How to go round NPR: Roy recipe
Even as PM Modi announced with aplomb on Wednesday that ‘‘we will challenge the challengers’’ – in the backdrop of the raging controversy over the citizenship law – Arundhati Roy, the torch bearer of the ‘liberals’, has urged like-minded persons to "lie" or furnish fake names when the National Population Register house-to-house enumeration is on.
Her reasoning is that the NPR will serve as a database for the controversial National Register of Citizens.
The television channels, which are believed to peddle the government viewpoint, lost no time in accusing Roy of trying to ‘sabotage’ the NPR exercise by her absurd suggestion. But what finally got their goat was her off-thecuff remark that the Modi government shouldn't be "given" the remaining four years.Detractors felt she was churning out a false narrative to exploit the prevailing confusion over the citizenship issue across the country.
The confusion was confounded when she further remarked, "Now what is NPR? NPR has happened before. In NPR, they will come to your house, they will ask you for your name and phone number. It is a database for NRC."But she muddied the waters when she proposed, "We have to fight them for the next 4 years. First, we should not give them four years, but we must have a plan. When they come to your house asking for your name, you give them some other name -- like Ranga Billa, Kung-Fu Kutta, give your address as 7 Race Course Road and let's fix one phone number. But we need multiple subversion. We were not born for lathis and bullets.
"In these times of extremities, to many, her remark that "we should not give them four years," is tantamount to appealing to overthrow a democratically elected government that rebounded this May with an unprecedented mandate.
The government is insisting that NPR has nothing to do with NRC.
Home Minister Amit Shah, too, has said, "NPR is a compilation of data of those living in India. While, NRC is the process when proofs are sought for the same... The two have nothing to do with each other."Roy begs to differ and when she was addressing students at Delhi University, she raked up the matter of alleged detention centres.
"They don't have money to eat, but they will have to hire lawyers. This is not just against Muslims, but it is also against the poor, the Adivasis, the Dalits and the tribal people. This is a plan to get everyone into trouble. There are detention camps being built," she claimed, while the naïve students were left wondering how many facets does truth have.