Relevance: mains: G.S paper II: Indian Polity
Citizenship cannot be seen as existing outside the larger concerns of humanity.
The publication of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam has begun to stir up the politics in the state as different social forces are responding to its outcomes. Among the proponents of the NRC, including the ruling party, there is a sense of disappointment with the outcome as the number of individuals excluded is substantially less than the claims and rhetoric of the proponents. Furthermore, for the Bharatiya Janata Party, the disappointment is also due to the exclusion of a large number of individuals from the groups constituting its social and electoral base. Ideally, there should be some sense of relief at the number being substantially smaller (if we were to set aside for a moment the arbitrariness and unfairness in the process of such exclusion) considering the travails of the excluded people and the immense human costs involved. Pushing lakhs of individuals into the drudgery of appeals to foreigners’ tribunals and courts, putting them in detention centres notorious for degrading conditions, and relegating them to secondary citizenship or statelessness are bound to bring extreme suffering to the people, the majority of whom are already living a marginalised existence. However, the cynical calculations and the agenda of the ruling party leave little scope for empathy for this suffering. In fact, the very logic of an idea like the NRC—particularly in the times of generalised political ascendancy of exclusionary-divisive rhetoric—precludes such humanitarian considerations and, therefore, has grave implications for polity and society going beyond Assam.
An exercise like the NRC, with its fundamental premises rooted in the binary of outsiders/insiders, cut-off dates, and primordial claims over land, threatens to aggravate the already existing social tensions. This is the case even if the intentions behind such an exercise were to bring to a closure the festering conflicts and dispel the atmosphere of mutual suspicion. Realising these intentions would demand a reconciliatory process within communities/social groups and coming to terms with the burden of history by arriving at a consensus in the present to fashion a common future. However, this would require painstaking efforts with an overarching normative vision for a decent society. With the ruling party’s political agenda being shorn of such a vision and its evident attempts to use this exercise to consolidate its electoral prospects, the pious hopes of reconciliation harboured by a section of progressives in Assam are bound to be belied. Statements of the leaders in the context of the NRC are replete with terms like “ghuspethiye” (infiltrators) and “termites,” and claims of a large number of unfair inclusions from particular communities. These are definite signs of the attempts to maintain and perpetuate social divides. Reconciliation and closure are inconsistent with the politics of permanently manufacturing the fear of the other.
Discriminatory procedures, criteria, and requirements followed in the exercise have also aided this exclusionary logic. Differential requirements of documents from different groups have produced a built-in bias in the process and the requirement of legacy documents makes a departure from the principle of citizenship by birth. Such departures threaten to institutionalise the exclusion of the other and that seems to be the purpose behind the weaponisation of the NRC by the ruling party. Such an intent is evident through the demands for holding an NRC-type exercise in other states as well as holding it nationwide. At least in the context of the historical peculiarities of Assam a logical case—howsoever problematic on moral grounds—can be made. Can a logical case even be made for say Delhi or Telangana or Maharashtra? The only possible logic could be the cynical one of targeting particular communities by deliberately creating a mist of doubt. There have already been reports of rumours and speculations about the nationwide implementation of the NRC and the institution of detention centres instilling panic and insecurities. The anxiety of being relegated to being de jure secondary citizens—even as such relegation is happening de facto—is palpable and needs to be responded with sensitive assurances. Even as the ruling party would seek specific communal targeting to suit its objectives, the logic of such demands could spiral across varied horizontal and vertical axes and, thus, produce constant strife in a diverse and unequal country like India.
At a fundamental level, while dealing with issues, such as the question of citizenship, that potentially have implications for lives and livelihoods of vast masses of people, can we afford to privilege primordial identity over constitutionality, and the procedural understanding of constitutionality over its substantive-universal understanding which has humanity at its core? Considering that migration has been a historical fact of human civilisation as such and its prevalence has been increasing manifold in our times for various reasons, the idea of citizenship and the corresponding rights needs to be human-centric rather than state-centric. Declaring a section of humanity to be bereft of the rights by invoking a primordial conception of identity would reduce India to being an ethnic democracy at best and a theocracy at worst. What is required is the fostering of the civic identity consistent with the republican ideal of the Constitution.