Noncitizens and history

It is a shame that our contemporary public discourse on amending citizenship laws aims primarily at containing spatial mobility.

THERE is a wide variety of reasons why a person’s name may not have appeared in the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. In all, 3.76 million applications for citizenship have been rejected and a final decision has been put on hold in a quarter million cases. However, the final NRC is likely to have fewer exclusions than in the draft.

The complexity of what is involved in updating the NRC deserves close attention. Prateek Hajela, the State Coordinator for updating the NRC, describes the process as “technology-driven, transparent and objective”. But he is the first to admit that “computers only work for submitting the documents to us, and sending it to the issuing authority”. Beyond this, they are of limited use because the identification documents used in the process, except PAN cards, are not stored in any computerised database. The updating of the NRC, therefore, basically relies on paper documents of various kinds and old-fashioned manual verification of such documents by the NRC staff.

The NRC exercise exemplifies the fact that contrary to the talk of a paperless society, the growing use of electronic technologies has actually increased the need for paper documents and underlined their importance in people’s lives. Legacy data are at the heart of the process. To be included in the NRC one has to identify an ancestor whose name appears in either the NRC of 1951 or a pre-1971 electoral roll, and provide documentary evidence of linkage with that person. Even with the substantial assistance available at the NRC Seva Kendras, this can be a challenge for many people.

Consider a person who lives in Assam but was not born in the State. In order to process his or her legacy data, NRC officials have had to make as many as 600,000 requests for “legacy verification” to various State governments. The response from them has been poor and tardy. Some States responded to fewer than 1 per cent of the requests. More than 100,000 requests for legacy verification were made to the West Bengal government, but the NRC authorities received responses only in 6.5 per cent of the requests. The history of the reorganisation of Assam has also complicated the process. The relevant records of some current residents of Assam, for example, could be in an office in Shillong, which was the capital of undivided Assam but is now under the jurisdiction of the Meghalaya State administration. In other words, the verification of legacy data would depend on the cooperation of jurisdiction government.

The challenges can be especially daunting for poor people with limited literacy. The Assamese graphic novelist Parismita Singh, author of The Hotel at the End of the World (Penguin, 2009), has written touchingly of the experience of villagers near Biswanath Chariali, an area where she grew up. Many in that area spoke to her about a lot of kheli-meli, confusion. A different spelling of a name of a grand parent in a voters list of decades past was sometimes the source of anomaly. Women were particularly vulnerable since “their names almost never appear on land records, or family trees, or school enrolment lists”. A father and a child do not always have the same surname: a woman with the birth-name Khatun may be Bibi after marriage. And for some people in the area “documents have scattered in the vicissitudes of displacement through floods and political disturbances, ethnic clashes, communal riots, violence”.

The updating process, however, has not been reliant on paper documents in every part of Assam. The administrative rules developed for this purpose allows for the use of the category “original inhabitant”. In the case of persons in this category, local an of office under the another State