Two images: first, policemen wielding lathis against students protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act; second, buses being set ablaze. Two conflicting narratives: a victimised Muslim community, or ‘jihadists’ attacking public property. Yet the real issue of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the impending all-India NRC is not just about religious communities or about Hindu vs Muslim. It’s actually about India’s big state attempting once again to subdue citizens. Hindu vs Muslim is only the dog-whistle to consolidate vote banks; in actuality, CAA-NRC is about expanding and legitimising brutally coercive state power.

What will CAA and an all-India NRC mean on the ground? The state will get to decide who is a citizen, who is a refugee, who belongs to which religion, whose family arrived within the cutoff date and whose did not, based on documents. This means an army of officialdom, a gargantuan state machinery verifying papers, people scurrying for documents or desperately seeking political and bureaucratic patronage. There’s no reason to believe that an all-India NRC won’t work in exactly the same way it did in Assam, where 19 lakh people — many of whom may be legitimate citizens but without the right papers —have been declared ‘illegal foreigners’. In Assam, the poor have been the primary sufferers, families have been split down the middle with, in some cases, husband declared citizen and wife declared ‘foreigner’.

CAA and the impending NRC are at first glance Muslim-centric but are also an assault on the sovereignty of every citizen because we are being denied the fundamental freedom to choose our own identities from the basket of pluralities each of us represent — we needn’t just be Hindu or Muslim, we could be atheist, rationalist, agnostic or moon-worshipper. But now the state will decide that religious identity is the only label we can have, and also decide who is what according to the babus’ satisfaction.

A LONG-STANDING DEMAND: Liberal ideas in India have always called for the urgent need to restrict state power

Narendra Modi’s campaign slogan was once “minimum government, maximum governance”, yet today from demonetisation to cattle slaughter rules to data surveillance to internet shutdowns, government control is being pushed into every aspect of life. CAA-NRC is the next instalment in the exercise of big state power over all citizens.

The big state uses guilt to instill fear and subjugate citizens. Not yet linked data with your Aadhaar card? You’re guilty. Too much cash in your house? Guilty. Reading books on Marxism? Guilty. Eating beef? Guilty. Sharing opinions on social media? Guilty. Citizen of India? You better hope there’s no Pakistan or Bangladesh connection anywhere.

Every political party in India swears by the fear-inspiring big state. The UPA brought in the Aadhaar card which has become a double-edged sword. Yes, it facilitates transactions, yet the India Spend website reports that a million children across India were denied school admission because they could not furnish Aadhaar details. Hospitals sometimes deny treatment without Aadhaar. Far from facilitating the poor, in many cases Aadhaar victimises them. Section 66A of the IT Act was rampantly used in UPA years to imprison students, professors and cartoonists.

The Indian state under every party has always been violent and expansionist. This is precisely why Gandhi warned that India would never be truly independent until the nature of the state itself is changed and reformed. That’s why liberal ideas in India have always campaigned for the urgent need to limit political and state power, of which police brutality is the most visible manifestation.

Today, cattle slaughter rules have created a police machinery that seeks to oppress trade and business in livestock; the censor board seeks to remove “anti-national” content; the new Personal Data Protection Bill gives the government wide ranging powers to enable snooping. Bullying taxmen criminalise even justly earned profit.

The state can harass, deny travel abroad, cancel FCRA licences and slap sedition charges. Said Gandhi: “I look upon any increase in the power of the state with the greatest fear,..(because) the state destroys individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.”

CAA and NRC may seem to be harshly and primarily directed at Muslims. Yet they aren’t the only ‘enemy’ here, instead every citizen might find his or her rights and freedoms put on hold as netas and babus acquire massive powers to scrutinise and judge ancestry, families and citizenship claims. Today, Muslims are threatened with exclusion, will ‘urban Naxals’ be next? Or the ‘tukde tukde gang’ after that, given that any criticism of CAA is being dubbed as ‘speaking the language of Pakistan’? CAA and an all-India NRC will make the state even more dangerously powerful and has the potential to demonetise the citizenship of all Indians, not only Muslims.