CAA-NPR-NRC: Will they affect you?

I. The biggest issue of our time

Like most Bengali Hindu women of her time, my mother used to sit before an assortment of Gods at a corner of her room every morning after taking bath. She would quietly pray for some time. Every Thursday, she would perform Laxmi Puja by reading out a prayer book in a sing-song voice. Interestingly, one of the Gods in her collection was an image of Jesus Christ with a crown of thorns. She would also visit the nearby Kalighat temple whenever she could.

I wonder what my mother would have felt if someone asked her, ‘Prove that you are a Hindu.’ 

I believe she wouldn’t have had an answer. Now that the government is going to ask you and me ‘Prove that you are an Indian,’ how do you feel?

The biggest irony of our time is that while

• The economy has come down from nearly 8% to 4.5% within a year in December 2019*, 
• Unemployment is at a 45-year high, and 
• The sanctioned budget for school education is being cut by ₹3,000 crore because of funds crunch, 

the Indian government is spending almost its entire energy on preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC). And to do this, they are going to tell each one of us, ‘Prove that you are an Indian!’

What is the purpose of an NRC? Is it really necessary? How exactly will it be done? What will be its impact on you and me?

Let’s try to find answers to these questions.

[* The actual may be much lower, as low as 2 to 2.5% as stated by respected economists like Arvind Subramanian, the former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India.]

II. CAB-CAA-NPR-NRC: An alphabet soup

Let’s begin on 9 December 2019 (Monday), when the Home Minister of India, Amit Shah tabled a Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) in the Lok Sabha. This bill was to modify an earlier Citizenship Act of 1955. Lok Sabha passed the new bill next day. The Rajya Sabha approved it on the 11th and the President signed it on 12 December (Thursday) late in the evening. With his signature, the CAB became CAA, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Therefore, in just four days and almost without any debate in Parliament or outside, the government steamrolled the CAA, which, if implemented, is going to change India forever. I shall come back to the CAA in a moment.

Besides the CAA, the government also wants to prepare a National Population Register (NPR) in 2020. That isn’t new either. The earlier UPA government considered the idea, but didn’t implement it. Instead, after a lot of debate, it went for AADHAAR, which even the BJP government has certified to be foolproof. Therefore, we already have a “national population register” though in a different name. So, why does the government need one more?

Finally, the National Register of Citizens (NRC). For the state of Assam, an NRC was published on 31 August 2019 after five years of mammoth exercise. Through it, out of Assam’s 3 crore people, 19 lakhs were found to be “non-citizens”.

Let’s note that the central government wants to do the NRC exercise for the entire country, including Assam all over again. The Home Minister has announced it in the Parliament and elsewhere repeatedly. From videos available on YouTube, we see the Home Minister assert the following:

• “Chronology to samjhiye (Understand the chronology).” And the sequence, according to him is: CAA will come first and then the NRC.  
• NRC will be done before 2024 for the entire country.

CAB became CAA before the people of India could realise what was happening. But as soon as they did, a huge spontaneous uprising began. Nothing like this massive agitation has been seen since independence and the protests are on. In response, at a rally in New Delhi Ramleela Maidan on 22 December, Prime Minister Modi claimed, with mind-boggling dishonesty:

“I want to tell the 130 crore people of India that ever since my government came to power in 2014... from then until now... there has been no discussion on NRC anywhere... we only had to implement it in Assam to follow Supreme Court directives.” [India Today] 

However, the government hasn’t withdrawn NRC and NPR. Until that happens and until the government repeals the CAA, it remains valid and legally binding. The following pages will answer two questions:

    A. How are CAA-NPR-NRC connected?
    B. What will be their impact on us, the ordinary citizens of India?

III. What does CAA mean?

Basically, the CAA offers a path to Indian citizenship for some refugees in India. But the path is not open to all refugees. CAA will cover

 Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian minorities
 Who lived in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan,
 Who were treated badly because of their religion, and
 Who were forced to come to India before December 2014.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan are all Muslim majority countries. The Indian government says that the new Act is an act of kindness for the suffering minorities there. The Indian government just wants to give them shelter. The new law – the government now says – will not affect citizens of India, including Muslims. What the government doesn’t say is that they themselves are going to decide who are “citizens of India”.

The problem with CAA is not what it covers, but what it doesn’t. The government doesn’t answer why it didn’t include our other neighbours, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Nepal in the Act. Also, there are lakhs of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka and Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar in India today. They have been left out of CAA.

The more glaring exclusion in the Act is that it covers all the religions practised in the subcontinent except Islam. This is the first time in independent India when religion is being used as a marker for citizenship. The law hits our country at a fundamental level. It damages the secular character of our country, which the Indian Constitution mandates.

Let’s now see how many people will benefit from CAA. According to an estimate prepared by the Intelligence Bureau of India, immediate beneficiaries of will be only 31,313 refugees: 25,447 Hindus, 5,807 Sikhs, 55 Christians, 2 Buddhists and 2 Parsis. [The Telegraph]

Also, on 19 January 2020 Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in Chennai that in the last six years, 2838 Pakistani, 914 Afghan, and 172 Bangladeshi refugees have been given Indian citizenship. Between 1968 and 2008, more than four lakh Tamils from Sri Lanka were given citizenship. [Times of India]

Therefore, the existing laws are good enough to grant citizenship to people who the government chooses. Clearly, we do not need a new law and such huge efforts and expenditure to grant citizenship to just 31,313 people. Let’s now try to understand why our ruling party is so desperate to introduce the new law.

The BJP argues that Muslim refugees have many Muslim countries to go to, but Hindus have only India. Therefore, they claim that CAA has been designed to protect non-Muslim refugees. This argument is flawed for two reasons.

First, Muslim refugees, say poor Rohingyas running away from certain death in Myanmar, with a just a bundle on their head, cannot be expected to charter an aircraft and fly to Pakistan or Iran.

More importantly, India is NOT a Hindu country. Pakistan was created as a Muslim nation, where people of every other faith were second-class citizens.

On the contrary, India chose a secular democratic path where every religion and language community was equal before the law. Please allow me to move away from CAA for a minute and glance through the comparative histories of Pakistan and India since 1947.

India has taken big strides in agriculture, science, technology, medical research, education, and gender equality (today, Indian women compete with men in every sphere and often outperform them). However, Pakistan has fallen far behind in each of the above areas. Besides, thanks to the persecution of Bengalis in East Pakistan, Pakistan broke into two countries in 1971 after tremendous bloodshed and suffering. Socially and economically, what survives as Pakistan is often referred to as a basket case or a failed state.

It’s important to understand the contrast between India and Pakistan because the Indian government today is about to take certain steps which look exactly like what Pakistan did in 1947.

IV. NRC, a time bomb ticking

As I have said, National Register of Citizens was prepared in Assam in 2019 after five years of war-like efforts. Through this exercise, out of 300 lakh people in Assam, 19 lakh couldn’t prove their citizenship (6 out of every 100 people). What happens to them?

The question of sending them to another country doesn’t arise. For a fact, they will lose their voting rights. They will also lose their jobs and properties. And they will be sent to detention centres. Many “non-citizens” are already in six detention camps set up within jails in Assam.

Bigger detention camps are under construction. Although the prime minister categorically denied it during his now infamous 22nd December Ramleela Maidan speech, investigations by journalists show that this claim was a blatant lie. For example, a report by India Today TV on 26 January showed that at Matia, in Goalpara District of Assam, a massive detention camp is under construction at a cost of ₹46 crore. It will have the capacity to hold 3,000 people. [India Today TV] 

Detention Centre under construction in Goalpara District, Assam [India Today]

If this doesn’t remind us of Nazi Germany, what will?

Let’s now move on to how the so-called “non-citizens” are identified. Even in the case of a murder, the accused is considered innocent until proven guilty. Proving guilt is the state’s responsibility. However, in Assam the “Supreme Court turned around the burden of truth and made it the responsibility of the common man to furnish the proof of his citizenship. He was looked upon as a foreigner until he proved his citizenship.” [Harsh Mander (Former IAS Officer and Activist) in Frontline]

The government spent over five years and reportedly, Rs.1,600 crores to complete NRC in Assam. But the people of the state have paid a much bigger price. Harsh Mander writes they were forced to run around for documents of land, birth and school certificates, and voters’ lists to prove that their parents and they were citizens of India. “If they failed, they ran the risk of being lodged for years in detention centres …, separated from their families, and threatened with deportation.” [Indian Express]

So, the poor desperately sold all their belongings and engaged expensive lawyers and had to deal with hostile and corrupt officials. The designated offices were often far away, which they had to visit multiple times, foregoing their daily work and income. They were often sent back for petty reasons, as it happens in government offices everywhere. In the end, three kinds of people were not able to prove their citizenship.

1. Actual refugees who came in after the declared cut-off date
2. Extremely poor Indians who have no documents, and little else
3. Citizens who had minor discrepancies in their documents, for example, different English spellings of their name in two documents, say a land record and the voter’s ID. 

People have been put in detention centres for years. To quote Harsh Mander again:
The detention centres are like a jail within a jail. They do not even have the usual provisions of jails …. In a jail you can meet family once a week. Not so here. They do not have the right to work, right to parole, the families are separated, the husband in one jail, the wife in another, the children outside. [Frontline]

I would request that before you read ahead, please close your eyes and imagine the enormous suffering of such a family.

However, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP governments in New Delhi and Guwahati are not concerned with such minor issues. What put them in a fix was the religious backgrounds of the “non-citizens”. The exact figure is not known, but on 11 December, when the CAB had been tabled in the Parliament, the Times of India reported: “Five lakh Bengali Hindu NRC rejects will get citizenship. ” The report quoted the BJP chief minister of Assam Sarbananda Sonowal say,
“These people need to apply first… Then their applications will be assessed before they are granted citizenship. We expect to complete the process and give them citizenship before the next assembly elections in 2021.”

So, the cat is out of the bag. The CAA was required because BJP had to play the Hindu card and discriminate against “others”, and through this, find a way to rule over India for 50 years, as the BJP President Amit Shah grandly announced in 2019.

To put it simply,

1. CAA became necessary because the BJP was trapped; Contrary to their expectations, Assam NRC has turned a huge number of Hindus into illegal migrants. 
2. They are going to grant citizenship to the Hindu refugees using CAA, and showcase it in the rest of the country to divide the people along religious lines.
3. They would make the CAA-NRC their main plank in West Bengal election in 2021, which they hope to win by dividing people, and later, go for an all-India NRC.
4. If they are able to exclude say, a few crore of Muslims through the process, and make them non-voters, BJP will be able to lord over the country for decades to come. 

This, Dear Reader, is the real agenda behind CAA and NRC.

V. NPR: A road to NRC

The National Population Register (NPR) the government has planned now will be more detailed compared to AADHAAR or the earlier (abandoned) NPR. In the earlier NPR, which was discarded by the UPA government in favour of AADHAAR, some information was to be collected, like your name, sex, date of birth, marital status, occupation / activity, names of parents and spouse, place of birth, present and permanent addresses, and nationality.

In the new NPR, the government will ask each one of us to submit the following information too:
1. AADHAAR No. (Voluntary)
2. Mobile No.
3. Date & Place of Birth of Parents
4. Place of Last Residence
5. Passport No.
6. Voter ID Card No.
7. [Income Tax] Permanent Account No.
8. Driving License No.

The third element on the list is Date & Place of Birth of Parents. How many of us can provide this information? In India, crores of people don’t even know their own date of birth, how will they find out their parents’ date and place of birth? And what documents will they provide in support of their claim?

According to National Citizenship Act, 2003 passed by the Vajpayee government, government officials will go from door to door to collect information from people to prepare the NPR. They will return to their office and feed the data into their computers.

For NRC, government will not have to collect data afresh. The NPR data can be easily used for NRC as all the information will be digitised (that is, on computers). From that, the government will be able to prepare a list of D-voters, that is, “doubtful voters”, as in Assam. You and I will have no control on whether we will be marked as a D-voter. Sarkari babus will decide our fate.

Then the real harassment will begin. The government will summon whoever they have chosen to identify as a D-voter and demand from them documents to prove their citizenship. Curiously, the government has not yet found the time to clarify what documents will prove citizenship. In an interview however, the Home Minister said, AADHAAR is no proof of citizenship. We have also heard government sources saying passport is no proof of citizenship, it is only a travel document! Wah Bhai Wah!

For anyone among us who has obtained a voter card, passport, driving license, or even a ration card, we know how difficult and humiliating the process is. And how much money goes into the pockets of corrupt officials in the process. There’s little doubt that countless sarkari babus will become enormously rich if NRC is done.

On the other hand, ordinary people will not only go through tremendous mental stress, they will also have to spend their life’s savings and/or sell whatever they have or to get another piece of paper called the National Identity Card, over and above their voter ID, AADHAR, and ration card.

There are millions of exceedingly poor people in India, like Adivasis, who have no papers at all. I personally knew a girl from Chhattisgarh who couldn’t even travel by train as she had no ID card. She is not alone. There are millions like her. What will happen to them? Can we even imagine the scale of disruption to our life?

Let’s now move on to the cost of preparing an all-India NRC. Using the data from Assam, NDTV calculated that for each person, NRC cost ₹399. Therefore, for 137 crore people, the total cost will work out to ₹54,663 crore. Does the government have the right to spend such a colossal amount for something that will bring no benefit to the country?

Naturally, people are asking, since we have AADHAAR and Voter’s ID, what is the need for another card as all the information about people is already available with the government?

Finally, think of the government which seriously hates anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Their hatred for Muslims, Christians, and ordinary people who criticise them is well-known. Will it be too fanciful to suggest that the BJP is trying to carry out this disruptive process just to mark a large number of minorities and people who oppose them, and take away their voting rights?

To sum up,

• CAA is discriminatory against Muslims to begin with. CAA can be used against others too, if the government wishes.
• It changes the democratic structure of the country.
• NPR is only a trick to collect information from citizens that can be used to prepare NRC.
• NRC will be used to take away voting right of people who are likely to oppose BJP in future elections, so that BJP can rule over us for eternity.

Please think. Should we remain silent spectators to the trickery of the present government to divide Indians vertically among Hindus and Muslims? Should we allow the government to carry out its evil design to turn Muslims into second-class citizens? Hasn’t Pakistan already put similar discriminatory laws into practice showed their results?

We must resist the plan to turn India into a Hindu Pakistan with all our might. 

[The cartoon is Mumbai based artist Abhinav Kafare's brilliant take on the situation of India today]