Do you think that CAB will help Hindus from neighbouring countries become Indians or is this simply to appease their vote bank?

Let’s look at what has happened in Assam. We found that the Supreme Court in the Sarbananda Sonowal vs Union of India judgement passed a dangerous ruling which reversed the burden of proof. It was now up to the citizens to prove that they were Indian citizens and not the state, which had to prove that they were foreigners. The basis of proving this was a range of documents, which most of us, including urban Indians, would find it hard to find, let alone rural Indians, who are most often poorly lettered and often landless. Their ability to muster these documents is more fraught and unlikely.



People don’t know their date of birth, they have not gone to school, so they do not have school certificates and they don’t own land, so they do not have land records. They not only have to produce these documents, but also produce the entire family tree, which is legacy document and then you have to get the linkage documents to show your connection with the legacy documents.

You can imagine the amount of suffering the people in Assam have had to undergo in order to produce these documents with the kind of poverty and lack of education and resources that people have. For years this has dominated their lives.

Then there is the BJP government in the Centre and state, which is appointing people who have no experience to foreign tribunals. They are under pressure to declare more and more citizens as foreigners. In this environment, when 2 million people were excluded, the ruling party faced a political conundrum because according to sources around 15 lakhs of those excluded were Hindus. There can be no doubt that the much larger number of those left out of NRC are non-Muslims.

If the BJP had to continue to head the government in which all of them are declared foreigners, then it would be political suicide for them. That is why they are now rejecting their own NRC. They implemented the process and our complaint has been the extreme bias the minorities face. Now, because the findings are not suiting their political purpose, they are declaring the same process as unfair and biased. For them, to walk out of this conundrum the only solution is to give citizenship rights to Hindus who were excluded from the NRC.

For this purpose, they have created this Act, which states that they will be treated as refugees escaping religious persecution from neighbouring countries and will be given citizenship. The irony is that every person who has been excluded from NRC are people who are claiming that they are Indians, and now in order to become Indian, they will have to claim they are Bangladeshi and that they were persecuted.

So, either yesterday they were lying or tomorrow they will be lying in order to get citizenship. This pathway is going to be barred only to those people with Muslim identity.

The Rohingyas in Myanmar and the Uighurs in China are the most persecuted people in the world. But, there is no question of them being accepted because of they are Muslims.