What after identification?

Endgame in Assam’s citizen-identification exercise unclear

Earlier this week, the Assam government released its first draft of the National Register of Citizens, or NRC. The NRC is, as the name implies, meant to permanently solve the fraught question of who is a “foreigner” — a migrant from Bangladesh with no citizenship rights — and who is not. There are 19 million names on the NRC at the moment; the scale of those excluded can be gauged from the fact that Assam’s population is around 33 million. As the large number of exclusions show, the requirements for being entered into the NRC are strict. An individual has to demonstrate that she, or her ancestors, was in the first such register compiled in 1951, or else in any electoral rolls before March 1971. For someone born after 1971, even the presentation of a valid Indian passport or birth certificate is not adequate grounds for inclusion. The Registrar General of India insists that the verification process is ongoing, and many more names will be added to the NRC when it is completed. The process, which is being monitored by the Supreme Court, is supposed to be completed within the year.

The NRC was generally seen as a way of finally defusing the central issue that has led to violent flare-ups in the north-eastern state, and has long distorted its politics. One of the major electoral promises of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which came to power in the state in the first half of last year, was to expel all illegal immigrants while welcoming non-Muslim immigration from Bangladesh. The promise of the NRC was that it would permanently settle the question of who was an “outsider”, thus allowing the state to move on from this divisive question. Yet, it is now clear that things are not quite so simple. There are, after all, two ways in which this could pan out. First, the NRC, when it is completed, is more comprehensive and includes more current residents than the anti-Bengali and anti-Muslim political forces in Assam would like. In which case, the NRC and the process through which it was created will be called into question, and state politics will remain in the same rut it was in earlier.

The second possibility is that the exclusions — some justified, some unjustified — in the final draft of the NRC are vast, running into hundreds of thousands or even perhaps millions. What happens then? The notion of expulsion is a poor joke. There is not the slightest chance that Bangladesh will cooperate — at least without concessions at a higher level than any that have so far been discussed. Will these residents instead be rounded up and put into detention camps, there to be housed and fed at the state’s expense? Even if human rights concerns are set aside, will this action not be frightfully difficult to implement, open to legal challenge, and a national security nightmare? The eyes of the world will be turned to Assam then, the way that they are fixed on Myanmar’s Rakhine province at present. National deliberation on the best way forward — perhaps work permits and residency short of citizenship — is essential.