By Vijayesh Lal
Home Minister Amit Shah has told the Parliament that the process of making a National Register of Citizens (NRC) will be conducted across India and will be repeated in Assam.
This exercise which will be carried out with the Census 2021 has disastrous consequences on many fronts.
Firstly, it would be a huge money guzzler costing the exchequer much more than the usual Census exercise.
Secondly, it will be catastrophic for the Muslim population which is already apprehensive for its security, citizenship rights and human rights. It will also have troublesome implications for all other minorities including Tribals, Dalits, nomads and Christians.
The NRC for the rest of the Indians till now was only an Assam issue which they could have ignored but now it has implications for everyone. The NRC exercise in Assam has a history since 1951 that needs to be understood.
The final exercise of NRC in Assam, which was carried under the supervision of the Supreme Court, was published on August 31 and has left more than 1.9 million people stateless who are now facing an uncertain future and the threat of being lodged in detention camps should their appeals against the exclusion fail.
The appeal itself is an exhausting task. The Assam NRC cost more than 1.2 billion rupees and took five years to complete and has been criticized across the board by experts and politicians including that of the BJP.
Many believe that the NRC could be used as an instrument by the present government to take away citizenship rights from minority communities. BJP leaders have used the issue in their election campaigns with the present Home Minister comparing illegal immigrants to “termites” during his election campaign earlier.
The effect of the same on the Christian community and other minorities can be understood in relation to conversions. If a person is disowned by their family because they converted to some other religion, from where are they going to get the necessary documentation including most importantly a legacy certificate?
This will not only expose and put to risk people who have changed their faith and will make them vulnerable to the wrath of the law which can be invoked to harass them unnecessarily but also leave them exposed to extra-constitutional organizations like the RSS and its affiliates.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) seeks to amend The Citizenship Act, 1955, and plans to make it easy for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian illegal migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan to become citizens of India. Muslims are however excluded.
The rationale for this given by the BJP is that these are persecuted minorities from Muslim-majority countries. The ‘persecution’ factor has been criticized by experts who have called it a ‘fig leaf’, as “illegal Hindu migrants, who are the largest number, are presumed to be persecuted without bothering for proof thereof.”
The exclusion of Muslims from the CAB undermines its very rationale that refugees must be treated in a humanitarian way. What leads people to migrate as refugees is not only religious persecution but war, social conflict, ethnic targeting, and economic distress.
Seeing this only through a prism of religion is undoubtedly political and is an insult to the longstanding Indian tradition of hospitality of the stranger and the migrant and of the philosophy that proclaims that the “world is our family.”
If the CAB is passed, it can immediately make all the non-Muslim persons who have so far been excluded from the NRC in Assam, eligible for citizenship with some conditions, while the Muslims will continue to be treated as illegal immigrants.
The CAB reduces the time period for submitting citizenship applications from 11 years to six years, but there will be challenges in the implementation of the same nationwide particularly in the already disturbed North East India where nearly all states and political parties including some allies of the BJP are against it.
That is one reason why, according to media reports, that RSS volunteers have been dispatched to different parts of North East India to convince the people about the legislation and the government exercise of implementing both the CAB and NRC.
The world too is watching. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has already criticized the NRC in Assam as “targeted mechanism to disenfranchise Assam’s Bengali Muslim community, implicitly establishing a religious requirement for citizenship and potentially rendering large numbers of Muslims stateless.”
As we approach Christmas, we remember the citizenship exercise that is mentioned in the Gospel of Luke and because of which the Savior of the world was born in Bethlehem of Judea and not in Nazareth.
The difficulties faced by the couple because of this exercise must not be forgotten and should move us to pray and stand for and with those who face an uncertain future because of the citizenship exercise carried out in Assam and which is now staring the country in the face. The people factor must never be lost in statistics as it often does making us forget that each number on the chart is either a human being affected or a family affected, about whom God is very concerned.
(Reverend Vijayesh Lal is the General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. Views are personal.)