The spectre of deportation

The outcome of the NRC exercise has implications for India’s ties with Bangladesh

The last date for filing claims and objections for Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) has been extended by the Supreme Court to December 31, from December 15. This exercise of compiling the NRC in the first place has sparked a debate around its political, economic and humanitarian consequences, and its implications for India’s relationship with its neighbours, particularly Bangladesh. In fact, there was some disquiet in Bangladesh when the Indian Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, lent support to the NRC drive, claiming that those settled in Indian territory without legal jurisdiction posed a threat to national security.

Two-way traffic

Few seem to realise that there are legal as well as illegal Indian immigrants in Bangladesh too. According to the latest available Bangladesh government estimates of 2009, more than 500,000 Indians were working in Bangladesh. More recently, Bangladesh was reported to be among the highest source of remittances to India, behind the United Arab Emirates, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the U.K. Many Indian citizens are securing coveted employment opportunities in Bangladesh through multinational companies, non-governmental organisations, and trading activities. To put things into perspective, most of them are employed in advantageous jobs in Bangladesh while Bangladeshis in India are largely employed in low-paying jobs.

The ruling establishment in India maintains that the NRC is an administrative task overseen by the Supreme Court, and not a political gambit. However, some members of the ruling party have been making hateful anti-migration and anti-Bangladeshi comments that reflect poorly on the prevalent positive relationship between Bangladesh and India.

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has assured the Bangladesh government that those excluded from the NRC will not be deported, Dhaka has so far been silent on the issue, terming it as an ‘internal matter of India’. This is seen as a signal that Bangladesh, already stretched in terms of resources and manpower to host Rohingya refugees, would not be acceding to a request of taking back Bengali-speaking Muslims in case deportation is initiated. Yet, some remain apprehensive, pointing out that Bangladesh had been similarly unconcerned about the Rohingya issue, which did not prevent the country from ultimately hosting more than a million Rohingya.

Neighbourhood first?

Mr. Modi came to power with proclamation of a ‘Neighbourhood First’ policy. Midway in the final year of his term, the reality speaks quite differently. Nepal, once a time-tested ally, has tilted towards China since the 2015 Nepal blockade barring the entry of fuel, medicine and other vital supplies and holding the state to a literal siege. Nepal now has been given access to four Chinese ports at Tianjin, Shenzhen, Lianyungang and Zhanjiang in addition to its dry (land) ports at Lanzhou, Lhasa and Xigatse, as well as roads to these facilities, ending India’s monopoly to its trading routes. The India-Bhutan relationship has also been strained ever since India temporarily withdrew subsidies on cooking gas and kerosene in 2013, constraining bilateral ties. The Doklam stand-off in the summer of 2017 reinforced Bhutan’s scepticism towards Chinese expansionist plans across the region. Simultaneously, Thimphu has been underlining the landlocked kingdom’s aspiration to affirm its sovereignty. It has, for instance, stepped out of India’s diplomatic influence, as evidenced by its withdrawal from the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) motor vehicles agreement. The India-China power play has also cast its shadow over Sri Lanka and the Maldives in the last few years.

Against this backdrop of China making inroads into South Asia and India’s backyard, Bangladesh has so far been the most trusted ally of India. On the security front, it has cooperated in India’s crackdown on insurgents. Border Security Force (BSF) chief K.K. Sharma said last year that because of close cooperation with Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) “the number of training places and hideouts of these insurgents (in Bangladesh) has been reduced to almost zero.” Annual bilateral trade is set to cross the $9 billion mark, making it India’s biggest trading partner in South Asia. In addition, Bangladesh has facilitated connectivity with the Northeast by allowing the use of Chittagong and Mongla ports. However, the Teesta water-sharing issue remains unaddressed, non-tariff barriers on Bangladeshi exports persist and border killings are yet to become a thing of the past.

The NRC issue threatens to disturb the equilibrium in India-Bangladesh ties. It is vital to note that Bangladesh is heading for elections at the end of this month, and in poll campaigns, relations with India tend to be played up. Plans for deportation of those not on the NRC list are not only politically imprudent but also risk inciting unrest across the region. Previous similar exercises have not been effective and only resulted in alienating individuals from their natural rights.

Syed Munir Khasru, chairman of the Institute for Policy, Advocacy, and Governance, is based in Dhaka. E-mail: munir.khasru@ipag.org

Source: The Hindu, 17/12/2018

A feeling of homelessness

Anti-NRC campaigns refuse to acknowledge that Assam’s indigenous people are losing land and economic space

The strident propaganda launched by some quarters against the updating process of Assam’s unique National Register of Citizens 1951, insinuating that this was a conspiracy to disenfranchise a huge number of Indians, forget that the upgradation is being carried out under the direction and supervision of the Supreme Court of India in a state that has long suffered from large-scale infiltration of foreign nationals.

It was decided to have an NRC for Assam after the 1951 census after it came to notice that large-scale illegal migration was taking place in the state. It was a far-sighted decision. Unfortunately, this exercise was abandoned in the subsequent censuses, presumably under the influence of vote bank politics. And illegal migration through the porous border continued. This created a situation in which the indigenous people of Assam were gradually losing their land and economic space, and further becoming almost politically irrelevant in their native land. The Assam Agitation took place in such a situation. Indian researchers have documented the migration problem and even an American researcher, Myron Weiner, discussed in detail Assam’s disturbing demographic change in his book, The Sons of the Soil. In 1987, the then Assam Governor Lt General S K Sinha had submitted a detailed and well-documented report to the President of India on the issue of illegal migration suggesting many measures to effectively prevent this undesirable situation. Unfortunately, successive governments ignored the well-meaning recommendations of the governor.

The draft of the full NRC was published on July 30, 2018. Despite the exercise being undertaken under the supervision of the apex court, a massive international campaign was carried out against the exercise even before the final draft was published in the name of human rights. It launched a signature campaign claiming it to be a conspiracy to deprive 70 lakh “Indian Muslims” of their citizenship equating the fate of this imaginary number to that of the Rohingya of Myanmar. Another campaign was carried out by some organisations and intellectuals from the Barak Valley to call it an exercise against the Bangla-speaking population of Assam.

Where do these two separate campaigns, issuing from two different socio-cultural registers, meet? They both are attempting to paint this exercise as conspiratorial on behalf of the indigenous people, who have ironically been at the receiving end of migration pressure on demography since the time of the British occupation of this region. The British encouraged continuous migration of the immigrants for making their occupation profitable. The trend continued and migration increased even after the partition of India. Successive ruling parties have found in the immigrants a vote bank. So through the successive census operations, demography continued to change in favour of the non-indigenous people with the alarming reduction of the original natives. History does not go back and the pre-British original natives of Assam cannot be expected to get back the comfortable position of absolute preeminence of the past. This is the lesson the Assam agitation has taught resulting in the compromise of Assam Accord. But the one thing the indigenous communities will not accept is being a minority in their homeland and be politically beholden to the immigrants, who may, in course of time, try to grab the major portion of the political cake. The anti-NRC campaigns are an attempt not only to communalise the exercise but also to cause an amnesia about the historical fact of continuous loss of political and economic space by the indigenous people.

The NRC is an exercise to ensure that genuine Indian citizens are not deprived of the entry of their names in the register and that those who entered India after March 24, 1971 from Bangladesh are not included in the same register. The acceptance of the entire stream of immigrants from the date of the independence of the country till March 24, 1971 is not only a recognition of the historical situation of the birth of Bangladesh, but for the autochthons, it is a big sacrifice of their interests and rights on their native soil.

Since the Supreme Court is overseeing the exercise, it must lend its weight to the preparation of a correct NRC. Entry of names in the NRC needs proof of some documents, which are many with alternatives, and everyone including the indigenous people have been required to collect and submit these documents. Everyone has taken a lot of pains to submit their proof of citizenship. If there is some mistake and if there is some mischief, all such aberartions have to be rectified during the ongoing process of submission of complaints and if it is found that any official is indulging in mischief, such official/s have to be taken to task according to procedure. Unfortunately, the ruling party by bringing in an amendment to the Citizenship Act to grant citizenship to illegal migrants of all religious communities barring the Muslims, has provided ammunition to international groups to paint a communal picture of the NRC document.

This exercise is not the end of the struggle of the indigenous communities to preserve their native identity. The Clause 6 of the Assam Accord has to be implemented to ensure constitutional safeguards for the future of these communities. Assam’s Commissioner of Home L S Changsan has said “a common database is being created with the objective to avoid confusion and overlapping”. This is welcome as it will help citizens from being subjected to undue harassment. Besides, the updating is not an one-time exercise. The citizens will have children, and so, there has to be a seamless process for updating the NRC in future to include the newborns. In future, the birth and death registration will have to be linked to the NRC database.

Source: Indian Express, 27/08/2018

National Register of Citizens: Beginnings and endings

For lakhs of immigrants, Muslim and Hindu, NRC puts final seal on citizenship. For others, it’s a long road to closure.

It’s been a week since the publication of the final draft of the National Register of Citizens. The prophets of doom have been proved wrong and a sense of calm prevails throughout the state. Not to speak of media and social analysts, even the state government which had asked for an additional 150 companies of para-military forces to deal with possible outbreaks of violence and had sought help from the Northeast Space Application Centre for proper mapping of the char or riverine areas for better policing, seems to have been caught by surprise.

Many have attributed this calm to the assurance given by the central government that mere omission of names from the NRC did not amount to being labelled a foreigner and that those left out of the NRC would be able to file claims before September 28 with a hint that this date could be further extended. Others have said that it goes to the credit of the Assamese and other indigenous people that they have reacted with “maturity” to the announcement that such a large number of “foreigners” have been detected in their state. Most of the Assamese nationalist organisations like the AASU and the AJYCP have declared that they would help all those Indian citizens whose names have not figured in the NRC to file their claims and have even offered to provide free legal assistance to those who cannot afford it.

This sudden sense of magnanimity on the part of the AASU and its sister organisations, who have enthusiastically celebrated the publication of the final draft list, seems to stem from the fact that they see the NRC as a final vindication of their several decades-long struggle to rid the state of foreign nationals. For them, this appears to be the beginning of a closure of an issue that has bogged the state since Independence. Whether it would really be a closure remains to be seen, especially because of the immense humanitarian dimensions involved in making lakhs of people stateless. But as of now, one notices a major change in the AASU’s usual rhetoric which appears quite toned down and accommodative, especially because it would like to take along with it all the stakeholders in the process, including minority organisations which it had long considered as enemies.

Now that doubts about the citizenship of lakhs of pre-1971 Muslim immigrants have been cleared, the AASU would obviously need their support to resist what is being seen by many as an onslaught on the status of the Assamese language by the rising number of Bengali speakers in the state. As per the 2011 language census, the number of Assamese speakers has decreased to 48 per cent from 58 per cent in 1991 while Bengali speakers have increased from 22 per cent (1991) to 30 per cent.

Although several minority organisations of Assam have expressed their doubts about the NRC process, the overall response to the publication of the NRC’s final draft has been quite positive. In most of the local TV shows, leaders of these organisations have welcomed the NRC and have expressed the hope that in the final list, the names of most of those who do not figure now would be included. It appears that the apprehensions that there would be a large-scale deletion of names in the Bengali-dominated areas of the Barak and Brahmaputra Valley have not been substantiated by the final NRC list.

According to a survey carried out by senior journalist Mrinal Talukdar of the leading local TV channel, Pratidin, the highest number of deletions, percentage wise, has been in the districts of Nagaon, Darrang, Bongaigaon and Kamrup Metro, where it ranges from 25 to 31 per cent, Darrang district heading the list. By contrast, the deletion figures are substantially less in districts like Morigaon, Karimganj, Goalpara, Barpeta, Cachar which have always been seen as dominated by illegal infiltrants from Bangladesh.

Another reason why the NRC figures have not created a stir is the fact that most of the pre-1971 immigrants of East Pakistan/ Bangladesh origin who have been living all these years with the tag of a foreigner have now found a place in the citizens’ register. The Deputy Speaker of the Assam assembly, Dilip Kumar Paul, summed up this feeling of relief when he said that despite his wife’s name not figuring in the list, he was happy that the people of Cachar and the Barak Valley, who have long carried the “Bangladeshi tag”, are now finally rid of it. The NRC, he said, has finally put the seal of citizenship on 90 per cent of the people of Barak Valley. This is also true of most of the other districts of the Brahmaputra and Barak Valleys where large masses of people long seen as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and looked upon with suspicion have now been cleared of stigma and accepted as citizens at par with the state’s indigenous people. This is certainly a great relief for these people and partly explains the lack of tension in the state following the publication of the NRC.

It needs to be seen that for lakhs of immigrants, both Muslim and Hindu, the NRC has put a final seal on their citizenship and this is a great closure for them. In this context, It is significant that organisations like the Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha, which has moved the Supreme Court for 1951 to be the cut-off year instead of 1971, have accused the AASU and the Asom Sahitya Sabha of betraying the Assamese cause by helping lakhs of “foreigners” to get citizenship.

It is near certain that after all the claims and objections are dealt with, the actual number of deletions will substantially come down. But even then, there would be a massive number of stateless persons, necessitating a well coordinated, nationwide move to work out a solution within humanitarian parameters. But that in itself should not deflect from the ground reality in Assam where immigration and demographic change continue to be a major concern for the indigenes.

Source: Indian Expres, 7/08/2018

Citizenship and compassion

Can India manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy?

The current situation in Assam seems like a nightmare, a warning about the internal contradictions of democracy. It is a warning that the 19th century ideas of democracy as electoral-ism and the notion of the nation-state as a fetishism of borders may be inappropriate as imaginations for the 21st century. It is a caution that governance and politics are full of ironies and paradoxes and that the best of intentions might lead to the worst consequences. Inherent in it is the banalisation of evil that can take place when suffering on a large scale gets reduced to a cost-benefit scenario. Democratic India rarely had experiences of detention camps, except during the India-Pakistan wars, and in 1962 when Indians of Chinese origin were unfairly detained in camps. The last episode, a stain on the Indian conscience, is forgotten or swept aside. Today, the statistic of four million names off the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) is reduced to an everyday problem of management. This routinisation of violence is deeply worrying.

Surveillance state

There is another piece of cynicism that one needs to be cautious of. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is adept at projecting a mastery of electoral frames and governance to maximise electoral output. It took the normalcy of a governance project and turned it into a panopticon, classifying citizens through a system of surveillance, creating a sense of sovereignty where the bureaucrat plays god, deciding who is in and who is out. With 40 lakh names off the final draft of the NRC, it has made a play for the majoritarian vote. The party will dwell on the claim that it took the bull by the horns, updating the citizens’ register, a challenge the Congress was not up to.

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The politics of citizens’ registers underlines the problem of migratory politics, refracted through the layered memories of many historical events. It began in the colonial era when the British attempted to import labour for the plantations. Major displacements like Partition and the Bangladesh war added to a huge “illegal” population. “Legality” is determined through certificates. Legitimacy is a stamped paper. But the question one asks is, what happens to the ones who have grown roots, who have brought land in the area? Do they not count with the stroke of a pen? In fact, it forces one to open up the question of who is a citizen? Is citizenship based on land, residence, identity, cultural roots, language, ethnicity? Or is it a formal certificate, a clerical endorsement that makes one a citizen? Informal economies operate according to parallel rules, with residents getting regularised over time and obtaining the entitlements of citizenship after decades of stay. Here, the temporariness of the migrant is something that haunts her. Vulnerable though she is, she also becomes prey to electoral politics of corrupt politicians seeking instant constituencies.

A leader’s summary

The very scale of the exercise, the suggestion that 40 lakh people must do more to prove their claim to citizenship, gives it a technocratic air. The sense of history and memory is lost. As West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee suggested, the label ‘infiltrator’ already implicates you in a paranoid world, where the other is perpetually suspect. Ms. Banerjee attempted to introduce a notion of sanity by observing that while there may be a minuscule number of people who are infiltrators from across the border, among the 40 lakh people who don’t find their names on the NRC are those who crossed over decades back, compelled by historical reasons, and they cannot be considered infiltrators. She made three quick points. First, infiltrators and refugees are different categories, to be coped with differently. Second, time and history are crucial for comprehending such a colossal event. To reduce it to one moment is mindless. Third, by introducing such measures, it is the BJP that is playing the infiltrator, penetrating into citizens’ lives, probing what they eat, what they wear and what they do. The BJP, in treating Assam as an enclosure, is also panopticon-ising our world, increasing the level of surveillance and control over our lives.

The point Ms. Banerjee is making is fundamental. In this tussle between nation-state and an open democracy, the enclosure and the panopticon as mediums of control are at odds with the idea of the commons and the hospitality of the community. Technocratic solutions cannot hide the absence of human and historical understanding. She might be dismissed as a rabble rouser, but it is she who is pointing out that the BJP is playing on the anxieties of people, rousing old hates between Bengal and Assam. To hide behind the abstractions of sovereignty and security and, officialising parochialism is the logic of the BJP game.

The handling and management of large populations create a problem of ethics. Assam raises the question of both triage and exterminism. Once one plays out the census game, makes a few concessions, one almost feels that the remainder are dispensable. The dispensability and disposability of large populations confronts India on a large scale. One cannot handle such situations merely through law. One needs generosity, hospitality and compassion. One needs to understand that once our civics accepts the detention centre and the internment camp as routine, we are creating gulags of the mind, where one can begin with an ordinary act of classification and erase a people. Indian democracy has to face the genocidal prospect inherent both in its technocratic sense of governance and in the anxieties that electoralism creates.

The populist frame

In fact, it is BJP president Amit Shah who gives away the game as his party adopts a tough stand. He claims that the BJP is fighting for the security of the people. The shift from citizenship to a preoccupation with security unfolds a different paradigm of thought. Nation-state and citizenship as encompassing entities offer different ideas of order and control. Security is a panopticon-ising notion, while citizenship is a caring, even protective, one. Security operates on the grids of surveillance, scrutiny and separation. Citizenship is a more hospitable notion of initiating the other into a system. The norms of the paradigm are different. Mr. Shah’s response was a giveaway because it puts the idea of security within a populist framework, where demographic and cultural anxiety becomes the raw material for emerging vote banks. A register which began as a routine, even clinical exercise now acquires a Machiavellian shadow. Suspicion and anxiety magnify as rumour becomes epidemic. One hopes the register does not create an Orwellian situation where some are more equal than others.

This point becomes clearer when we read that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants a similar NRC exercise in West Bengal and other States. Rather than seeing wider conspiracy theories, it is the inner contradictions of the exercise that we shall consider.

The Assam model?

Maybe one has to go back and look at our Constitution and reread notions of the border, the very idea of citizenship. We need to go beyond hard definitions and look at the penumbra of these concepts. A citizen may be defined in terms of certain properties. But the question is, how humane or plural is such a definition? Can we manage with a certain amount of disorder to sustain a plural vision of democracy? These are the questions Assam raises but our policy-makers do not discuss. How do we create a more hospitable, affable theory of citizenship where marginal groups survive, where nomads and other fluid groups are allowed to follow their life lines? Can we think of a nation-state with permeable borders and a fluid sense of citizenship which makes life more hopeful for the refugee? These are questions not for the distant future, but challenges this decade will have to overcome. We have to rethink the Assam in us.

Shiv Visvanathan is an academic associated with the Compost Heap, a group in pursuit of alternative ideas and imagination

Source: The Hindu, 6/08/2018

Numbing numbers: on draft NRC

To begin with, the claims of those left out in the NRC must be heard carefully, humanely

At upwards of four million, the number of those excluded from the second draft of the National Register of Citizens published on Monday has sparked great anxiety about the legal status of so many individuals. As with the first list published on December 31, 2017, the publication of the final draft before the Supreme Court-mandated and monitored exercise moves to the next phase of claims and objections wasn’t accompanied by major turbulence. And this despite lingering doubts over whether the process was indeed foolproof, or even warranted. Causes for concern have been aplenty, from the frenetic pace to meet deadlines in the face of an unrelenting apex court to the omission in July of 1,50,000 names from the 19 million that had made it to the first draft. Monday’s list again had its share of notable omissions, including serving and former legislators. Given such a gargantuan exercise, it is to the credit of the NRC bureaucracy and its 55,000-odd workforce that timelines have been adhered to. But even a skilfully devised system of digitised mapping of family trees is subject to human interface, subjective bias, and the inherent flaws in the NRC of 1951 and the electoral rolls of 1961 and 1971 that make up the core of the ‘legacy data’.

The state owes it to those now left out, a staggering 40,07,707 persons, to ensure that their claim to citizenship is exhausted in its procedural entirety. But it also has a larger responsibility — to ensure that people who have lived here a long time, or those who know no other home, are not left high and dry in any eventuality. On that front, the Central and State governments must step up their assurances that there is no need for panic. While the modalities of a standard operating procedure for claims and objections are being worked out, to be placed before the Supreme Court by mid-August, the window for contestation could be extended by a month beyond September 28. The Union Home Ministry has also tweaked rules to enable applicants to move the Foreigners’ Tribunal, where earlier only the state could haul up a suspected alien before it. Bigger challenges lie ahead, especially after the final NRC list determines the precise number of deemed illegal immigrants; the state then has to grapple with what to do next. How India addresses the fate of those eventually left off the list will ascertain whether its democracy can lay claim to being humane or not. It is one thing to detain and deport illegal immigrants instantly when they cross the border. But when people have been allowed (or they have managed) to be in India for so long, when they have built their lives and become part of local economies and communities, they cannot and must not be rendered state-less on the basis of a list.

Source: The Hindu, 1/08/2018