‘Can you prove your grandfather was an Indian?’
As the state police departments flounder in terms of creating a database of migrant workers, or at least keeping a record of those who have been accused of crimes, the Central government has been hard at work on the National Register for Citizens. This poses a different set of problems, for proof of citizenship is difficult to provide, especially as it requires knowledge of one's forefathers. Crimes committed by migrant workers in major cities go unchecked and untraced, while journalists near the border campaign against the NRC, say people are detained in camps or rendered stateless and that the majority of these are Muslim.
Work on updating the
National Register for Citizens (NRC) beganin 2015 and seemed to be about more than Assam. Political journalist Rohini Mohan, who was present at a session at the Bangalore International Centre on Monday, said the project to identify illegal immigrants of Bangladesh threatens to rob many genuine Indians of their citizenship. The talk was based largely on the speaker’s ground experiences of reporting in Assam during the floods, elections and multiple encounters with regard to the NRC in the state.
Citizenship, said Mohan, is taken for granted until the time when it is no longer dependent just on oneself but requires proof of one’s forefathers. The individuals who didn’t make it to the recent NRC list in August 2019 had owned documents like driving licenses, land records, proof of stay and even passports, all documents issued by the State.
While it is true that women and other minorities are the most vulnerable groups, the NRC also includes journalists, academicians and defence personnel as ‘victims’. There were situations in which some people made it to their list but their children did not. Requests of elderly women were denied on grounds of weak document proof. Assam is subject to floods, twice a year, she claimed, so documents of identity are often lost. Also, the duration of stay in a particular place cannot be proved due to frequent migration due to floods.
Mohan filed RTIs with the 100 existing tribunals for copies of verdicts issued in the last six months. She was shocked to note that only six responded, while others denied the information on grounds of resource scarcity, demands for an HC order, false claims of nonpayment of fees and so on.
“82 percent of orders I saw declared the individuals to be foreigners. I met 113 of them, they were all Bengali speakers, 89% of the declared foreigners were Muslim. Nine out of 10 Muslims were declared foreigners and four out of 10 were Hindus. 78% of the people declared as foreigners didn’t face trials. Some didn’t k now they had been declared foreigners. Fake cases of absconding were registered and so on.”
The BJP, she said, battled for NRC but not anymore. “The party is now underplaying and discrediting it after realizing that their own constituencies are getting stuck. Many MLAs have expressed this. Since BJP is disturbed with the number of Hindus in detention camps, it has sowed seeds of hope with regard to their release.” During her discussions with the former NRC coordinator, she said, “The coordinator confessed to the pressure to declare people as foreigners. The judges of the Foreign Tribunal have also said the same thing. There have been times when tribunal judges were fired for restoring citizenship in several of their cases.”
A significant number of people have been proved innocent and released from detention camps, Mohan admits, adding, “There is no compensation for the years they have lost. In an environment of battling for citizenship, a number of people have been rendered stateless as there is no treaty signed between India and Bangladesh to deport individuals. A murderer in an Indian prison has more rights than these people. Bangladesh on the other hand has declared it an internal issue of the Indian state.”