The process will create chaos all over

Even if a need to maintain a national register of Indian citizens is strongly felt by a particular section of our policymakers, I would request them to refrain, and not just eye immediate electoral gains

How can one even think of implementing the National Register of Citizens (NRC) across the whole country after experiencing the bizarre and haphazard way with which it has been executed in Assam? It will not only be premature to extend the NRC in other states at this juncture, but will be a social, cultural and political disaster. Is it not an indication that the process adopted in Assam was so seriously awry that more than four million residents of a single state were out of the Citizens’ Register?

If a process that ascertains the Indian citizenship keeps out a nephew of India’s fifth President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s, Ziauddin Ali Ahmed, can we take NRC as the final word for telling us that who is an Indian and who is not? The deputy speaker of Assam’s state Assembly was denied a place in the list of citizens. Even the people who have represented their electorate in the state Assembly, those who have worked or are still working in the police services and the Army, could not find a place in the NRC. Descendants of freedom fighters had been excluded from the list and they are now illegal migrants. A man and his family who fought the British in 1857 are out of the NRC. Fiftyfive per cent of those disenfranchised in Assam are women.

Under the process of NRC implementation, people who have been living for generations, that is centuries, in places that were made part of Assam only in 1874 and still live there were asked to prove their citizenship under Section 6A of the Citizenship Act 1955. The law provides a cutoff date of March 24, 1971 for distinguishing deemed citizens and illegal immigrants. For this one has to submit prescribed pre-1971 documents. This has essentially meant treating them as immigrants based mainly on their non-Assamese linguistic identity.

This part of the process was problematic. The people living outside “proper Assam”, the territory that the British annexed to their empire by the Yandabu pact of 1826, which is now called Upper Assam, are all immigrants. Their ancestors have been living in those places since before the Ahoms came into Upper Assam in the second decade of the 13th century. But most of them are declared as illegal immigrants. They are marginalised, landless and illiterate people who, due to their economic and social status, do not have the prescribed documents.

The poor and deprived sections of our population generally do not have access to documentation. If in a state of three and a half crore people, 40 lakh could not produce documentary proofs of their being Indian, just imagine what will happen if the NRC is extended to the whole country? Millions and millions of otherwise naturalised citizens of our country will fail to satisfy the demands of the NRC. Any such process is bound to create chaos, that will not serve any purpose.

I agree with those who feel that Indian citizenship is the greatest privilege because only those who have purified their souls by protecting cows — not cows of Bangladeshi origin — for seven consecutive births are reincarnated as Indian citizens. That’s the reason only one in six people on our planet enjoys the honour of being an Indian citizen. Therefore, even if a need to maintain a national register of Indian citizens is strongly felt by a particular section of our policymakers, I would request them to refrain, and not just eye immediate electoral gains.