My observations on NRC (National Register of Citizens)

Back with another post again. The motivation for writing this comes from the on going violent protests across the county and the fear of a few of my friends who're worried about the CAB and NRC both being implemented together and the ramifications of it on them and others like them.

I spoke about the CAB in my last post so will just talk about the NRC for now.

So what is the NRC?

At its core, the NRC (National Register of Citizens) is an official record of those who are legal INDIAN citizens. It includes demographic information about all those individuals who qualify as citizens of INDIA as per the Citizenship Act, 1955. The register was first prepared after the 1951 Census of INDIA and since then it has not been updated until recently.

So far, such a database has only been maintained for the state of Assam. However, on November 20, Home Minister declared during a parliamentary session that the register would be extended to the entire country.

Who is a citizen of INDIA?

As per the Citizenship Act, 1955, every person born in INDIA:

(a) on or after the 26th day of January 1950, but before the 1st day of July 1987; 

(b) on or after the 1st day of July 1987, but before the commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003 and either of whose parents is a citizen of INDIA at the time of his birth;

(c) on or after the commencement of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, where-

(i) both of his parents are citizens of INDIA; or

(ii) one of whose parents is a citizen of INDIA and the other is not an illegal migrant at the time of his birth, shall be a citizen of INDIA by birth.

What happens if you're not able to prove your citizenship?

"Non-inclusion of a person's name in the NRC does not by itself amount to him/her being declared a foreigner," govt has said. Such individuals will have the option to present their case before foreigners' tribunals. 

If one loses the case in the tribunal, the person can move the high court and, then, the Supreme Court. 

In the case of Assam, the state government has clarified it will not detain any individual until he/she is declared a foreigner by the foreigners' tribunal.

What is the confusion and what is the fear?

There is a huge misconception being spread about NRC. People feel that it targets only the Muslims which is entirely wrong. The anti social elements spreading this fake news have largely succeeded in spreading their propaganda if you see the amount of protests happening around the country. 

First of all NRC is not for Muslims alone as is evident by the results in Assam. Out of the 1.9 million left out of the NRC over half of the people are Hindus so please remove this misconception out of your heads. People say that the Hindus and other minorities left out of the NRC can still get citizenship through the CAB. True, But provided they are from those three countries mentioned in the CAB. If at all the NRC is applied across the country then not just Muslims but people from other faiths will also have to provide proof of their citizenship. Many of them would be unable to find enough documents to prove citizenship. With so many youngsters born after 1971, how can they prove they lived in INDIA before 1971? By confirming, both parents lived in INDIA before 1971. How can parents confirm they lived in INDIA before 1971? By giving their Birth certificates and some documentary evidence that their parents lived in INDIA before 1971. And then one has to establish lineage from grand parents (on both sides) to parents and from parents to oneself. Is this reasonable? 

People move. They migrate from one state to another. Disasters destroy their documents. Who can unearth these at least 70–80 year old documents? Even the government doesn't have a record of all of the citizens for verification. What about children who were orphans? Or whose parents or grandparents were uneducated and did not have any documents? People who feel or are being led to believe that only the Muslims do not have documents are highly mistaken. Any person irrespective of his/her religion who does not have a document is stateless according to the NRC and the CAA will not help such people (Muslims or non Muslims) who were always in INDIA if they failed to provide their documents. The CAA is only applicable for people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. So If I as a Hindu would fail to furnish my documents or make it into the NRC then the CAA would not help me at all since I did not migrate from those 3 countries. I would be stateless too. (There is every chance that CAB could be misused to provide backdoor entry to non Muslims who fail NRC. But that is still debatable as the Supreme court will not let that happen.) 

A humble request to everyone to please do your due diligence and stop panicking or believing or spreading rumors.

My view on Detention centers or Concentration camps.

As I write this post there are detention camps being constructed across the country (if I am not wrong) to house these so called foreigners or illegal immigrants or infiltrators. The first one in Assam has been completed with a cost of 46 crores or half a billion in INDIAN rupees or close to 7 million USD. This detention center can house around 3000 people. Over 1.9 million people in Assam have not been able to prove their INDIAN citizenship and have been left out of the NRC. So you can do the Math and see how much the government will have to spend in constructing the detention centers in Assam alone. And this is the tax payers money we're talking about. Multiply this amount with the number of people left out in the NRC if it were to be applied across the country. The numbers would be mind blowing. 1.9 million from the small state of Assam and if you see the way they've done the verification then nearly half of INDIA's population will be left out of NRC. Is this even practical Mr. Home Minister?

Some section of the media and the people are even celebrating the idea of having these detention centers. They're convinced that it is in the National interest to keep these people confined. The level of brainwashing that the media and the folks in the government do is quite amazing. People don't even think about asking basic questions like 

1. How are we going to fund these detention centers? (Not just the infrastructure but their maintenance?)

2. We don't even have adequate amount of prisons to house the criminals then how do we plan to create these concentration camps across the country to detain the millions of people who will fail to find their place in the NRC?

3. What about documents of those tribal communities where people don't even know about a single document, those nomads, those laborers who don't have a proof of their ancestry?

4. How many government officials will be needed to implement this across the country? Don't they have other work to do? (Yeah. I know they hardly do any work.)

5. Imagine there are close to 3 crore illegal immigrants currently in the country, roughly around 2.5% of our population. Is it fair to make 1.3 billion people stand in long queues just to undergo citizenship test for finding 2.3% illegal migrants? That also in a country which has majority of the population which is semi literate and for whom even getting two times food is a big achievement. INDIA lacks the state capacity to undertake this process in a humane manner.

6. How many people would be housed in these concentration camps and how many camps would we need per state? (Just going by the number in Assam, if you do the Math, the first detention center cost around 46 crores to house 3000 people. Divide 1.9 million by 3k and you get roughly 633 detention centers and now multiply that by 46 crores. You get roughly around 29k crores which is around 4.5 billion USD and this is just for the state of Assam. Thats somewhere around the entire budget of ISRO. Apply it across INDIA and the amount will even dwarf our annual spending for Education and other sectors.)

7. How long do you intend to keep these so called illegal immigrants if the countries fail to accept them? Are you just going to keep running these detention centers forever? Or are you going to throw these people into the sea or shoot them? Has this even been thought of?

Imagine spending this much amount in just building concentration camps like the Nazis when you can spend it on building up our crippling infrastructure and eradicating hunger and poverty. The same amount could be used to improve the conditions of ours schools and hospitals, to improve our education sector, to generate Jobs for the millions of unemployed youth. For Assam, the expense of this exercise went in thousands of crores. 52,000 government workers spent their time on it. Assam is a small sparsely populated state in North East. Imagine what would happen in UP, Maharashtra, Karnataka etc. Guess the expense! Do you think is it okay to spend so much money, cause so much trouble to all INDIANS, and then filter out undocumented people and turn them into “stateless” entities just for possibly appeasing your vote bank?

We're among the bottom countries when it comes to indexes like hunger we're on 102nd place, We're at 129th place in HDI, 117th in kids rights Index, 147th in Inequality Index, 177th In Environmental freedom Index and still we are so courageous to spend such a huge amount in these things.

The CAB discriminates on religious grounds which is against the principle of equality enshrined in the Constitution. It will set a precedence that would be used by others in future to come up with laws which discriminate on grounds of gender, class, caste, region, language, sect and ethnicity among other things, which will hit Hindus the most as they are the largest group in the country.

What do I think about the current violent protests across the country?

Democracy gives you a right to freedom of expression but in a peaceful way. If any Act aggrieves someone or some section, you can always knock the door of the Court of Justice. You can build up a consensus and create public opinions by educating them of what this means to them and what would be its implications should something like this were to happen in their state. You can organize peaceful marches and protests but you simply can't do what some mobs are doing in Delhi, UP, WB etc. where the mobs turned violent and destroyed public property, burnt buses and trains, violently blocked communications and National Highways. Remember, law enforcing authority is empowered to apply force, even open fire on a violent mob. Many have died as a result of this. There are people getting injured on both the sides. Whether they're the students or the law enforcement officials. What does this gain? Many of the protesters don't even know what they're protesting(For the uneducated protesters, rising onion prices and NRC are not the same). They're just there to act as a mob that will lynch and destroy everything in their way. 

Being a Hindu or not is of no importance here. You can have an opinion based on your ideology and values, if these are against your values, you have every right to express your opinion factually & without inciting unwanted fear or violence. If you feel like protesting, do protest peacefully taking care not to disturb others and without breaking any laws. People who also bring their kids to these protests should also be thinking about what values they're teaching them. Kids are innocent and do not take sides as adults do. Please do not enforce or impose your ideologies on them. Educate them and let them become better citizens than you are. Do not brainwash them. 

Jharkhand is the perfect example of how a protest should be like. People of Jharkhand have shown how to differ with the government in a true democracy by showing them the door(Yes Congress and the opposition parties,. The EVM's were again rigged by the BJP to ensure that they lose in the elections). There is a lesson here to be learnt by our JNU, Jamia and other students, our intellectuals and our media that the only way to protest in a democracy is without creating unrest, without destroying public property, without beating up students or policemen and without acting like animals.

What do I feel about NRC?

NRC is just Demonitization 2.0 which would yield nothing but create tensions, agony, unrest, distrust and differences. The government already has AADHAAR and other state machinery to fish out the so called infiltrators or illegal immigrants. They don't need an exercise like NRC (but given the recent incidents of violence across the country I feel some people should just be thrown out as they're a burden to the society and the nation. I still don't support NRC but these anti social and anti national elements must be thrown out no matter which side they're on. Violence is not the answer. It never was and it never will be.).

I believe CAB and NRC are plots to divert the people's attention from serious issues like the falling economy, falling GDP, rising inflation, rising economic inequality, rising crimes and crony capitalism. The entire move is flawed and undermines INDIA's values of inclusion and its core constitutional principles. These issues are just creating further divisions among ourselves and our people. The poor state of economy is affecting all the communities and not just Hindus alone. Communal narrative is driving peoples attention from these real issues. We must not fall into this trap. 

The entire initiative is inconsistent with the scale of the challenge. There is no substantial evidence to show that illegal immigration is happening on the scale that the government often suggests, or that it has drained INDIAN resources. There is also no clear end goal either. Our Home minister has promised to flush out all the illegal immigrants by 2024 but where? Do you think Bangladesh will accept them with open hands when you keep saying NRC is an internal affair? Any move to deport immigrants will seriously undermine our relationship with Bangladesh which for sure will not accept them. Can a nation, with rule of law and international humanitarian commitments, keep millions locked up in jail-like conditions for the failure to produce paperwork? It is clear that the implications of the CAB-NRC package have not been fully thought through. 

The true illegal immigrants or infiltrators in my mind are Poverty, Hunger, Sanitation, Illiteracy, Unemployment, Inflation, Injustice, Inequality, Crimes, Corruption, Pollution, Violence, Lack of Transparency etc. Most of these illegal immigrants have been there with us from even before our independence. The need of the hour is to weed out these infiltrators from the country so that we can move towards building a better place for ourselves and our future generations. The only path towards a peaceful world is through development of all and inclusion of all. The only true way to do it is by tagging everyone along in the process. Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas and Sabka Vishwas should be applied not in words but mind and spirit. Only then we will grow.

Since ancient times, We have taken pride in `Vishwa Bandhutva’ (Universal Brotherhood) and `Sharnagat Kee Raksha’ (Protecting those who seek refuge), the two core values in Hinduism. We're going against these values by discriminating against those who seek refuge in the country and against our own people. One thing to note and understand here is that not just Hindus but Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and people from other faiths chose INDIA as their motherland and contributed immensely during our freedom struggle and are also contributing towards building our nation. They all deserve equal rights. There is an example to learn here from Pakistan. Pakistan was created based on religion and within Islam itself they created rifts among the various sects and their quest for majority dominance resulted in the creation of Bangladesh and has also created unrest in Sindh and Balochistan. We don't want to follow their example and divide us further and break us apart.

For the Andh Bhakts and those with fascist mindsets. Remember one thing. You are Hindus as long as Muslims are there in the country. Once they're gone you will be Bhramins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Shudras, untouchables etc. 

Our secularism is our true strength and the reason that we've forged ahead and earned a reputation in the world is because of our constitutional democracy which gives everybody equal rights. Remember, United we stand, Divided we fall. So lets come out of that mindset of divide and rule. Its time to unite and bloom. 

Mahatma Gandhi described the notion of “majority” as a fiction constructed by British to divide and rule INDIA. He said that we all belong to one minority or another – religious, political, social, economic, regional, lingual and ethnic among others.

Bapu was right. In the end, we all stand alone, bound together only by the constitutional values.

As I conclude I believe, when nation-wide NRC will be completed (if at all that happens), neither anyone will be assigned a foreigner status nor anyone would go to jail so please stop panicking and spreading rumors.

I would like to end my post with this quote which describes the current situation perfectly well.

"Education is not memorizing that Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Education is understanding how millions of ordinary Germans were convinced that it was required. Education is how to spot the signs of history repeating itself"

Correct me, Criticize me. After all we live in a democracy. 

As I end this loooooooong post I would like to again reiterate that I do not belong to any political party nor do I endorse one. I am not an Andh Bhakt or an AAM Aadmi or a Pappu follower. I am just a common man expressing my common views.

Jai Hind _/\_

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