“Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” — Peter Brougham

Students Protesting against NRC and CAB in Delhi

In the last few days, we have had people across the country protesting against the CAB and NRC. After the incident in Jamia the day before yesterday-which I strongly condemn — the protest skyrocketed with students from many institutes coming together and showing solidarity that moved me.

But the more time I spend across the internet watching the News, the more I realize that people don’t actually understand the implication of the bill/act. Just this evening, I came across a couple of kids (perhaps 18–20 years old) riding a two-wheeler, giddy and excited, ready to protest. I was glad to see the youth participating until the guy sitting in the back loudly said: “Chal bhai maza aayega protest me” (brother, let’s go, we will have fun). You see, those kids would “enjoy” the clashes, they don’t know what they are even fighting for. This is what irks me.

The lack of education in the youth disturbs me. This is what this post is for, let’s dive in to what the people are protesting for! I will explain it in depth to the best of my knowledge as how these bills together might affect everyone in this country. Mind you, I am no student of law or a guy who knows a lot about Laws, I will try to be as accurate as possible, I’ll quote my sources and if you have any issues, I am ready to discuss in detail later. This will be a long read and I hope I have at least a couple of people who read the whole thing. So, let’s not waste our time further and dig in:

1. What is Citizen Amendment Act and Why Assam protested?

Citizen Amendment Act was passed in the houses of parliament this month as CAB (Citizen Amendment Bill 2019). In between a lot of protests, the ruling party BJP successfully passed the bill and later the President cleared it through.

The Bill was not new, BJP failed to clear it in Rajya Sabha in 2016 in their first attempt. It was clearly in their election manifesto when the North Eastern States and Assam voted BJP in. They wanted BJP to implement NRC and CAB properly which other parties clearly failed to do. Since India’s independence in 1947 there was an influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh which was then East Pakistan to Assam, they came in and settled down. In 1998, The Governor of Assam submitted a report to then President of India, K. R. Narayanan (Link Below): In the report he wrote :

“As a result of population movement from Bangladesh, the spectre looms large of the indigenous people of Assam being reduced to a minority in their home State. Their cultural survival will be in jeopardy, their political control will be weakened and their employment opportunities will be undermined.”

Protesters shout slogans against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in Guwahati. Source : AP Photos

These illegal immigrants were using the resources of Assam, people were angry over large scale unemployment in the state and wished a better Bill than what they received.

The main idea of CAB to make it easier for undocumented immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to get Indian citizenship. The catch is that these immigrants can’t be Muslims. It says and I quote:

“Provided that any person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, who entered into India on or before the 31st day of December, 2014 and who has been exempted by the Central Government by or under clause © of sub-section (2) of section 3 of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 or from the application of the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 or any rule or order made thereunder, shall not be treated as illegal migrant for the purposes of this Act;”.

The problem is right there in the first sentence but let’s discuss the impact of this in Assam first, The National Registry of Citizens (NRC) was a promise made in the Assam Accord in 1985, to identify and deport foreigners. By the time it was published, it became evident that majority of those denied citizenship were Hindus or indigenous tribes. The final list of citizens, published on Aug. 31, excluded nearly 19 lakh residents of Assam, including Hindus. (Including MLAs)Protesters say CAB will make NRC redundant and bestow citizenship on illegal immigrants. This is exactly what they did not want. It contradicts the Assam Accord of 1985, which clearly states that illegal migrants heading in from Bangladesh after March 25, 1971, would be deported. And also this reduces minimum required stay in India to get citizenship from 11 years to 6 years (More on this later). Assam Accords mentioned above came after a six year agitation in the state. It’s the threat of cultural erosion which worries the indigenous Assamese people, as well as other factors such as how a state like Assam is to bear the sudden burden of more citizens.



But that’s not what the whole nation is protesting for. That’s just the fears of Assam.

2. Problems with CAB/CAA

This girl with a Donate a book to the needY

The very first statement of the paragraph I quoted above shows exactly where our first problem comes along. It specifies communities from most of the religions of our ‘secular’ country except Muslims. As United Nations Human Rights Office clearly points out

“ India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 is fundamentally discriminatory in nature…. The amended law would appear to undermine the commitment to equality before the law enshrined in India’s constitution and India’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to which Indian is a State party, which prohibit discrimination based on racial, ethnic or religious grounds. Although India’s broader naturalization laws remain in place, these amendments will have a discriminatory effect on people’s access to nationality.”

The secular foundation of our nation stands in tatters with this ideological weapon of the government. The first bill that actually divides the nation by what religious book they started reading in their childhood.

CAB offers citizenship with more lenient rules than before.

‘Provided that for the person belonging to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian community in Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan, the aggregate period of residence or service of Government in India as required under this clause shall be read as “not less than five years” in place of “not less than eleven years”.’.

In both the houses home minister repeatedly used the term “persecuted communities”, even when the original bill does not use the term anywhere. The term “persecuted” is not defined, how will they identify which individual is persecuted and which is not, beats me. Perhaps a deeper understanding is warranted here.

Senior advocate and founder of the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) Colin Gonsalves told News18:

“In Pakistan, there are Ahmadiyyas who are persecuted. In Afghanistan, there are the Hazaras who are persecuted. These two communities are also present in India as refugees. They have come to India and the United Nations Human Rights Commissions (UNHRC) has recognised them as refugees, which means that the UN has recognised that they are persecuted. The BJP started off by telling everyone that they are taking care of persecuted minorities but actually they are excluding persecuted minorities and ordinary minorities,”

There is another community that finds themselves in a bad spot. The Tamil Hindus that are refugees from Sri Lanka. There are thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils who fled the country after the atrocities committed during the civil war between LTTE and Sri Lankan Military. CAB 2019 does not apply to them, as it only applies to minorities living in countries bordering India with majority of Muslim Populations. They would have to follow the old Citizenship rule and prove that they have lived in the country for 12 years.

CAB 2019 does not actually offer a lot of help and asylum to refugees I have mentioned above.

You can find the original copy of the bill submitted to Gazette of India at this link: http://egazette.nic.in/WriteReadData/2019/214646.pdf

So to sum up, CAA is openly discriminatory in nature against a particular community but “it does not affect the citizens of the country”. As Amit Shah and Narendar Modi have been saying in public for past few days, CAB only applies to illegal immigrants and not people who are already the citizens of this country.

Article 14 of the Constitution of India:

The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth”

The Preamble of The Constitution of India Source Facebook T”he outcaste”

So why are so many people protesting against the bill? NRC has entered the chat!

National Register of Citizens of India

We earlier talked about failed attempts at updating of NRC in Assam.

NRC has been proven to be a disastrous scheme which is very difficult to implement. The implementation in Assam was not really optimal and it cost a lot as well.

Amit Shah has repeated multiple times that after CAB they will implement NRC across the nation.This monumental task requires a lot of infrastructure and economic standing that the country right now lacks. In Assam, implementation of NRC cost around Rs.1220 Crores. If we do somehow implement NRC, looking at the track record in Assam and West Bengal, it will fail to register a significant amount of citizens.

So. a nationwide NRC affects everyone in the country. No matter which religion you belong to or which community. But how does NRC work?

The way NRC is implemented is that they first claim that everyone is not a citizen of the country, then they use a pre-decided cutoff date before which if you were part of the population register you automatically get added into the NRC. In Assam, the cutoff was decided to be 1971 based on the accords. Which would mean that if your identity proof dates before 1971 you can apply directly to be in the Register. But, if you were born after 1971 or have identity proofs dated after 1971, you have to prove that your parents were citizens of the country.

The 1971 cutoff was decided just for Assam, for the rest of the country the Register hasn’t been undated since 1951, so it’s hard to say which date will be decided.

In 1986, there was another Citizenship Amendment Bill which was passed by then-ruling party, Congress (Link to December 1986 report). India had by birth citizenship regardless of parent till July 1987. So, if we assume the cutoff to be 1987, if you were born before 1987 you get Citizenship, if you were born after 1987 you have to prove that either of your parents (One Parent) is/was Indian citizen and he/she is indeed your parent.

The Bill was again Amended in 2004 for reasons not clear to me: The new Law now said that you are a citizen of the Country if Both of your parents are Citizens of the Country.

It is inevitable for a significant portion of the population to not be part of the NRC. In many poor regions the illiteracy would be a big hurdle to cross. Many flood prone areas like Assam have history of losing documents in natural or artificial causes. There are many communities where until recently Women were not allowed to go out , having citizenship papers is a long shot.

It took more than 3 decades to finish NRC in one state Assam, imagine the time, cost and infrastructure required to finish a register that would cover 1.3 billion of the population of this nation. The difficulty of the feat is so enormous that it almost makes me believe it is just to distract people from more important topics like economic crisis.

To summarize, CAB 2019 does not affect Indian Muslims, but is discriminating in nature to illegal Immigrants. While NRC is a registration process which if implemented to the whole nation will affect every person in this nation. We will all be presumed non-citizens, until proven otherwise. Hindus too.

NRC + CAB

Imagine it’s two friends Raj and Salman, standing in the queue for registration in NRC. They get their documents, and their parents’ documents as well. After a couple of years the Register is released and overnight both of them are not Citizens of the country either by some problems in the documents or by some clerical error by a babu.

What will they do now? Like Raj and Salman, there would be millions of people who would have CAB as the last resort. But for using CAB they would need to prove that they were part of a persecuted community of either Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, then apply for citizenship.

Even after proving the above, they would need to accept that they lied earlier with fake documents and now show more documents that do not exist, to show that they indeed have lived in the country for “not less than five years”.

Surely you can see how crazy it already is. In between all the mayhem are those who were not named in CAB 2019, what do they do now? What about Tamil Hindus from Sri Lanka? And the Indian Muslim who were not in the Register? A register that is controlled by people who might deliberately try to sabotage it and make people run around in circles. CAB combined with NRC has a high chance of dividing this nation in parts.

That’s what the people across the nation are afraid of right now and are protesting across the world.

It would be wrong to assume things as there is no legal precedent on how NRC will be handled across the country, and will they change it for good or for bad. Speculating would only increase the fear of the individual. But it’s obvious even if in the end they somehow make it not as discriminatory together as it looks right now, it will be complete chaos to implement.

Source @Satish Acharya

The video above is a very informative breakdown of the things I have gone through in this post and more. A Must Watch!

I would like to end this by sharing a post I found on social networking site Reddit, to amplify my point how serious ground we are treading. We need to walk carefully and think where we are leading our nation to.

“As an born Indian Muslim (now atheist) with Indian-born grandparents I have been feeling extremely suicidal. I don’t have a birth certificate as my parents were semi-literate (they were unaware about its importance). I fear for myself and my parents due to the obvious rising of fascism and Hindu Supremacy. I constantly live in fear and paranoia, as if I’m a Jew in Nazi Germany. I don’t have enough money or enough education to migrate to any other country. I have nightmares about living in detention center and getting deported. … I have been having suicidal thoughts since a year, but they have increased since a couple of months. I’m already on my anti depression meds. I think I just couldn’t take it anymore. At least if I die I could get to be buried here, in my home land. I don’t live in Assam or West Bengal, but I genuinely believe that NRC wave would take over the India….Thank you everyone for reading this “rant”.”

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