The promise of CAA, minus politics

 

Politicisation of NRC over decades obscured the issue of immigration in Assam. CAA, which seeks to help those who have suffered terribly, must not meet the same fate

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is back on the political centre-stage with Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, JP Nadda, Mamata Banerjee, Asaduddin Owaisi, Rahul Gandhi and several other political leaders invoking the Act from various public platforms in the past few weeks.

Separately, incidents of persecution of religious minorities in India’s neighbourhood keep pouring in. The alleged forced marriage of a 13-year-old Christian girl to a 44-year-old Muslim man in Pakistan and the vandalisation of Hindu households in Comilla district in Bangladesh earlier this month led to heated debates on the CAA on social media platforms.

The political outpourings on CAA 2019, expectedly, happened during the election campaign in Bihar and are likely to gather speed as political parties gear up for polls in West Bengal and Assam. The events in Pakistan and Bangladesh, however, were not politically motivated. These incidents came as a reminder that despite being deeply entrenched in politics, the CAA is fundamentally about a bunch of destitute people facing oppression in countries they ended up being citizens of, thanks to the politics that led to the creation of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It is a pitiful irony that these people are victimised in their countries of origin — with the state often looking the other way – because they are followers of a minority religion. As for their country of refuge, because the voters of the majority faith in India were never a concerted vote bank, these people languished on the periphery of electoral politics for decades. It’s the same politics that has made them appealing now.

Indeed, the BJP is pushing the CAA for electoral gains but its politics is no different from the kind that kept the NRC (National Register of Citizens) hanging fire since 1951.

To understand the tribulations of this group of immigrants, we need to look at the chronology, a la Amit Shah, of events that led to the passage of the CAA in December last year.

The CAA wouldn’t have come into being had it not been for the then Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, who pushed for updating Assam NRC in 2013, a year before BJP came to power. The Assam NRC was conducted in 1951 after a large number of people, mainly Hindus and Sikhs, crossed over to India from Pakistan after Partition. The register was supposed to have been updated later, as immigration continued in subsequent years and then escalated manifold in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war in 1971. The scale of the immigration can be gauged from the fact that it was described as the largest movement of people in the world in the second half of the 20th century by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Updating the NRC was also the underlying promise that led to the signing of the Assam Accord in 1985, thus, ending the violent Assam movement that started in 1979.

The NRC, however, was never updated.

What is happening in the country today is the fallout of many decades of deliberate callousness and electoral gains resorted to by political parties cutting across ideologies.

It is known that the immediate trigger for the Assam movement was the sudden surge in the number of voters in several Assembly constituencies in 1979. The All Assam Students’ Union, the body leading the protest, was enraged that a large number of illegal immigrants, allegedly Muslims, were included in the electoral rolls, and a large number among them had been clandestinely issued Indian citizenship certificates by the state government with the help of the government at the Centre, both led by the same political party. This, they felt, diminished the significance of local residents besides impinging upon their socio-cultural identity.

No prizes for guessing why any political party would grant voting rights or citizenship status, especially around election time, to disputed immigrants.

It is scandalous that before the Supreme Court-led exercise in 2013, there was no definitive data on immigrants in Assam and other affected states. The final report — though disputed now — submitted in August 2019, for the first time, provided some official data. Tragically, even that data is more confounding than enlightening. For instance, census data reflects that the Muslim population in Assam has grown at a faster rate than the rest of the country over the years. In 1951, Muslims accounted for around 25 per cent of the population in Assam against the national average of 10 per cent. In 2001, 31 per cent of the population in Assam was Muslim against 13 per cent nationally and in 2011, more than 34 per cent in Assam were Muslims against 14 per cent in the country. This is when a large number of Muslim immigrants are known to have moved to West Bengal and other states.

There has been enough debate, without any conclusion, on whether the faster rate of growth in Muslim population in Assam was on account of Muslim immigrants. Against this opaque backdrop, it is puzzling that of the supposed 1.9 million individuals named as illegal immigrants in the “now disputed” final draft of SC-led NRC, a large majority are considered to be Hindus.

Clearly, data and commentary on the issue do not add up. The only thing that is consistent is that the issue of immigrants was never evaluated objectively, keeping politics aside. Sadly, it has been reduced to a Hindu-vs-Muslim debate even by the non-political groups as against an issue of immigration and the reasons behind it.

Since the NRC has been universally politicised, evaluating the CAA without using the prism of politics is pertinent. Because the fate of more than a million individuals who landed at our doorstep for the fear of their lives should count for more than the political leverage their rehabilitation may confer upon a party. They were promised refuge by our founding fathers as well as by most large political parties at different points. These individuals have nowhere to go because they lack economic and religious charm. Hindus among them are the most pitiable. Sheltering Muslims is celebrated as fighting Islamophobia. Concessions to other religious groups is seen as a commitment towards secularism but any allowance to even the most miserable and disenfranchised Hindus is seen as playing majoritarian politics.

Isn’t that bigotry?

Written by Archna Shukla

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist

Source: Indian Express, 24/11/20

Government needs to act urgently to conclude NRC process in Assam

 

The authorities have not been treating this matter with the gravity that it deserves. Shifting the goalposts for political gains reflects an extraordinary lack of regard for the people who have been excluded.

Nurjehan Begum, a 45-year-old home maker from the flood-ravaged Bongaigaon district in northwest Assam, struggles to be optimistic. The devastating combination of the recent floods and COVID-19 lockdown has exacted a significant toll on her family. But that is not her biggest fear: 2020 marks the end of Nurjehan’s three-year confinement in one of Assam’s six dreaded detention centres, the final destination for those who are deprived of their right to citizenship in the state. While she is silent about the trauma she has experienced, Nurjehan does not hesitate to share her deepest fear — her family could now face the same fate, as they too have been excluded from the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

On August 31, 2019, the final list of the NRC in Assam was released. This was considered to be the culmination of decades of strife and agitation in the state over the question of continued presence of “illegal immigrants” and the urgent need to identify and deport them. The NRC was envisaged as a comprehensive record of citizens in Assam, identified by the law of the land as persons who had migrated to Assam before March 25, 1971. The legal home for the NRC is found in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003. The updation of the NRC was sanctioned by the Supreme Court, which, in 2014, began monitoring the entire process.

Five years, 5,5000 employees, and Rs 1,200 crore were only the visible administrative costs — this does not include the lives that were lost, primarily out of fear of exclusion. The loss of citizenship, after all, is the loss of one of the most crucial rights a person can have; in its absence, one’s entire body of rights disappears. Conversations on the ground revealed that initially, people from across the spectrum agreed on the NRC. People who belong to the ethno-religious category of Bengali-Muslim origin were relieved at the prospect that inclusion in the NRC would end the cloud of suspicion over their heads. On the other end, of the spectrum, the indigenous Assamese population welcomed the NRC as fulfilling the aim of weeding out “immigrants”.

The result of the NRC list has been well documented — 1.9 million people were excluded from its ambit and now face the prospect of filing appeals against this exclusion before the quasi-judicial body known as the Foreigners Tribunal (FT).

Set up in 1964 under the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, the FT is the main legal body with the power to determine who is a citizen in the context of Assam. As has been extensively documented, this process of citizenship determination is riddled with flaws. The burden of proving one’s status is on the person who faces scrutiny. S/he is expected to provide stringent documentary proof of citizenship, despite there being no clarity from the state on what documents meet this evidentiary standard. (It has been held that Aadhaar cards, PAN cards, land records, birth certificates and passports may not amount to proof.) Oral testimony is frequently disregarded, and the tribunal is quick to dismiss paperwork on flimsy grounds such as minor errors in spelling or dates. The main test of citizenship according to the Tribunal is the ability to trace one’s legacy to a person who had been residing in the state before 1971. Applying such a high standard of documentary evidence flies in the face of the ground realities of the country. Moreover, there are serious concerns around the judicial independence of the tribunals. Members are appointed by the home and political departments of the Assam government, and the performance of tribunal members is incentivised based on the number of persons they declare as foreigners. This implies biases entrenched in the system. As a result, around 1.3 lakh people have been declared foreigners since the inception of the FTs. Like Nurjehan, many declared foreigners are sent to languish in detention centres.

The potential repercussions from the NRC exclusions could be catastrophic. It does not help that the appeals process is fraught with delays; one year on, there is no sign of when this process will begin and decisions such as the re-checking of rejection orders to exclude people only add to the uncertainty.

Vulnerable populations are poised to suffer grave consequences in the absence of legal clarity. For instance, there are multiple instances of children who have been excluded from the NRC. Will they be extended protections as per the law governing juveniles in the country? Will they be separated from their parents and sent to detention if they are unable to prove their citizenship? What guarantees are in place for the protection of their rights? We only have questions to which there seem to be no answers.

The state machinery’s track record is one of see-sawing. In 2019, the Ministry of External Affairs described the NRC process as “statutory, transparent, legal”, a “fair process based on scientific methods”. In almost the same breath, it has called for the NRC to be scrapped. Shifting these goalposts for political gains reflects an extraordinary lack of regard for the people who have been excluded. Those included in the NRC are also waiting for the final list to be gazetted.

The authorities have not been treating this matter with the gravity that it deserves. Justice delayed, as the adage goes, is justice denied. The state needs to take urgent steps to move the NRC process forward as soon as possible and to ensure that guarantees of due processes are in place. Otherwise, in the words of Nurjehan Begum, “citizenship will remain a dark cloud looming over (our) lives”.

This article first appeared in the print edition on September 1, 2020 under the title ‘Year of uncertainty’. Baruah is a Guwahati-based lawyer and graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Boston. Wadud is a Guwahati-based human rights lawyer. Both work with the Justice and Liberty Initiative, which takes on cases of those deprived of citizenship in Assam

Source: Indian Express, 1/09/20

Politics after NRC threatens to change old framework of Assamese nationalism

When the Bill returns, seeking to accommodate Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, it will upset the section of Assamese whose opposition to illegal migrants does not recognise religion.

A distant but distinct memory from my student days, which I often recall with fondness, concerns an incident so trivial that I would never have thought of bringing it up in connection with something as serious as the National Register of Citizens (NRC). Yet there can be no better illustration of what our identity meant to us:

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It was after dinner at our engineering college hostel, and we were taking a new boarder through an introductory routine. We asked him to chant the national anthem; he faltered a little. Are you not Indian, we asked. I am Naga, the freshman said with pride. You are Naga but Indian first, one senior started to preach, when another interrupted him: Let him be Naga first if he wishes, as long as he is Indian; just as we are Assamese first and also Indian.

No need for anyone to outrage. Nearly every Assamese I know is as proud of his or her nationality as an Indian from any other state. That observation by my friend was just a reflection of the times. In the wisdom of the 1980s, “Assamese first” was the identity we wore on our sleeve. A logician might find the idea questionable — each one of us was all his identities simultaneously — but what the phrase conveyed was tied with emotion. It remains in circulation today; the question is whether it carries the same import as before. As we get more and more “mainstreamed” and a new politics of religion competes with the regional pride of old, every Assamese may one day need to reflect on what we once were, and what we are turning out to be.

Take the NRC. The exercise was religion-neutral at its core, seeking to identify citizens on the basis of a cut-off date. But after its completion, the focus has been on the religious faith of one section among the 19 lakh excluded — Bengali Hindus, who may eventually be given citizenship — and even more on one section among the 3.11 crore included. The NRC has given legitimacy to lakhs of migrant-origin Muslims, who had papers to show that they or their ancestors had entered Assam before the cut-off date. For this very reason, many of them had welcomed the NRC, but it turns out that they are still being viewed with suspicion despite — and because of — their high inclusion in districts bordering Bangladesh.

What I have set out to reflect on is not, however, whether the number of exclusions is too low or just right, or the unanswered question of what will happen to those who will still be left out after the NRC is trimmed further after the appeals and legislation. This is about a puzzle called the Assamese identity, now confounded by religion.

Religion has cast its shadow in strange ways. Take the “Miya Poetry” controversy, when verses of self-assertion by Bengal-origin Muslims caused offence to many Assamese, leading to police booking them. Those who had filed the complaints included a number of Assamese Muslim organisations. In one news report, a complainant was quoted as saying that “we are Assamese first and Muslims later”. Those two words again, so nostalgic and relatable. Come to think of it, however, it begs a question: Is it necessary to mention your religious faith to show that you are more Assamese than others?

Indeed, the idea of Assamese identity, for some, has often coexisted with contempt for the other. The 1979-85 agitation against illegal immigration may have limited its focus to those who had entered Assam after a cut-off date, but the emotions it generated were built on larger Assamese anxieties around the migrant communities as a whole. When the cut-off was agreed and signed, it came with the implicit premise that the greater Assamese society would accommodate migrants on the right side of that date. Instead, a number of factors, including population growth and political consolidation around the AIUDF, have raised the anxieties around Bengal-origin Muslims, while the proposed Citizenship Amendment Bill has threatened to reopen a fault line between Assamese and Bengali Hindus.

When the Bill returns, seeking to accommodate Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, it will upset the section of Assamese whose opposition to illegal migrants does not recognise religion. It will also raise a new question, between one Assamese and another. If a Hindu migrant is a better migrant than a Muslim migrant, does it mean, by extension, that an Assamese Muslim is less Assamese than an Assamese Hindu?

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As a society, we appear to be holding on. We still pat each other on the back, thump our secular chests with Assamese pride, and still celebrate our shared culture and shared history of centuries — from the Battle of Saraighat when our ancestors brought Mughal invaders to their knees, to the language riots when our elders were killed, and the agitation against illegal immigration when 855 of our generation became martyrs.

As voters, however, we are already divided. In 2016, when the BJP won Assam for the first time, a survey by Lokniti-CSDS, published in this paper, found that two-thirds of Assamese Hindus had voted for the BJP and two-thirds of Assamese Muslims for the Congress. Like Assamese Hindus, two-thirds of Bengali Hindus had voted for the BJP, while Bengali Muslims had split evenly between the Congress and AIUDF.

Maybe I worry too much, but I keep an eye on the Muslim population, already over one-third of Assam’s total by 2011. Yes, that population includes both Assamese and Bengal-origin Muslims. But if it keeps growing, will an Assamese who looks at me as a fellow Assamese today, see instead a Muslim tomorrow?

Who knows, that day too may come. It can never be sweeping, though; there will always be some who continue to believe in what we once were. Defined by the cliché we used that night more than three decades ago. Assamese first. Non-negotiable.

kabir.firaque@expressindia.com

Source: Indian Express, 23/09/2019

Courts of injustice

The fate of close to two million people excluded from the NRC in Assam rests with the Foreigners Tribunals. The constitutionality and conduct of these quasi-judicial bodies are questionable

Over 1.9 million people have been excluded from the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. The herculean executive exercise, mandated and closely monitored by the Supreme Court, has incurred a staggering expenditure of over Rs 1,200 crore and immeasurable cost in terms of human suffering and death. The buck now passes to the Foreigners Tribunals. The fate of close to two million people who have been excluded from the NRC rests with these one-man tribunals. The constitutionality of these quasi-judicial bodies — from the appointment of its members, arbitrary procedure for its functioning and the nature of its orders — have always been in question. Yet, the numbers of these tribunals are being increased, from the existing 100 to more than 200, to adjudicate upon citizenship claims. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the order of the Foreigners Tribunals will prevail over the NRC order on citizenship and declined to create an appellate forum for appeal from the tribunals.

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Foreigners Tribunals were set up by an executive order in 1964 in contravention of Article 323B of the Constitution, which requires the legislature, by law, to provide for adjudication of matters by tribunals. The matters that can be decided by the tribunal, listed within the Article, do not include citizenship. “Judicial experience” was an essential appointment criteria for its members, as stated in the 1964 order. However, the eligibility was relaxed in June 2019 by a notification, calling for applications from retired civil servants and advocates with just seven years of practice, to be appointed on a contractual basis, through an interview conducted by a panel of high court judges. Two hundred and twenty one members were recently appointed without any written test and no transparency in the selection process. The members of the tribunal are selected by the Gauhati High Court, but the appointment is done through the home and political department of the Assam government. The tenure of tribunal members and extension of their terms is based on a review of “performance” conducted by the Gauhati HC.

The minutes of the monitoring committee of the HC reveal that the government is also asked to send its appraisal of tribunal members to the court. The performance report of the government has a special column — “percentage of foreigners declared”. Extension is often given to those who have declared the maximum number of persons as foreigners — the low scorers are “terminated”. Pay and allowances of members is regulated by the government. “Impartiality is the soul of the judiciary, independence is the life blood of the judiciary”, held a Constitution Bench in UOI v R. Gandhi (2010). In the absence of security of tenure and dependence on the government, these tribunals cannot function freely and impartially. There is no mechanism for receiving complaints against members of a tribunal, giving a free hand to such members to adjudicate, most often without any judicial experience, on citizenship — the right to all rights.

Apart from those excluded from the NRC, who now have to appeal in the Foreigners Tribunals within a period of 120 days, the Assam Border Police and the Election Commission refer cases to the tribunals. Inquiry reports submitted by Assam Border Police to the tribunal, while making a reference, are often blank. There are allegations that poor and unlettered are randomly picked up and, on non-production of citizenship documents, referred to the tribunals. Further, the Election Commission, since 1997, under the pretext of a “strict scrutiny” of the voter list, started an exercise that marked D or “doubtful” against any person in the list, arbitrarily, without any investigation. In the absence of investigation, even decorated army officers have been referred as illegal immigrants to the tribunals.

These tribunals have the power to regulate their own procedure for disposal of cases expeditiously. The section 3(1) of the Foreigners Tribunals Order requires that the tribunal shall serve on the person to whom the question relates, a copy of the main grounds on which he is alleged to be a foreigner. However, in practice, these are rarely mentioned in the notices issued by the tribunals. With no grounds to rebut and the burden of proof on the person alleged to be a foreigner, it becomes impossible to present a cogent case before the tribunal. Most of those declared foreigners by the tribunals are poor and do not have access to legal aid to represent them through the procedural spiral. If a person does not appear before the tribunal, either for lack of understanding of the notice issued or in the absence of any notice, such persons are declared as foreigner by an ex parte order. According to a question in the Lok Sabha in July this year, the minister of state in the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that as many as 63,959 persons have been declared foreigners through ex parte proceedings in Assam between 1985 and (February) 2019. The order of the tribunals can be challenged before a division bench of the Gauhati High Court in writ jurisdiction, most often distant and beyond the means of the poor.

Once a person is declared a foreigner, s/he can be detained under Section 4 of the Foreigners Act, 1946. There are close to 1,000 detainees in six detention centres across Assam. Pending deportation, these persons languish in sub-human conditions with little or no access to legal aid or rights such as adequate healthcare and education. According to the government’s own figures, only four such declared foreigners have been deported since February 2013. Since there is no agreement with Bangladesh to deport declared foreigners, their detention seemingly is indefinite. The Supreme Court, in May, ordered all those who had been in detention for over three years to be released on production of two sureties of Rs one lakh each and reporting to the local police station every week. However, four months after the order of the Supreme Court, only nine declared foreigners have been released while 355 remain detained for more than three years, as on June 2019.

Diversity, plurality and inclusivity form the bedrock of the Indian Constitution, which abhors systematic targeting of the minorities and xenophobia. Unfortunately, in Sarbananda Sonowal (2005), the Supreme Court itself laid the ground for xenophobia. Relying on unverified reports about the influx of foreigners, the apex court declared the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act unconstitutional on the ground that it placed the burden of proving a person to be a foreigner on the state. These tribunals were manned by proper judges and the percentage of those declared foreigners was low. The Supreme Court declared that the Union had failed to protect the State of Assam against “external aggression” caused by the huge influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh! This astounding judgment has since set the tone for all future proceedings under the Foreigners Act.

Bhushan and D’souza are advocates at the Supreme Court of India

Source: Indian Express, 20/09/2019

It is important to contextualise the NRC

Errors aside, the process was rigorous, methodical and did not target any particular community

The National Register of Citizens (NRC), which was expected to land with a bang in Assam, seems to some as having landed with a mere whoosh. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders are particularly upset as it has belied their hopes of netting a huge number of immigrant Muslims in a dragnet — reportedly, a majority of those left out are Hindus. The All Assam Students Union (AASU) has expressed disappointment, arguing that the numbers did not tally with earlier figures mentioned by the government. Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has even given dark hints of ‘other measures’ in store to offset the ‘errors’ in the NRC.

On the other hand, former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta has welcomed it as satisfactory. Pradip Bhuyan, whose PIL galvanised the process of preparing the NRC; The Forum Against Amendment of the Citizenship Bill, which I chaired; and organisations representing immigrant Muslims have also welcomed it, while pointing out that such a massive and complex exercise in a country where official documentation is still at a rudimentary stage is not likely to be foolproof.

Those expressing their disappointment ignore that the rigorous procedures and methodical cross-verifications were not put in place to fulfil some people’s fantasies. The previous figures cited by the government in earlier times were not based on any systematic procedure.

Rhetoric and reality

The concerns over the migration of Muslims also mask a social phenomenon. As Dr. Ilias Ali, a surgeon and crusader for family planning, and Abdul Mannan, a retired professor of statistics, have shown, the Muslims’ swelling numbers are the result of widespread poverty, illiteracy, early marriage and lack of birth-control measures rather than migration. However, this is not to deny that some migration did take place.

The results should also set at rest the tireless campaign by certain well-meaning but ill-informed people in the academic and media circles to paint the NRC as a vicious plot by some ‘xenophobic Assamese’ to oppress and torture Muslims. The process was impersonal and its strict machine-like operation pre-empted the targeting of any particular community. While there may have been errors and lapses, there is no truth to the allegation of bias.

People outside Assam have very little idea of the terrible times Assam lived through from the 1980s to the late 1990s. Social unrest, ethnic conflict, militancy and insurgency under different flags created a monstrous and stifling atmosphere. There was a complete lack of security, loss of trust between different communities and uncontrolled violence. The government’s attempt to quell these with the Army and the police made matters worse.

On the other hand, there was also an attempt by a group of civil society activists, saner political elements and mature tribal leaders to mobilise support for peace. At that juncture in the late 1990s, popular Muslim clerical leaders came aboard and publicly declared their support for the Assam Accord, which they had opposed tooth and nail for a decade after 1985. This was a watershed moment, when the demand for an NRC gained greater traction.

Earlier, since 1979, a turbulent stir in the State against a perceived threat to native identities had practically held the government to ransom, disrupted businesses and put a stop to education. Looking back, I cannot help feeling that underground saffron brigades had a lot to do with some of the grim incidents. In any case, there was a stream of BJP leaders visiting the State to rally massive crowds. The curtains were drawn on these scenes in 1985 after the signing of the Assam Accord, which set 1971 as the cut-off year for determining citizenship. Immigrant Muslims initially considered it a betrayal and even formed their own political party but, as mentioned above, they began expressing support for the pact in the late 1990s.

The colonial roots

‘But why is there so much hue and cry about migration, which is a natural human phenomenon?’ wonder many outsiders who do not know the history of Assam. Such an attempt to naturalise sociopolitical events is an intellectual folly. The roots of the State’s discontent can be traced to the early decades of the 20th century. The British colonial rulers, after fleecing poor East Bengal peasants for more than a century, apprehended a massive peasant revolt and promoted the latter’s migration to Assam. The relocation, which began as a trickle in the early decades of the 20th century, turned into a deluge in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, the British also set off an alarm among native Assamese people about their lands being ‘seized’ and their culture ‘being’ buried. Provocative remarks like those by Census superintendent C.S. Mullan in 1931 made the situation worse, turning anxiety into panic. Muslim leaders like Maulana Bhasani breathed fire into this by demanding both land for new immigrants and inclusion of Assam in Pakistan. However, following Independence, when Bhasani went to East Pakistan and left millions of his followers in the lurch, it was a grim acceptance by the immigrant Muslims of their fate, patient negotiations with Congress leaders and sheer grit that saw them through.

Fortunately, there was also a strand of Assamese national culture that tolerated diversity of faith and promoted peaceful coexistence and fraternal relations. Cultural icons like writers Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, Bishnu Prasad Rabha and singer-musician Bhupen Hazarika upheld that tradition and until the Assam Movement, which began in 1979, the relations remained cordial.

The fate of the excluded

Now that the NRC has ended, what are we to do with the 19 lakh people left out? The problem is that their fate will be decided by Foreigners’ Tribunals which are short of mature and judicially trained members and which have so far leaned on reports of the Border Police. An option of appeal to the higher echelons of the judiciary does exist for those excluded but that is likely to be expensive and sometimes unaffordable. The government has promised legal aid but we have to wait and watch if it is dispensed impartially.

And what will be the fate of those left out, most of them poor and hapless, after these appeals are exhausted? Deporting them is not an option. However, many of the Assamese people, living in a State that is still under-developed, are not willing to bear their burden at a time when their own lot is facing difficult times due to the annual floods, a drying up of natural resources and the cut-throat competition. They are scared of losing whatever political power they have enjoyed. It is the Centre’s responsibility to rehabilitate and look after those who are left out after the exercise. In the meantime, patience and a refusal to take the bait of rumours and inflammatory rhetoric may see the Assamese through.

Hiren Gohain is a scholar and literary critic

Source: The Hindu, 5/09/2019

In Assam, basic dignity at stake

There are concerns over how the State government plans to solve the issue of stateless citizens after the NRC exercise

The Supreme Court has extended the day of reckoning for the controversial exercise known as the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam from July 31 to August 31, giving a month’s relief or another opportunity to those who are off the list to scramble and get into it. Thus, it has provided an equal time frame for those who say that many on the list shouldn’t be there because they are not actually ‘foreigners’.

With this extension, the Court rejected demands by both the Central and State governments which, concerned about the nationwide controversy about the drive, had said they wanted to re-verify 10% to 20% of those on the list. In making such a request, the governments were expressing a degree of anxiety about the data quality of a process for which they themselves have pressed strongly since 2014.

The Court’s decision was based on a declaration by the State Coordinator of the NRC, the officer whom it has mandated to run the NRC, that such a review was not necessary: his team had already re-verified 27% of the list. This again has roiled the waters — the local unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) says the officer, Prateek Hajela, had no business to do so. The State unit’s president asserted that the party stood by its demand for a 20% re-verification: “Even if some more time is taken, we want a correct NRC.”

The concern here is that many Hindu Bengalis will be left out of the NRC and hence also get disenfranchised in the process. This has happened numerous times in the ongoing exercise as also with members of traditional tribal groups in the State.

Identifying Indians

The goal of the gargantuan effort of the NRC appears simple: identify Indians living in Assam and by exclusion pick out the ‘foreigners’ or Bangladeshis. In this case, some 40 lakh people were left out of the NRC when the draft list was published last July. This led to an outcry by civil society groups, and media accounts showed how citizens had been left out, reportedly on religious and ethnic grounds, and due to bad data collection. In the past months, not less than 36 lakh or 3.6 million counter claims seeking inclusion were filed.

That is nearly 90% of those who were left out. In the last storm of data-driven efforts, the country’s highest court allowed not less than two lakh complaints against people alleged to be “foreigners” by others whose identity was kept secret. Unknown entities tossed vague charges against people who had lived in India for generations.

The overall effort is to untangle what appears to be nothing short of a Gordian knot — to resolve the issue of illegal immigration from neighbouring Bangladesh into the region over decades. But each stage and layer appear to underline how challenging the problems remain, with issues of legal redress being acute.

The plight of the stateless

Concerns in Assam have been high over the purported influx post-1971 after the creation of Bangladesh. The effort is to calm local anxieties and also cater to a political agenda. Yet the question that is often asked but rarely answered is what happens to those individuals (and their dependents) who are deemed stateless after they find themselves off the list.

I have two questions: What becomes of them while applying to tribunals and courts for relief — all the way to the Supreme Court, a detailed, drawn-out process? How will the government deal with those who are declared non-citizens and if Bangladesh refuses to take them, saying they are not its nationals, as it has consistently held for decades?

In this context, the recent remarks of a senior BJP leader from Assam on the issue are important. For they outline a process which the government believes can help resolve the situation. In a recent television panel discussion, the BJP leader underlined his non-acceptance of the Assam Accord, which has been the madhyam (medium) for the issue of alleged migrants, and which enabled the conferring of citizenship on a distinct group of people after a cooling off period of 10 years.

About 75,000 persons who benefited from this process had migrated from then East Pakistan between 1966 and 1971; most of them were Hindus. The BJP leader said that such a cooling off period was unacceptable, that “there should be” push back” but “push back with dignity”.

But it is significant, however, that what appears to be emerging is that until such expulsion, alleged foreigners must have access to rights that will enable their survival. These would include the right to education and health. But it would exclude the right to vote or to acquire property so that they did not have a role in political processes.

Is this an indication of how the governments, in Assam and the Centre, are thinking of resolving the issue? Could the “suspected” perhaps not be displaced from their locations but deprived of the right to vote and acquisition of property? As has been mentioned earlier, what also needs to be clarified is the status of lands on which they are living or have acquired. Will they be deprived of those? Would this amount to creating an enduring phenomena since Bangladesh refuses to take alleged illegals back?

Many of those who are off the list are poor, cannot afford lawyers and may not even know of their right to legal aid. At stake is the basic dignity of the weak, voiceless and vulnerable. The next few months will see how many of them will receive succour and how many will need to carry their bundles of documents from court to court in an unending and perhaps desperate search for hope.

Sanjoy Hazarika is International Director, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative. The views expressed are personal

Source: The Hindu, 30/07/2019