By Faheem Muhammed
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint
-W.H. Auden, The Unknown Citizen
The opening lines of the poem The Unknown Citizen contain a significant message for a society where the state holds the power to control, manipulate and define its people. Further, it explicates and contextualizes a state which shows negligence to ‘individuality’ and humanitarian values. It is a state that reduces people to numbers, elucidating its overt strategies to control and manipulate populations. This is the Indian state.
The north-eastern state of Assam’s final draft of India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) materialized in this overt context. On August 31, the register excluded nearly 2 million people from a citizenship list. The process of creating a National Register of Citizens in Assam has become a disaster rather than a solution for decades-old conflicts in the region. The NRC is a register which contains the names of (supposedly) all Indian citizens residing in Assam. It is prepared after the conduct of the Census of 1951, in respect of each village showing the houses or holdings in serial order and indicating against each house or holding, the number, and names of people staying therein. The NRC is updated periodically, which is the process of enlisting the names of citizens based on Electoral Rolls up to 1971 and 1951 NRC. These registers covered every person enumerated during the Census of 1951 and were kept in the offices of Deputy Commissioners and Sub Divisional Officers according to instructions issued by the Government of India in 1951. In the early 1960s, these registers were transferred to the police.
The updating process of NRC started in the year 2013 under the strict monitoring of the Supreme Court of India. In the midnight of 31 December 2017, the Part Draft NRC was released and subsequently on 30 July 2018, the Complete Draft NRC was released. Assam hit the headlines after its NRC updated the electoral rolls with four million people missing. This raised questions on the lucidity and impartiality of democracy, as it is a clear picture of political gambling by Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Later on, the state finalized another list of the register on 31 August 2019. Altogether, 19.06 lakh* of the total of 3.30 crore* applicants have been excluded from the final list. The excluded allegedly failed to ‘prove residency’ in the state or anywhere in India before March 24, 1971.
To rob people of their identities and render them stateless is a gross violation of their fundamental rights.
The people left out of the updated NRC are both ethnic minorities and majorities, including Hindu Bengalis, Bengali Muslims, Gorkhas, Dalits, Adivasis, and even Assamese-speaking persons (whom presumably, should bear proof of residency through their native tongue). The Narendra Modi-led government has promised to bring the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill to grant citizenship to Hindu and non-Muslim migrants – an important specification. The government claims it wants to detect and deport ‘undocumented immigrants’ from Bangladesh. The Home Minister Amit Shah is the first politician to refer to the alleged undocumented migrants, many of whom are Bengali-speaking Muslims, as ‘termites’. He said, “It is our commitment to bring in NRC across the country to chuck out every infiltrator.”
The final draft of NRC has brought into limelight the perimeters of the nation-state system and how state defines and constructs ‘citizenship’ and ‘citizens’ respectively.
The nineteen lakhs of people who disappeared from the registers are a paradigm of how the state is involved in the inclusion and exclusion of identities - especially when a majority of the excluded are historically marginalized communities of Dalits and Muslims. The government says those who do not find their names on the final list will be allowed to prove their citizenship first in quasi-judicial courts - known as Foreign Tribunals (FT) - and subsequently in higher courts. Those excluded would not be considered foreigners until they exhaust all their legal options. If they are declared foreigners by the FTs, they would be imprisoned in the detention centres. Besides these narratives, it is evident that the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization backed by the BJP), and the right-wing coalition of the National Democratic Alliance, has used the process to step up their divisive communal agendas.
It should be mentioned that India’s biggest detention centre is being built at Matia, Goalpara district of Assam. Those who fail to prove their claims in the FTs will be detained here. The camp will host almost 3000 detainees at a time. Assam currently has six detention centres - the government is planning for ten more in the state. The central government has backed the plan with an aid of 46 crore rupees. Those excluded from the NRC are worried about how they will be treated at the new detention centers. The Joint Forum against NRC has called upon the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, the Union, and Assam State Governments, the Indian Parliament and the Assam State Assembly to intervene immediately to stop this cruel, anti-democratic exercise of mass persecution and initiate the process of granting Indian citizenship to all the 19 lakh plus NRC-excluded persons, irrespective of religion, language, caste, and creed.
The plan to implement the NRC nation widely has brought fear among minority communities. They feel that their lives are no safer as their identity. In this context, there should be genuine and meaningful interventions from the national and international key players including legislators, bureaucrats, and the judiciary to safeguard the democratic rights of these individuals to live with dignity. Lastly, we must ask and answer, who are these people (the RSS and Hindu nationalist organizations) to define or to rob one’s identity?
*Lakh: a measurement widely used in India referring to a hundred thousand.
*Crore: a measurement widely used in India referring to ten million, or one hundred lakhs.
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