Damocles sword hangs over the citizenry

Undeterred by the suffering caused by the process of updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC) undertaken in Assam, the Narendra Modi administration is pressing ahead with plans to repeat the exercise all over India.

The Citizenship Amendment Bill, moved by Home Minister Amit Shah in the Lok Sabha on Monday, is the first step in that direction.

If passed into law, it will pave the way for India’s transformation into a Hindu Rashtra (nation), bypassing the commitment to secularism in the Constitution.

The bill seeks to amend the Citizenship Act to empower the government to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from the neighbouring Muslim countries of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Act, as it now stands, makes no reference to any religion. The new measure seeks to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christians from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who had entered India illegally if they have been living here for six years.

The list of beneficiary communities makes it clear that the objective is to exclude Muslims. The Bharatiya Janata Party claims the bill has been designed to help minorities facing persecution in neighbouring countries.

Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar are the worst persecuted minority in India’s neighbourhood at present. They are excluded. In fact, India has been deporting Rohingya refugees.

While announcing the proposal to extend the NRC scheme, devised to deal with large-scale illegal immigration into Assam from erstwhile East Pakistan, Amit Shah had set the election year of 2024 as the deadline for completion of the process nationwide.

It indicated that the BJP views the NRC exercise as a means of polarising the entire country on religious lines for electoral gains.

Assam’s NRC was prepared during the 1951 census. It resulted in the division of the state’s population into two categories: Indian citizens and illegal immigrants.

Demographic changes resulting from the waves of migration that followed Partition and the Pakistan army crackdown on East Pakistan engendered fears in Assamese minds of being reduced to a minority in their own homeland.

The Assam Accord of 1985 signed by the state government with the All Assam Students Union and the All Assam Gana Sangram Paishad, which had conducted a protracted agitation on the issue of illegal immigration, provided for revision of the NRC and expulsion of those identified as illegal immigrants.

At that stage illegal immigration was essentially an Assamese-Bengali issue. The BJP turned it into a Hindu-Muslim issue and earned electoral dividends.

The predominantly tribal Northeastern states, several of them with large Christian populations, have also voiced concern over illegal immigration. There, too, the issue is not one of religion: it is tribal vs non-tribal.  

When NRC revision in Assam was completed last August, the BJP voiced dissatisfaction over the inclusion of many Muslims in it and the exclusion of many Hindus, confirming its communal approach to the issue.

Those who failed to qualify as citizens are now being held in detention camps in the state. The national NRC is sure to lead to such camps in other states, too, as it will not be possible to deport the alleged illegal immigrants to any country.

The Assam NRC exercise was overseen by an officer appointed by the Supreme Court. When it is extended nationwide the Modi government will have the opportunity to pick officers to do the job.

India’s Muslim population, which stood at over 172 million at the last census in 2011, is the world’s third largest after those of Indonesia and Pakistan. It constituted 14.2 per cent of India’s total.

The nationwide NRC project is a veritable Sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of all citizens, especially the largest minorities.

Given the communal orientation of the political leadership in many states and the corrupt disposition of officials, the NRC exercise has the potential to harass all citizens, not merely those belonging to minority communities, by simply calling for the birth certificates and marriage certificates of parents and grandparents, which they may be unable to locate.

Several opposition parties and almost the entire civil society have objected to the bill as it violates the Constitutional provision barring discrimination on grounds of religion.

The BJP has the numbers to ensure the passage of the bill in the Lok Sabha. Although it lacks a majority in the Rajya Sabha, it may be able to hustle the measure through that house too by working out deals with leaders of small parties. But it will still have to contend with the Judiciary and enlightened public opinion.