “what”, as in, what this Bill seeks to do, the NRC answers the “how.” The NRC is a register, which contains the names of all Indian citizens. The process to update the register began in Assam, where the people of the State were required to prove that they were Indian nationals prior to March 24, 1971. Even by conservative estimates, the NRC in Assam has been a disaster. The reason for this is that it requires citizens to prove their citizenship by inter alia providing documents such as refugee registration certificate, birth certificate, LIC policy, land and tenancy records, citizenship certificate, passport, Government-issued licence or certificate and bank/post office accounts among other things.

The people most affected and least likely to be able to provide these documents are the poor. Most have no idea where these documents are. Some in Assam had to go to their villages to try and obtain them from the local authorities. There have been reports of widespread corruption, where bribes are often taken to provide these documents. And if people have the right documents, bribes are still to be paid to ensure that the officials actually accept the documents. For anyone who has dealt with a public official in India, this will hardly be surprising.

Such discrimination is also due to inefficient implementation. The people left reeling with this awfully inept and horrendously organised process have been the poor, Muslims and Hindus alike. Writing for a leading newspaper, Shruti Rajagopalan had talked about the sheer magnitude of the errors in the NRC if implemented all over the country. For example, if the Government executes the NRC all over India exceptionally well and has an error rate of just five per cent, 67.5 million people will face action, which would equal the human displacement caused by World War II. What is frightening still, as Rajagopalan says, is that if we outsource the execution to an organisation with a very low error rate of one per cent (such as that of Scandinavian countries), 13.5 million Indians would still be erroneously excluded. This number would equal the human displacement caused due to Partition. It would be an unmitigated and wholly intentional disaster.

The most frightening part of the CAB and the NRC is how the BJP keeps lying to us that everything is okay and that there will be no problems. Just like how the Government recently proclaimed that India was open-defecation free. I must have missed something because just this past week, the Government has openly defecated all over our idea of India.

(Writer: Ajoy Kumar; Courtesy: The Pioneer)

While the CAB violates our Constitution, both in letter and in spirit, the NRC, which will follow next, will lead to an unmitigated and wholly intentional disaster

One of the most interesting phrases that I have come across in recent times is “the idea of India.” Popularised by a book with the same name written by Sunil Khilnani, the expression is inclusionary in nature. There is no straightjacket answer as to what constitutes this idea of India. It means different things to different people. My idea of India is the wonderful experiment we undertook when our country was born as a Constitutional democracy. An experiment where we, as Indians, promised ourselves to abide by and stick to the principles of democracy and secularism when the world thought we could not.

When the British thought that India, with its diverse populace and terrain, could never blossom into a secular democratic republic, we promised ourselves that we would not wilt before a majoritarian dictatorship. This past week, we saw a glimmer of that very idea, if only for a fleeting moment. The image of Indian-American economist Abhijit Banerjee and his French-American wife Esther Duflo in traditional Indian attire accepting the Nobel Prize for Economics for their ground-breaking work on how to tackle poverty, showed how no matter where you’re from, if you open your heart to India and show a desire to make the country better, it will open itself to you, too.

This idea of India, however, largely took a beating this past week. As I write this article, both Houses of Parliament have approved the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB). While there’s still no clarity on what the idea of India exactly is, there should be little debate about what it is not. What India is not (or was not) is a country where we treat our very own people as second-class citizens, purely on the basis of religion. What it is not, is a country where we segregate, discriminate and terrify sections of our populace. In a week where the clampdown on the only Muslim majority State in our country went into its fourth month and where the Right-wing BJP Government decided to bulldoze one of the most divisive legislations in recent memory through Parliament, it appears that we have awoken to a different nation altogether.

Amit Shah, the Home Minister of the country, while introducing the CAB, invoked memories of Partition while speaking about the Bill. Partition was one of the bloodiest chapters in Indian history. Even since then arose two nations. One that decided to reject plurality and multiplicity, which eventually took it down a dark and tumultuous path. The other chose to embrace plurality and took the brave decision to make strides towards a hopeful future. However, acts in the past five years have blurred the lines between these two countries. For a party that attacks critics of its rule as sympathisers of Pakistan, it is actually the BJP’s hateful and exclusionary rhetoric that bears an eerie resemblance to the voices that were heard during the birth of Pakistan.

The CAB seeks to amend the Citizenship Act, 1955, and make it easier for non-Muslim immigrants from India’s three Muslim-majority neighbours to become citizens of India. It does so by making it easier for illegal immigrants — Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan — eligible for citizenship of India. Under the Citizenship Act (as it currently stands), one of the requirements is that the applicant must have resided in India for 11 of the past 14 years. The CAB reduces this threshold from 11 to six years for the applicants from the abovementioned religions and regions.

There are many issues with the CAB. For one, if the objective (as is stated) is to protect those who have come to India seeking refuge from religious persecution, then why does the Government only deal with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh? Why has it left out other countries where there is widespread religious persecution? The other problem is that a large number of Muslims are persecuted in these countries, too. For example, the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan. Why then have these sects of Muslims been excluded?

The reason is that the tone, action and agenda of this Government are to divide the country along religious lines, where we start to identify ourselves less as Indians and more with our religion. It was a tactic adopted by the British, too. Many legal luminaries have cogently argued that the CAB violates the right to equality as guaranteed under our Constitution by making religion the basis of citizenship even though the Constitution expressly bars such a distinction. The CAB, therefore, violates our Constitution, both in letter and in spirit.

If the problems ended here, it would have been one thing. But the CAB cannot be treated separately from the National Register of Citizens (NRC). If the CAB tells you about the “what”, as in, what this Bill seeks to do, the NRC answers the “how.” The NRC is a register, which contains the names of all Indian citizens. The process to update the register began in Assam, where the people of the State were required to prove that they were Indian nationals prior to March 24, 1971. Even by conservative estimates, the NRC in Assam has been a disaster. The reason for this is that it requires citizens to prove their citizenship by inter alia providing documents such as refugee registration certificate, birth certificate, LIC policy, land and tenancy records, citizenship certificate, passport, Government-issued licence or certificate and bank/post office accounts among other things.

The people most affected and least likely to be able to provide these documents are the poor. Most have no idea where these documents are. Some in Assam had to go to their villages to try and obtain them from the local authorities. There have been reports of widespread corruption, where bribes are often taken to provide these documents. And if people have the right documents, bribes are still to be paid to ensure that the officials actually accept the documents. For anyone who has dealt with a public official in India, this will hardly be surprising.

Such discrimination is also due to inefficient implementation. The people left reeling with this awfully inept and horrendously organised process have been the poor, Muslims and Hindus alike. Writing for a leading newspaper, Shruti Rajagopalan had talked about the sheer magnitude of the errors in the NRC if implemented all over the country. For example, if the Government executes the NRC all over India exceptionally well and has an error rate of just five per cent, 67.5 million people will face action, which would equal the human displacement caused by World War II. What is frightening still, as Rajagopalan says, is that if we outsource the execution to an organisation with a very low error rate of one per cent (such as that of Scandinavian countries), 13.5 million Indians would still be erroneously excluded. This number would equal the human displacement caused due to Partition. It would be an unmitigated and wholly intentional disaster.

The most frightening part of the CAB and the NRC is how the BJP keeps lying to us that everything is okay and that there will be no problems. Just like how the Government recently proclaimed that India was open-defecation free. I must have missed something because just this past week, the Government has openly defecated all over our idea of India.

(Writer: Ajoy Kumar; Courtesy: The Pioneer)