On November 20, Home Minister Amit Shah said the government intends to launch a nationwide National Registry of Citizens (NRC), an ambitious exercise to identify and separate legal citizens and illegal immigrants. Residents will have to produce proof confirming that they were born in India and that their parents were Indian citizens.
The BJP’s intention behind this exercise needs a closer scrutiny. It is important to note that issues like building a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya had increased the party’s popularity and expanded its voter base. The party had promised a countrywide NRC in its manifesto for 2019 elections. According to political observers, the rhetoric of eliminating these immigrants who are mostly Muslims could be music to the ears of BJP’s hard fans. The influx of illegal immigrants to India, especially in states such as Assam, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, is a grave concern. A large number of these illegal immigrants reside under a fake identity and many have allegedly become core vote banks for a few political parties. Immediately after the home minister’s statement, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had vehemently opposed any such move in her state. “No one could take anyone's citizenship away in Bengal,” she had said. But can an all-India NRC address this complex issue?
Amit Shah assured that all citizens of India irrespective of religion will figure in the NRC list and that NRC is different from the Citizenship Amendment Bill. "NRC has no such provision which says that certain religions will be excluded from it. All citizens of India irrespective of religion will figure in the NRC list. The NRC is different from Citizenship Amendment Bill," Amit Shah said in his address to the Rajya Sabha. He added, "The process of NRC will be carried out across the country. No one, irrespective of religion should be worried, it is just a process to get everyone under the NRC."
NRC and CAB backers say illegal Muslim settlers have been steadily expanding their footprint across the country. One unofficial estimate puts the number of Rohingya and Bangladeshi Muslims in Jammu alone at 50,000, their numbers having built up over the past decade with the blessings of local politicians, including some from the BJP. Another case is that of about 750 Rohingyas illicitly running a madrasa in Aligarh. They reportedly arrived in Delhi via Kolkata in 2012, and proceeded to Aligarh, where the Deoband network allegedly helped them settle down.
One view is that the BJP brought CAB to accommodate Hindu and other non-Muslim migrants who fled Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan due to religious persecution, as against Muslim migrants who infiltrated due to economic reasons. Proponents of this view claim pro-Muslim parties and organisations have launched a two-pronged attack to serve their constituency - on the one hand, criticise NRC in an attempt to prevent it from weeding out Muslim infiltrators, and on the other, build pressure on the Modi government to add Muslims to the list of refugees from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who will be eligible for Indian citizenship under CAB.
NRC backers feel that the Narendra Modi government is rectifying a 'historical wrong' through this exercise. To them, the genesis of NRC is not in communal politics, but in the vote-bank politics of Congress regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, which compromised both the interests of indigenous people in Assam as well as national security. Congress politicians are accused of looking the other way when leaders of pan-Islamist movements were welcoming illegal Muslim settlers to Assam and helping them settle down.
However, observers feel that the home minister's assertion that the NRC exercise will be completed before the 2024 Lok Sabha election and all illegal settlers will be expelled from the country is in variance with the situation on the ground. A credible pan-India NRC exercise will require honest police and administrative officials on a wide scale so that the infiltrators are identified. That a high number of illegal migrants have managed to obtain crucial government identification documents, such as Aadhaar and voter cards, as well electricity and cooking gas connections, with the help of conniving officials shows how porous the system is. At the same time, feel the observers, scores of Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, who settled in Assam, did not get such assistance and landed in trouble during the NRC exercise in the state. The estimated 1.9 million people excluded from the NRC list include a high number of Hindus. This has prompted the Assam unit of the BJP to demand a fresh NRC in the state.
An uphill task
Its difficult to implement the entire exercise with a population of 1.25 billion people of which 700 to 800 million people may not even have birth certificates. By a mere administrative exercise, one cannot come to a definitive finding that somebody is not a citizen. The exercise will end up with a lot of undocumented inhabitants. It doesn’t help that previous such nationwide exercises by the government have turned out to be damp squibs. The adverse aftermath of demonetisation is still being debated with lack of data to prove if it actually curbed black money. Similarly, the goods and services tax is being blamed for destabilising the unorganised sector.
Likewise, the implementation of NRC in Assam was nothing short of a disaster. There are claims that many illegal residents have been included in the list and several indigenous residents have been kept out. There have also been cases where a brother finds his name on the list but his siblings are kept out, or a father makes it to the list but his children don’t. A pan-India registry would be an entirely different exercise than the Assam NRC which was just an update on the 1951 citizens’ list. According to the information shared by Indian Civil Liberties Union, in a pan-India NRC exercise, those born before 1987 will have to show that they were born in India before July 1987. Those born after July 1987 but before December 2004 will have to prove two things: a) they were born in India, and b) proof that either of their parents are/were Indian citizens. Those born after 2004 will have to prove that both their parents are Indian citizens. In case their parents have different nationalities, they will need to prove that one of the parents is Indian citizen and the other parent is not an illegal immigrant.
The govt's NRC game plan
Proving someone an illegal immigrant could, therefore, be a lengthy process. And the questions don’t end here. “What will the government do with the identified illegal immigrants?” asks foreign affairs expert Sushant Sareen. “Supposedly, you identify 20 million people as illegal immigrants across India, where will the government deport these people? Will any country voluntarily or willingly accept such a huge number? Will the government put 20 million people in detention centres? Who will bear the cost of running these detention centres?” asks Sareen. Given the challenges to this perceivable mammoth exercise and the uncertain outcome, many suspect the ruling party’s intention behind announcing a nationwide NRC by 2024.
Responding to such fears, the home minister had clarified in the Rajya Sabha that a pan-India NRC will not target any particular religion. But critics refuse to trust Shah’s assurance.
Call for free and open debate
The government is planning to update the National Population Register (NPR) by September 2020. Once the NPR is completed and published, it is expected to be the basis for preparing the National Register of Indian Citizens. Activists demand that the government must conduct a free and open debate in Parliament before launching a nationwide NRC. Says Civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad: “Citizenship in India is based on the non-negotiable principles of equality and non-discrimination. Moreover, there are clear constitutional and legal bindings. This government, therefore, needs to answer a) if the NRC exercise will be an inclusive constitutional process b) what will be the criteria for being registered (included) or left out (excluded) from the NPR process which will precede the NRC and lead to it. What are the documents that will be required? c) What will be the cut-off date?”
Setalvad further highlights the problem of undocumented genuine Indians who might become the first casualties of NRC. “UNICEF figures point to the fact that only 52 per cent births are registered in India. Not all Indians have a passport, many don’t own land, there is a huge migrant labour population across the country who don’t have basic voting rights even after 70 years of independence, and only 240 million people have homes in their own name,” Setalvad pointed out. She says the government must publicly and rationally debate these issues in Parliament before rolling out NRC across India. “In Assam, several marginalised sections, Bengali Hindus as much as Muslims were deliberately kept out,” she noted.
In a survey conducted by the Rights and Risks Analysis Group, it was found that in Assam, each person excluded from the list spent Rs 19,065 on an average to challenge their exclusion before Foreigners' Tribunals. The Assam NRC has reportedly cost the exchequer about £160 million for a population of 32.9 million. Imagine the financial burden on the taxpayer for 1.3 billion people. With the government struggling to meet its committed expenditures, is there room to spend millions on an exercise that may only lead to further chaos? Or is this just another divisive propaganda aimed at the 2024 elections?
NRC & CAB two sides of the same coin: Mamata Banerjee
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) are two sides of the same coin and the Trinamool Congress will oppose it till the end. Speaking at a party programme in Kolkata, Mamata said the NRC and CAB were being taken up by the Centre to divert attention of the people from the economic slowdown. “If you give citizenship to all the communities, we will accept it. But if you discriminate on the basis of religion, we will oppose it and also fight against it,” the chief minister said.
CAB, NRC will divide nation in the name of religion: Protestors
The silent protest under the banner of ‘Citizens against NRC and CAB’ witnessed a huge gathering in Hyderabad demanding the Central government to withdraw the bills. The protestors also demanded that TRS and other political parties, who believe in the Constitution should oppose the bills in the parliament. Expressing unhappiness about both the bills, Kiran Kumar, president of Rythu Swarajya Vedika, said “The CAB is a discriminatory bill. It is for the first time that a religious element is being introduced in India’s citizenship law. Under the garb of saving people suffering from religious persecution, the government is doing sinister things. There are existing laws for giving citizenship status and what is need for new bills for selective religions only,” he wondered.
Talking about the NRC, he said the bill will make life of poor people difficult, as they do not have land in their name and will be difficult for them to produce documents. Calling the CAB bill anti-nation, the protestors claimed that the bill would divide the nation. “These bills will do no good to the nation. They will divide the country in the name of religion,” said J Jamel, Prof-emeritus, OU. Many critics also see both the bills as part of the ruling BJP’s vote bank politics. Calling CAB a communal bill, Raj Janagam (31), a social entrepreneur, said “If the bill becomes reality our country will not remain secular anymore. Even if NRC gets implemented across India, it will require honest police, a huge number of officials to identify the infiltrators, which we do not have. It will only add to another 20 years of conflict,’’ he said.
As of now, the NRC has been implemented in Assam. However, the Home Minister said that the Centre will implement both NRC and CAB across the country by 2024. The estimated 1.9 million people excluded from the NRC list include a more number of Hindus.
